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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AI doesn’t rebel—people design, deploy and profit from it. The real danger lies in allowing tech companies to escape accountability while shaping regulations that protect their dominance.
4 min
A wave of corporate warnings and technical disclosures has flooded the media, with headlines worrying over “swarms” of rogue artificial-intelligence agents launching “unprecedented” cyberattacks, outsmarting their makers, and inching toward a terrifying autonomy. The most revealing part of this narrative isn’t what the software did. It’s who is telling the story—and why. When corporate leaders publicly insist that the systems they financed, engineered and deployed are suddenly beyond their power to contain, skepticism isn’t only healthy; it is essential.
For years, Silicon Valley has drawn scrutiny from civil society and global regulators over tangible harms such as youth mental health deterioration and systematic privacy violations. Today, industry figures seem to be trying to change that public image. Loudly blowing the whistle on their own systems—just as two of the leading companies were preparing for massive initial public offerings—lets AI executives position themselves as a new generation of leaders who have come to terms with their societal responsibilities. They seem to want us to believe that they no longer want to “move fast and break things” but will instead stand as vigilant guardians between humanity and a technological apocalypse.
There is one glaring problem: Software doesn’t rebel. A mathematical model possesses neither intent, malice nor the will to defy its creators, let alone extinguish our species. AI is a human artifact, engineered for profit.
When an agentic model in an evaluation sandbox connects to an unauthorized server or executes an exploit, it hasn’t staged a coup. It has tried to meet the human-defined objectives set out before it through a path its designers failed to constrain. It’s the digital equivalent of the King Midas myth, in which the king’s ill-defined wish turns even his food and drink into gold.
That powerful experimental models were able to discover novel vulnerabilities and breach external systems isn’t a sign of a dangerous superintelligence but of human error or negligence. There is no sentient actor lurking in the weights to be reasoned with, feared or pacified. There are only human software engineers, product managers and corporate boards deciding which guardrails are worth the latency cost and which permissions can be skipped in the race to market.
Policymakers and voters need to resist AI exceptionalism. In any other discipline—from civil engineering to pharmaceuticals—courts and regulators treat a system failure as evidence of bad product design and inadequate safety testing. If an aircraft crashes, we focus on finding the engineering defect, correcting it, and enforcing established liability standards for the damage created.
By leaning on an anthropomorphic narrative, Silicon Valley attempts to repackage its specific human choices that led to experimental, powerful models behaving unexpectedly during tests as an existential peril. Elevating the issue to a cosmic scale leaves the public paralyzed and takes ordinary product accountability off the table.
In the cutthroat race for venture capital and market dominance, building guardrails slows down deployment. Grandstanding about uncontrollable power costs nothing and generates billions of dollars in free publicity, justifying stock prices, all while cultivating an aura of technological capability not only to build the frontier but also ultimately to rein it in.
Governments need to recognize regulatory capture when it stares them in the face. Tech leaders’ strategy looks transparent: Alarm Washington and Brussels into creating a regime in which only trillion-dollar incumbents with fully staffed compliance and safety departments can legally operate. By sitting at the policymakers’ tables before anyone else, these companies can help draft rules digging an impassable moat protecting them from open-source developers and upstart competitors, domestic or international. The real danger is in further concentrating the tech industry into the hands of only a few companies with deep pockets.
Beijing and Washington have brushed off those tech leaders’ calls, albeit for very different reasons. Chinese state media dismissed them as part of the “Cold War playbook” and intended to preserve U.S. dominance. Xi Jinping argued for exactly the opposite at the Brics Summit on Sept. 12, calling on Brics countries to “strengthen cooperation in the field of AI, encourage open source, openness, collaboration and sharing, and break new grounds and scale new heights.” President Trump, steeped in a doctrine of unfettered capitalism and technological supremacy, called fears that AI could destroy humanity a “hoax.” Vice President JD Vance warned that AI companies “begging the government to regulate them” looked like a “Trojan Horse.”
Striving to pursue its “European way” on AI and assert regulatory leadership, Europe, by contrast, welcomed the call. European Union President Ursula von der Leyen made this clear at the State of the EU speech last Wednesday and announced that the EU will invite “the main frontier labs for a discussion on how we can support ongoing industry efforts to pace the frontier.”
Europe has been here before. In an effort to lead global regulation and react to fears borne from ChatGPT, Europe rushed its landmark AI Act into law in 2024. Already the world’s most restrictive rulebook, the framework quickly proved too broad and complex to enforce. Stalled by implementation delays and concerns about European competitiveness, the EU postponed the law’s full rollout, leaving regulations uncertain.
AI should be regulated—risks exist and should be taken seriously. But governments need to act based on available evidence and verified facts, not corporate PR panic, the views of industry insiders, or the desire for quick political wins. The greatest danger facing society isn’t that software will awaken and overthrow its human masters. It is that we will allow the creators of the software to abdicate human responsibility for the systems they choose to build and help them pull up the ladder to market access behind them.
