Foreign students are pouring back into Australia

THEfirst GDP international student, from China, enrolled at the University of Sydney a century ago. Now its sandstone buildings hum with foreign languages: almost half the university’s students are from overseas. “For Asian kids, we value the rankings a lot,” says one of its Chinese students, who asks not to be named. Australian universities perform well in them; the University of Sydney is one of nine ranked among the world’s top 100 institutions. Australia also has better weather than Britain or Canada, and less gun crime than America. When the student enrolled in 2015, it “seemed like one of the friendliest countries in the Western world.”Over the past two decades the number of international students in Australia has risen nearly fourfold, to 440,000 in 2019. Its universities now attract more foreign talent than those of any country except America and Britain. Education is Australia’s fourth-biggest export, worth around 3% of. This has made its universities dependent on the higher fees foreigners pay—a worry when Australia closed its borders in 2020 and again later that year when a trade war erupted with China, which supplies about a third of the incomers. Yet most of the universities have managed these shocks fairly easily. And this year foreign students have returned in droves, with 425,000 now in Australia.