According to a new Australian Education International report, half of the universities of the Group of Eight have provided places for more than a quarter of international students. It has been estimated that one in three students from Macquarie University wasn’t born in Australia.
The snapshot made by AET shows that most of the prestigious universities in Australia heavily depend upon not stable overseas markets as almost 27% of foreign students study at unis at Melbourne, ANU, UNSW and Adelaide. The study also showed that the proportion of overseas students at Go8 institutions is above the average and equals to 22.3%. However, Alan Olsen, international education researcher, was not surprised to hear these findings. He said: “An aggregate 22.3 per cent is appropriate for Australia, where 22.2 per cent of us were born overseas and 21.5 per cent speak a language other than English at home”.
Mr. Olsen said that nearly 8% of people studying at UK universities were born overseas while about 12% in the US. A special research was made by AEI last month. The report found that the number of overseas students in Australia is three times more that OECD average of 6.7 per cent and six times the US average of 3.4 per cent.
In the USA, the largest percentage of international students is seen in 25 elite universities and in two of them the number of international students is higher that the Australian average.
