Mamas Don’t Let Your Babies Grow Up to Be Elite Uni Students

I first wrote it half in jest, but the joke’s been getting more serious every time I repeat it: bulldoze the universities. They’re beyond redemption by now, frankly.

That’s not going to happen, of course. Sadly. But prospective students still have the ultimate power: the power of choice. Just as parents can home-school their children and bypass the winky wanky wokeness of the educational system, uni students can bypass the Long March zealots by spurning the elite unis in favour of regional institutions that mostly still remember what university is for.

But the sandstone universities? Don’t even bother.

Stupidity and greed are a bad combination. Think Al Capone. Think Alan Bond. Think Australia’s elite universities.

Nothing exposed the stupid, grasping greed of the ‘Group of Eight’ quite like the Covid pandemic. These unconscionable slimeballs had spent years white-anting the university system by exploiting international students. Who cares if they had barely functional English or if Chinese students brought in the slithering Chinese Communist Party in their wake? They also bought the only thing the Go8 really cared about: money, money, money.

The Go8 squealed like bloated pigs when border closures took the international swill out of their golden troughs. Like junkies desperate to keep their fix flowing, they tried to get around the system by sending Chinese students for a fortnight’s holiday in Dubai before flying them to Australia, so technically they weren’t entering from a Covid-prescribed country.

But, now that border closures are gone, they’re plunging their snouts in deeper than ever.

Overseas students are being mustered like brumbies and every reform is resisted like poison. Overwhelmingly, international students enrol in big brands such as the University of Sydney and the Australian National University. It is not about good education, just the right rubber stamp. It is like a cattle market where the cows are lured, not herded.

Cattle is the right expression. For universities such as those in the Group of Eight, international students are cash cows. They are there for their high fees, not their education and wellbeing. So well-heeled institutions have ruthlessly stockpiled these students. Their great educational qualification is that they are just so much more fiscally winsome than low-paying Australians whose fees are set by government.

The greed of elite institutions has no cap. Before Covid, ANU had almost 50 per cent international students. Competitors such as Sydney and Monash were around 40 per cent. Particularly valuable are well-heeled Chinese students. As one former sandstone vice-chancellor exulted in an academic group, they would keep enrolling wealthy Chinese until someone stopped him.

Despite the lesson of Covid that the tap suddenly can be turned off, these guys are gorging like wolverines. They want to match or exceed pre-Covid heights. Like the Bourbon kings, they have learned nothing and forgotten nothing.

Why on Earth, though, would anyone bother with these greedy, shiftless, elites?

They deliver little for the international students they so blatantly milk – and even less to Australian students. Curricula and standards are dumbed down to pander to cash cows who can barely speak or write English.

Just as having an elite institution like Harvard or Stanford on their CV is become more of a liability than an asset for American graduates, the glitter of a Go8 degree is fast fading in Australia.

For those who adulate established universities over “lower quality” institutions, think of this. Which universities have devalued freedom of speech; peddled postmodernism; dissed Western civilisation; minimised anti-Semitism; and genuflected to Trotskyist student unions? It is not the universities of Newcastle or New England.

The Australian

Frankly, any employer with half a brain these days would prioritise a Cert IV from the local TAFE over a degree from Sydney or Melbourne Universities.