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International News

LETTER FROM AMERICA AUSTRALIA
Decentralisation wave Visa issuance problems

s in India and much of the VISA DELAYS AND REFUSALS ARE PLAYING
world, politics has been tur- havoc with Australian universities’ course and fi-
Abulent in America for years. nancial planning, weeks ahead of the new semester
Perhaps it is worse here. President starting July/August.
Trump has been impeached twice Median visa processing time frames for higher education
by our House of Representatives,
but both times acquitted by the LARRY ARNN students have more than tripled in the past few months,
Senate. After all that, he is still according to the Department of Home Affairs (DHA). Fifty
front runner for the presidency in an election scheduled percent of applicants are kept waiting at least 47 days for
for November. their paperwork to be processed — up from 14 days in Feb-
President Biden, showing signs of age for years, per- ruary — with 10 percent of students experiencing delays of
formed poorly in a face-off debate with President Trump at least four months. Meanwhile, refusal rates for offshore
on June 27. Now he has withdrawn from the race and the visa applicants are running at almost three times the pre-
Democratic Party must choose a new candidate at its Au-
gust 19-22 convention, probably incumbent vice president Covid average. Overall, one in five applications is rejected,
Kamala Harris. That candidate will have just ten weeks to including about one in three from India, one in two from
campaign before the election on November 5. Nepal and three in five from Pakistan.
It is a mess. The University of Technology Sydney (UTS) says its
This election is consequential for every area of policy, deadline for South Asian stu-
including education. I prefer the Republican platform, dents to accept enrolment offers
which supports the wave of decentralisation sweeping used to be about a month before
across the US. ‘School choice’ is the term we use for it.
It takes several forms, the biggest being charter the start of a semester. Visa pro-
schools, about which I have written in a previous column. cessing delays have forced the
Charter schools are exempt from many of the bureau- institution to increase the buf-
cratic controls that plague our system. In contemporary fer period, according to deputy
America, more than half the employees in public schools vice-chancellor Iain Watts. “If
are not teachers. Legions are employed to formulate com- they haven’t accepted their of-
plex rules about what and how to teach. Little wonder fers by about two months be- Ian Watt
that American students score poorly in reading and math
assessment skills. Students of charter schools do better. fore the start of term, we won’t confirm their enrolments
Since 2019, public school enrollment in America has because we know they won’t get a visa in time,” says Watt.
fallen 3 percent. On the other hand, charter schools en- According to Watt, UTS could lose more than A$100 mil-
rolments have risen by 7 percent over the same period. lion (Rs.559 crore) in tuition fees from students who would
Homeschooling has also become popular across the na- have been able to enrol this year but for the visa processing
tion. People are fleeing a system that doesn’t perform. changes and delays over the past six months.
This trend is important. Schools thrive when authority UTS is one of 16 universities that has managed to retain
is located in the school. Learning happens in the soul of
each student. Teachers and parents who know the stu- their Level 1 immigration risk rating despite a widespread
dent are the best people to enable and empower. They increase in visa rejections. “You can imagine what it’s like
may not possess the expertise of high-brow intellectu- for institutions that are rated at Level 2 or 3, and have been
als, but education doesn’t become rocket science until put at the back of the visa processing queue,” says Watt.
later years. Up to that point, common sense, native intel- DHA figures show that demand for Australian education
ligence, love, and hard work are sufficient to guide the remains strong. Some 185,000 would-be students applied
learning of the young. Just as every puppy is born to bark from overseas for higher education visas over the 11 months
and wag its tail, every human child is born to learn. Par-
ents are seldom experts in caring for babies. Somehow to May — slightly more than over the same period a year
they have always managed. earlier, and more than 50 percent more than in pre-Covid
In America, government has become larger, relative times. But the number of visas issued so far this calendar
to everything else, and steadily more centralised for three year is 26 percent lower than in the equivalent period of
generations. As this has happened, money has moved far- 2023.
ther away from the people who earn and provide it and Watt says all but five Oz varsities are losing students to
from their needs. In America, school choice is reversing other countries, principally the US but also non-anglophone
this trend in education. In India, a very large percentage
of students attend private schools. I think this is a healthy destinations such as Germany and Malaysia, “because we’re
development. perceived as not as welcoming as we used to be”. He doesn’t
expect visa processing to improve before the next federal
(Dr. Larry Arnn is President, Hillsdale College, USA. election. “All of this is about political parties wanting to
letteramerica@hillsdale.edu)
show that they’re in control of migration numbers.”

58 EDUCATIONWORLD AUGUST 2024