Draft plans to see international students return to university campuses across the state “by early 2021” have been welcomed by Charles Sturt University.
Speaking at the ATN International Education Summit last week, NSW minister for jobs, investment, tourism and Western Sydney Stuart Ayres detailed his commitment to re-opening borders to international students “earlier than we’ll be able to open borders for the visitor economy or tourists”.
“I want to be able to open, in fact, I foreshadow that we’ll be able to open borders to international students through a quarantine regime,” Mr Ayres said.
Optimistically, Mr Ayres said he would be “definitely working towards” bringing the international students by “the start of 2021”, following what has been learnt through the state’s hotel quarantine program.
“We’ve seen over 63,000 people come through hotel quarantine here in Sydney,” Mr Ayres said.
“By far and away that’s the largest amount of people under quarantine in the country. There are lots of lessons that we’ve learnt from that quarantine experience that we’ve been sharing vice-chancellors that we think will allow us to re-open our international student markets sooner rather than later.”
CSU acting vice-chancellor, Professor John Germov said the return of international dollars would be welcomed entirely.
But, he said, it would be treated as a separate issue to ensuring the university is financially sustainable in the long term.
“I want to ensure that Charles Sturt is sustainable irrespective of whether we have large numbers of international students or not so that we’re no longer relying on the revenue from those students to make the university sustainable,” Professor Germov said.
The university last week announced the latest round of job cuts to address its $80 million loss in revenue and predicted $49.5 million deficit in the wake of COVID-19.
It is now seeking 100 academic staff members from across its campus footprint to apply for a ‘voluntary separation’ package.
That follows the announcement in June that up to 110 professional and administrative roles would be made redundant, while 35 full-time equivalent roles would be left vacant.
Further discussions on when and where the jobs will be lost will be outlined following the voluntary separation application deadline on October 16.
Source: https://www.centralwesterndaily.com.au/story/6953632/international-students-may-return-to-uni-by-start-of-2021/
Originally posted 2020-10-06 14:07:38.
