Foreign kids back in class

AFR

HITTING THE BOOKS: Foreign student numbers have leapt 15 percent, as the industry sees a recovery after a slump that began in 2003.

Relevant offers

Industries

Dream Homes comes to a halt Waikato land targeted in energy exploration National grid upgrades blamed for power price rises Steel & Tube sees interim profit decline TelstraClear back in black Resignations at MediaWorks holding company boards Week-long strike looms for port Unemployment drops in December quarter Hamilton firm trains Singapore pilots Power price hikes

Foreign student numbers are up 15 percent in nine months, boosted by the weaker dollar.

Once an export darling, the education market took a hammering when the flow of Chinese students slumped in 2003, about the same time as other English-speaking countries began to compete.

Now the industry body for export education says it is seeing a recovery in "new starts" students, particularly from India, Brazil and the Middle East.

"In recessionary times, educational exports aren't really a discretionary item which people are dropping off their expenditure," said Robert Stevens, chief executive of Education NZ Trust.

Immigration figures for nine months to March show that more than 21,700 new foreign students have entered the country, up 3356 on the same period a year before.

The total number of foreign students last year fell 3 per cent to 88,557, well off the peak of 121,000 in 2003. However, Education NZ said the number of full-time students declined less than 1 per cent.

Students are also from a more diverse mix of countries. Numbers from the top three markets, China, South Korea and Japan, continue to decline, with Chinese students sliding from nearly 56,000 in 2003 to 20,579 last year.

But students from India, Saudi Arabia, Germany, France and the USA are catching up. Indian students have increased threefold, and the number from Saudi Arabia grew 10-fold to 4100 in 2008.

Mr Stevens said New Zealand had no competition in the Chinese market till 2002 "and then within a matter of months Australia, Canada, the UK and USA moved into China and ... we really lost out to the competition in a big way".

"Most of the other markets have been increasing over the last few years but they had been masked by such a drop from China, but now we seem to have turned the corner and are heading north again and the fall in the kiwi dollar is helping that, of course."

Educational exports are still New Zealand's fifth-biggest export industry, generating $2.3 billion a year, behind dairy, tourism, meat and minerals. The sector is forecast to grow to $3b in the next five years.

Mr Stevens was recently present at the signing of the free trade deal with ASEAN, the Association South East Asian Nations, and hopes the move will help boost New Zealand's profile.

There were not many trade barriers to the cross-border flow of students but the deal would make a difference when it came to establishing "commercial presence" offshore.

Australian universities already had campuses in south-east Asia, allowing them to teach foreign students in their own countries, and New Zealanders could do the same.

"It's an important development in the industry and one we think will be increasingly part of the industry's future, so that's why these trade agreements are absolutely critical to the wider operating environment for educational exporters," he said.

- © Fairfax NZ News