Experts on the sector say it will take years for the schools, among the best in the world, to recover from the economic damage.
4 min
SYDNEY—Australia’s decision to close its borders protected it from the coronavirus. But that policy is wreaking havoc on the country’s universities, which relied on lucrative tuition from foreign students who are stuck overseas.
Experts say it will take years for the schools, among the best in the world, to recover from the economic damage. Already, Australian universities have cut more than 17,000 jobs, according to industry group Universities Australia. It said operating revenue fell 4.9% last year and is expected to fall another 5.5% this year.
“As students finish and we haven’t got new ones coming, we’re yet to hit the bottom basically,” said Peter Hurley, a policy fellow at the Mitchell Institute for Education and Health Policy, which forecast that the country’s universities could lose up to $15 billion in international tuition through 2023.
Leaders all over the world have needed to balance protecting their populations from the virus with the economic damage that those policies can cause. But with a vaccine rollout expected to start in Australia soon, pressure is ramping up on conservative Prime Minister Scott Morrison to provide clarity on how and when international students could return.
Leaders in the nation’s states and territories have pressed for some places in the quarantine system to be reserved for international students, but Mr. Morrison has argued that returning Australians must come first. Thousands of Australians remain stranded overseas because the government has imposed caps on returning travelers, part of an effort to ease pressure on its hotel quarantine system and to minimise the risk of highly contagious variants of the coronavirus from spreading into the community.
The matter could be discussed at a cabinet meeting later this week. Any change in policy could signal whether Mr. Morrison is ready to loosen border restrictions with vaccines on the horizon.
Phil Honeywood, chief executive of the International Education Association of Australia, said overseas students are starting to doubt that they will return to Australia this year. He is concerned some students may drop out and go study in other countries like Canada, the U.K. and the U.S.
“The stickability of those students is now in question,” he said.
Ahmed Korayem, a 32-year-old in Egypt, wasn’t sure whether to start a master’s program in compliance and regulation at an Australian university because of the country’s border closures. He worries that studying online wouldn’t be the same as being there in person and that it would be difficult to interact with his professors because of the time difference.
Mr. Korayem has decided to enroll at school, but he said a prolonged period of border closures could force him to drop out later.
“If it’s three months and then I would be able to move and continue my studies face-to-face, I can handle this. If it’s more than that, then I think no,” Mr. Korayem said. “The uncertainty can be stressful.”
Foreign students, particularly from China and India, have been lured to Australia by its relative proximity to Asia, easy access to visas and high-quality schools. Australian universities charged them higher fees than domestic students; international tuition at one point made up more than 40% of student revenue at universities, according to an estimate from the Mitchell Institute.
Although students can study remotely online, international-student enrollments were already down 14% as of November, according to Australian government data. The number of international students physically in the country has fallen further—and is down about 35% when compared with pre-pandemic levels—according to the Mitchell Institute’s Mr. Hurley.
“I don’t think anybody had on their risk scenarios literally no international travel,” said Paul Duldig, chief operating officer at Australian National University in Canberra, the capital. The school estimates its international-student tuition fees fell last year by about 30%.
Aside from cutting staff, universities are delaying campus improvements and eliminating fields of study. Australia’s reputation for producing important academic research is also at stake, given that universities used much of that international tuition to fund scholarly pursuits. About 11% of Australia’s researchers, including postgraduate students and staff, could lose their jobs due to the decline in fees from international students, according to research from the Melbourne Centre for the Study of Higher Education.
To make up for the revenue decline, the Australian government included about $770 million in aid to fund university research in this financial year’s budget. But a long-term solution depends on allowing international students back into the country, according to academics who have studied university finances.
Before the pandemic, Australia was the third top destination for international students, behind the U.S. and the U.K., according to United Nations data. Australian universities were also more reliant on international students than other countries. In 2018, 27% of all students in higher education in Australia were from overseas, according to data from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, a group of wealthy countries that has 37 members. That was the second highest percentage in the OECD, behind tiny Luxembourg. In the U.S., just 5% were international students.
At Monash University, one of Australia’s top research schools, tuition from international students fell $85 million last year and overall revenue dropped by $270 million, a nearly 5% decline. The school is cutting 277 jobs and eliminating 2% of its courses. It is also shelving or deferring long-term building plans, including a new medical educational center, a biomedical teaching facility and an artificial-intelligence and data-science building.
Margaret Gardner, president and vice chancellor of the university, said having international students on campus enriches the academic experience for domestic students who get exposed to different cultures and viewpoints even if they are going to school close to home.
“It’s not just about plugging a hole,” she said. “I can’t begin to tell you how much difference it makes to the education you provide.”
