Blog 6: Worldwide Student Numbers Forecast to Double in 2025

By the year 2025, more than 262 million students will be seeking a higher education.  Eight million of these students will have to seek to study abroad.  Bob Goddard, a higher education consultant, says that the reason for the rise in education is because “young people are entering the peak education ages along with sharply rising participation rates, especially the non-compulsory education years.”  He later states that “developing countries are experiencing a huge demand for further and higher education but will be unable to provide enough places and because of this many students, eight million, will have to study abroad.”

                “Australia was one of the first countries to recognize how the global knowledge economy had created ‘a class of potential students prepared to invest in global mobility for their education.”  According to the article Australia was one of the first countries to charge students from overseas the full tuition fees.  Tuition fees from international students have” contributed billion of dollars to the national economy.”  Now many countries such as Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, and the Middle East are trying to attract international students to come to their countries.  China is also another country looking to enroll three hundred thousand students by 2020.

                This is a global issue because many countries are seeing dollar signs. As stated in the article “Australia showed other Western countries how profitable selling education could be by capitalizing on hundreds of thousands of foreign students to its institution.” With Australia’s revenue bringing in billions of dollars why wouldn’t other countries jump on this opportunity?  Professor Rizvi notes that “universities should rethink their approach.  As higher education institutions around the world embrace mobility, there is a growing awareness of the new demands and possibilities of collaboration and networking among institutions dealing with knowledge productions and to spread abroad.”  In other words universities may start to lose money if institutions start to team up.  I personally think this shows the greed of these countries because they are not concerned about the student as much as they are the money.

http://www.universityworldnews.com/article.php?story=20120216105739999