Coronavirus: Universities fear fall in lucrative overseas students

BBC News ^ | May 21, 2020 | By Jonty Bloom

[Oldeconomybuyer]

Which sector of the economy do you think is being hardest hit by the coronavirus - construction, retail, transport or catering?

Well, you are all wrong, and need to do some more homework. The answer is - education.

Many people probably don't even think of education as part of the economy. The groves of academe are surely above such sordid considerations as money and finance?

Not a bit of it. Money is the lifeblood of education - endowments from wealthy alumni, catering and accommodation fees, conference facilities, and the biggest of the lot - attracting lots of fee-paying students every year.

The trouble for the education sector is that it is uniquely vulnerable to the coronavirus pandemic.

For hundreds of years its business model has been to bring thousands of people together from across the country, and around the world, to sit together in rooms for three years and talk to each other.

As a result, nearly all its income streams are under attack at the same time.

Current students have been sent home, and many courses have moved online. If lockdowns around the world continue, new students are going to be hard to find in the autumn, and even harder to get on campus.

Plus, conferences are not happening, and all those wealthy alumni are nowhere near as wealthy as they thought they were.

This hits Western English-speaking universities particularly hard. They tend to charge even domestic students large tuition fees, and make money out of on-site catering and accommodation on top of that.

[Oldeconomybuyer]

[Fai Mao]

Honestly, there need to be fewer international students. The ones that do come should be from places at least nominally friendly to the Us

[MAGAthon]

like all FakeNewsMSM, BBC attributes every result of the lockdowns/shutdowns to the virus.

#LockdownFakeNewsMSM.

[JesusIsLord]

The education industry provides an overpriced product and over-promises on the value of that product. Why do you think so many students and their co-signing parents are drowning in education debt? People who spend hundreds of thousands of dollars for a degree that guarantees nothing are stupid - IMHO. I have to laugh when I hear people argue the need to give their kids the "college experience", which to many means a campus where you are unsupervised and are encouraged to fornicate, party, get drunk and high to your heart's content.

We live in a technological age where the vast number of classes could be virtual/online - at a fraction of the cost of a brick and mortar class.

Thankfully, there now are fully accredited colleges, universities, primary and secondary schools that have gone online. These online institutions will do just fine and likely grow through this pandemic.