Campus Review
17 February 2009
Vol.19, No 3
by Julie Hare
Peace Scholarships victim of efficiency measures
23/08/10
The Chair of IDP Education Australia Professor Ian Young has written to all Australian Universities advising them that its successful Peace Scholarship program has been terminated.
Since it was established in 2004, more than 300 students from 13 countries came to study in Australia under the program. As the program winds up, only a small number of scholarships will still be offered in July 2009 to students from Indonesia, Cambodia, Vietnam and Afghanistan. The Peace Scholarships were set up in the wake of 9/11 as a way of enhancing international understanding and cooperation.
Young told Campus Review the decision was made for efficiency reasons. He said it was expensive to run a small scholarship program in isolation which could be run more economically by the universities themselves.
“The peace Scholarship program had served its day it’s now time to move on to other things,” said Young. “It is much more efficient to take the money that is being put into the Peace Scholarship program and put it back into the universities and allow them to roll that into existing scholarship programs.”
However, the news was met with dismay by many in the international education sector, who view the program as an essential part of the public relations strategy aimed at retaining a positive attitude to Australian Higher education by overseas countries.
Rob Malicki, director of the Australian Institute for Mobility Overseas, described the decision as “disappointing”.
He pointed to the discussion at last year’s AIEC conference (jointly run by IDP and AEI) about the international education sector moving into a third phase. Phase one was giving, under the enormously influential Colombo Plan (IDP was originally an acronym for International Development Program), phase two was taking, with massive expansion of the full-degree market for international students. Phase three would be giving and taking via engagement with developing countries.
“This third phase includes sending more Australians overseas to study and important initiatives like the Peace Scholarship program,” Malicki said. Aside from the obvious harmonising benefits the program had for Australia in terms of our international linkages and relationships, the Peace Scholarship program was also a powerful signal to the rest of the world that the tag Australia is sometimes given as only being interested in the money from international education is an unjust one.”
IDP Education Australia owns a 50 per cent stake in IDP Education, with the other 50 per cent owned by Seek Ltd. In November 2008, the company was transformed from a not-for-profit company to a for-profit one. In his letter, dated 16 December, Young said as a result of the change IDP Education Australia no longer retained the funds necessary to support its various scholarship programs.
Malicki said he was not convinced that Australian universities would step into the breach and fund their own similarly targeted scholarships. “The reality is that institutional-level scholarships do nothing to benefit the collective reputation of brand Australia,” Malicki said.
However Young told CR he was confident universities would pick up the mantle, although he agreed that any additional scholarships might not be as tightly targeted as the Peace Scholarships.
“I think the money will get used for a range of purposes, but the international student sector is vitally important to all our universities. We are all acutely aware of how important it is to portray Australia in an appropriate light internationally.” “I’m very confident that all of Australia’s universities have been contributing very significantly to a broad range of students right across the world - particularly those from disadvantaged backgrounds”.
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