The decline in international student numbers has many people worried about the future of university research in Australia. A recent report from the Chief Scientist predicted that 7,000 research jobs could go due to reduced teaching profits, philanthropy and corporate funding.

In this post, I estimate how reliant research is on international student profits. It combines data from multiple sources. None of them were designed to calculate this profit, so my result should be taken as being in a plausible range rather than as a precise total. But it can give us a sense of the scale of reliance on international students.

According to the 2018 ABS higher education research report that was released yesterday, in 2018 universities spent $12.158 billion on research. The ABS also gives sources of research funding, but these only explain 44 per cent of the total, with the rest coming from ‘general university funds’.Read More »