The head of Australia’s top university has been accused of “deafness” to the issues that have led to international enrolment caps, after facing questions about why his institution has so many overseas students.

Ant Bagshaw, executive director of the Australian Technology Network (ATN), said University of Melbourne vice-chancellor Duncan Maskell had “missed the opportunity” to explain why international students almost outnumbered locals at his institution, as the debate over the policy heated up.

Professor Maskell, who appeared as a panellist at this month’s Australian Financial Review Higher Education Summit in Sydney, was challenged about the composition of Melbourne’s enrolments. He said the international share was “fine” and at a scale required to fund the university’s work.

Dr Bagshaw said he felt it was “outrageous” that the vice-chancellor had not used the public appearance to offer a defence of the high numbers of international students or to explain how they benefit the wider country.

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“It shows total deafness to the debate; total deafness to the role that Australian universities should be playing. I think it does a disservice to the sector,” he added. Both Melbourne and Professor Maskell declined to comment.

Australian universities’ overseas enrolments are high by global standards, averaging about 29 per cent, compared with 26 per cent in the UK and 16 per cent in New Zealand, while foreigners comprise 16 per cent of tertiary enrolments in Canada and 5 per cent in the US.

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The international cohorts at Australia’s top universities are particularly high. A Senate committee heard that they comprised 37 per cent at the University of Queensland, 38 per cent at Monash University, 41 per cent at the Australian National University, 45 per cent at Melbourne and “just under 50 per cent” at the University of Sydney.

Shadow education minister Sarah Henderson said the nation’s top universities should put Australian students first. “All university vice-chancellors need to understand their fundamental obligation is to educate Australians,” she said.

Administrators at other universities blame top-tier institutions for undermining international education’s social licence by allowing foreign enrolments to rise above publicly acceptable levels. Proposed caps on foreign student numbers, to apply from next year, will thwart the growth strategies of institutions including Western Sydney University, Queensland University of Technology and the University of Technology Sydney (UTS).

“Our international enrolments are 26 per cent of our total…and at no point in the next five years did we anticipate exceeding 30 per cent,” a UTS spokeswoman said. “This has been the result of responsible planning.”

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Dr Bagshaw said questions about appropriate international shares of enrolments were legitimate. “There’s no objective answer, but we all need to think about it and be able to articulate it.”

He said the universities of Oxford and Cambridge had been upfront about recruiting high levels of foreign postgraduates to cross-subsidise their undergraduate programmes, which were overwhelmingly domestic. “They have said, our mission is teaching domestic undergraduates and research, and we will pay for that with postgraduate. That makes sense mission-wise.”

Dr Bagshaw said Australian university leaders should “make a virtue” of their lofty international enrolments by explaining how the proceeds benefited tens of thousands of local people – unlike in the UK and the US, where the Oxbridge and Ivy League institutions were “tiny” by comparison.

“One of the amazing features about Australian higher education is that we don’t have super-elite, small universities,” he said. “We have large and inclusive universities. In Australia, we’ve democratised access to the Go8.”

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john.ross@timeshighereducation.com