The Australian programme credited with breathing life into outward student mobility faces possible decimation from ill-advised policy changes, a Laos conference has heard.

International education consultant Jan Drew said some universities had not even bothered applying for New Colombo Plan (NCP) funding because of reforms that take effect next year.

Ms Drew said the NCP had transformed study abroad among Australian university students. When it was implemented in 2014, just one in 20 obtained international study experience, mostly in North America or the UK. By 2019, the proportion had risen to one in four, with many heading to non-anglophone countries in the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (Asean) region.

These gains are now threatened by rule changes that doubled the minimum duration of NCP-supported travel to four weeks and imposed a mandatory language component.

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Ms Drew said that of the 40-odd countries students could visit on NCP mobility grants, just eight had languages taught as part of Australian university degrees. Most of the remaining destinations were small Indo-Pacific nations with languages spoken nowhere else.

Learning Lao, for example, offered few career advantages for students who could arguably do better by giving locals the opportunity to practise English.

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Addressing the Asean Australia Education Dialogue (AAED) 2024 conference in Vientiane, Ms Drew said the NCP reforms were set in stone for at least 2025 but their architects would be disappointed by the outcomes.

“I can see what they’re trying to do. They want depth but…we just don’t think they’re going to have the results that they expect.”

Racheline Tantular, Singapore-based chief executive of the Asean Australia Strategic Youth Partnership, said short-term study abroad stints were “more accessible” for many students because the financial barriers were comparatively small. Stretches longer than a fortnight often required participants to quit their jobs and saddled them with unexpected expenses.

“Two weeks on a study tour isn’t…as immersive as a longer-term programme, but that experience will very much open more doors and get people interested in the region,” Ms Tantular told the conference.

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Ms Drew, an executive board member of the Malaysia Australia Business Council, said short-term visits also helped ease students past culture shock anxieties.

“Many people that do the two-week experience then go on to…an exchange or internship or something like that. The short-term experience is really useful, particularly for coming into places in Asean.”

She said Australian student mobility was in a bad state, largely because the pandemic had leached experienced staff from universities’ learning abroad offices. Meanwhile, parents were discouraging students from venturing overseas, spooked by the wars in Ukraine and Palestine.

The damage from the NCP rule changes had been compounded by administrative delays, with 2025 funding yet to be announced. For the first time in a decade, no NCP-supported mobility students will be heading overseas during the summer break, Ms Drew said.

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She said the real test would come next year, when universities that had been allocated NCP funding found out whether students could be persuaded to use it.

john.ross@timeshighereducation.com