CPA - The Guardian

Last week colleges run by companies associated with Japanese multinational GEOS suddenly closed their doors. The eight language schools in Melbourne, Sydney, Adelaide, Brisbane and Perth have gone into voluntary receivership leaving 390 staff without jobs and the future of about 3,000 students up in the air. Australia’s reputation as a host country for international students will, no doubt, take a further battering. Government assurances, especially to Indian authorities, that this sector of education would be straightened out are looking a bit sick. More than that, the Rudd government’s assertion that students’ interests are best served in a competitive “education market” has failed another test.

More than 2,000 international students affected by the collapse will now have to be placed in other colleges. Industry group English Australia takes charge of this and the refunding of fees for tuition not delivered to students. Any other monies paid to the colleges, for accommodation or other services, have been lost. Some of the students had been transferred from the Meridian colleges in Sydney and Melbourne which shut up shop last November leaving 3,000 students in education limbo.

“A lot of these students are very sick and tired of being shafted from one private college provider to the next,” president of the National Union of Students, Carla Drakeford, said. “International students are not getting the support they need. They often don’t know what they’re getting into when they arrive at private colleges.”

Some students were nearing completion of their courses. Marcio Alves from Brazil spent $4,000 for a course he was expecting to finish in five weeks. “I think I lost money here. In Brazil I worked for one year to save for this course,” he told The Age.

GEOS is said to have got into difficulty as a result of the global economic crisis. The Victorian Registration and Qualifications Authority recently scrutinised the company’s Melbourne college after it was suspected of diverting funds to support other operations in Australia and overseas.

Clearly the Australian government has an obligation to the students to step in and run these colleges and plan for a long overdue government takeover of this troubled sector of education provision.

The latest collapse and the major disruption to international and other students raise some important questions for the future of education generally in Australia. For some time TAFE has been subjected to the blowtorch of forced increases in fees and competition from all manner of private operators. Foreign private university operators are now running campuses in Australia. Education is now presented as simply a fiercely competitive international “market” in which Australia is considered a strong competitor. Aside from the students obliged to pay the often exorbitant fees, it is profits and smiles all around. But what happens when economic times get rocky? We have been getting a foretaste.

Governments in countries like Australia are still holding to the ultimate neo-liberal objective of the full privatisation of all once government provided services with citizens “self-provisioning” for the lot. One interim objective is to make it a matter of indifference for “consumers” or “clients” whether the provider of a service is government or private. In the field of education for school age children, public education is handicapped by a massive funding advantage given to private, even elite, schools.

“It’s time to move beyond the outdated divisions between … public and private provision”, Rudd told a National Press Club audience in 2008. Teachers and communities pointing out the disadvantage caused to the public schools with increased class sizes and so on are labelled “dishonest”.

As the consequences of the Rudd/Gillard “education revolution” start to rack up, more and more people will be seeing through the invitation to “move beyond outdated visions” and will start to demand commitment to public education. They will resist the entry of here-today-gone-tomorrow colleges and schools.

* Bob Briton is the Communist Party of Australia’s candidate for the seat of Lee in the South Australian state elections to be held on March 20.

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