Decreasing Indian student numbers in Australia.

Well well well, an interesting article I found on Times of India online edition. It is about the steep decline in the Indian students enrollment in Australia.

Click here to get the article in a new window

I guess it would be pretty obvious to most Indians that the single biggest contributing factor for this result were the numerous attacks that happened on Indian students in Australia a few months back. At one point, I remember, there was an attack almost every week!

I am not jumping the gun and stating that these are racial attacks. We will not know for sure unless each culprit is caught and interrogated regarding the motives for their attacks. But on the other hand, they do seem to be racial attacks since it seemed that only Indians were attacked (as far as the news that came out) and they were attacked by Australians.

What made me write this post is the following statement from Times of India article:

"Student security would be lower down on the list of reasons than the difficulties of getting a visa and the lack of differentiation among providers," Connelly said.

Student security would be lower down on the list?? Are you kidding me? You mean the drastic decrease is because of mainly increased difficulty in getting a visa? Who is affected by the drastic decrease in foreign students? Yes, the Australian Universities as they suddenly have a huge drop in the funding. And whom will the Australian Universities affect? Yes, the Australian economy of course! So you mean that Australia is actively making it difficult to get student visas so that their economy is hit? 0.o

Of course there are a lot of assumptions in my statements but the fact remains that Student Security would have been one of the biggest factors why there was a drastic drop in Indian student enrollment. I doubt it is a matter of getting visas which is primarily influencing this enrollment figure.