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As AI productivity trackers reshape workplace evaluations, employees are learning how to manage calendars, activity levels and AI usage to ensure their contributions are recognized.
4 min
What’s more important than being a good employee right now? Looking like a good employee in the eyes of AI productivity trackers that more managers are using to evaluate their teams.
Employee-monitoring systems are especially popular at tech companies and are also used by other white-collar firms that want to probe how people spend company time. The scary thing: You might not even know you’re being watched because many states don’t require disclosure.
Metrics can include performance data that is undoubtedly relevant, such as sales results. But it also can employ dubious proxies like keyboard strokes and how often your computer screen goes into sleep mode.
We generally accepted, or at least understood, heightened surveillance during the work-from-home era. Back then it seemed reasonable for bosses to keep tabs on employees they couldn’t see.
Yet the oversight has only escalated, and tensions are rising, too.
A group of former Meta Platforms employees alleges in a lawsuit that the company used a “constellation of internal artificial-intelligence systems” when it began laying off about 10% of its workforce in May. Meta says humans make termination calls.
However that case shakes out, a couple of things are clear. Companies eager to gauge which employees are locked in now have sophisticated AI monitoring systems at their disposal. And they believe they have leverage in a tepid labor market.
So while we may chafe at having our worth reduced to numbers on the boss’s productivity dashboard, we have to play the game as it’s being played. Here are some tips, based on conversations with people who make employee monitoring systems—and others who game the systems.
Calendar integration is one way that productivity trackers have gotten more advanced and, ostensibly, fairer.
Let’s say you make an old-fashioned phone call or attend an in-person meeting. Your Outlook or Slack status may switch to “away,” making you appear as inactive as if you were taking an extended coffee break.
Employee monitors like one made by a company called Insightful cross-check your online status with your calendar to see whether there is a valid reason for your apparent inactivity. If that call or meeting is on your schedule, then the system will recognize that you are busy offline. If nothing is on the books, it could look like you’re slacking off.
Let’s not go any further without addressing the underlying question: How much downtime is permissible during the workday? After all, people have been scared to let managers see anything non-work-related on their screens since personal computers first arrived in offices.
No one knows this better than Roger Wagner, who is widely credited with creating the first “boss button” in the early 1980s. He designed a keyboard shortcut to instantly display a spreadsheet if the boss walked by your cubicle while you were playing a computer game. Boss buttons have been features of countless diversions since. (I confess to using one built into a March Madness streaming app.)
Wagner, the founder of computer-education company 1010 Technologies, says his original design was a joke—more of a commentary on overbearing managers than a cover for lazy employees. Good bosses understand workers need mental breaks throughout the day, he says.
This matches what I heard from Insightful Chief Executive Ivan Petrovic. He says customers that use his company’s workforce-management platform don’t expect employees to stay on task 100% of the time.
“On average companies are aiming for 60% to 80% of your time being utilized for work during the day,” he says.
Go ahead and exhale. It’s probably OK to watch an occasional YouTube video at your desk.
And if you’re going to artificially inflate your activity level, be careful. Hitting 90% could look suspicious.
So don’t leave your mouse jiggler on all day. Choose the right one if you must resort to shenanigans.
There are lots of software applications that mimic the movements of a computer mouse, so you can appear to be working while away from your desk. There are also devices that plug into computer ports and do the same thing.
Corporate cybersecurity systems increasingly block these apps and devices, and productivity trackers claim to be able to detect them. But some workers swear by mouse docks, like one made by Tech8 USA, that keep cursors moving. The company originally made mouse-moving software but now focuses on physical jigglers.
“People are drawn to mechanical solutions because they’re so simple and don’t require software,” says Tech8 Marketing Director Sam Matthews. “As monitoring technology becomes more sophisticated, that distinction has become even more relevant.”
Another popular metric for employee-monitoring systems is AI usage. Companies want to know who is embracing new tools, and it can be tempting to think more is better.
“There’s a performative aspect where employees overblow their usage of AI so that they appear relevant in the organization,” says Andrea Derler, principal researcher at Visier, which helps companies track and analyze employee work habits.
In a recent Visier survey of 1,000 U.S. workers, 48% admitted to exaggerating their AI usage.
This is already an outdated strategy. Using AI for everything used to score points for experimentation. Now it can seem wasteful because many companies are watching AI token spending more carefully.
Look, productivity theater has always been part of work. Most of us aren’t trying to cheat the system, but expectations are changing so quickly that we need to be savvy about what the latest employee trackers are looking for.
Sometimes it takes a little gamesmanship to get full credit for our contributions.
