by DIRK MULDER

It’s been a while coming but there is bad news on China student numbers

The feds have released international student course variation figures for the first quarter. Most categories increased in line with overall student populations.  But not the number who deferred on compassionate/compelling grounds. There were 9212 of them in the category for Q1 last year – this year there are 30,798.

Higher education takes the hit, less jumping than rocketing from 3592 last year to 19 310 this.

It’s not because most of these people don’t want to study – it’s because they can’t. And those who can’t are from China. There were 1743 deferrals by students from China this time last year – now it is, 19 310.

It’s not all bad – at least as of end March it wasn’t. As the Department of Education, Skills and Employment points out, there were 60 000 Chinese student visa holders outside Australia then, who had not deferred. We have to wait to learn what they think of their first semester of on-line learning.

But the new deferral data certainly does demonstrate the March first semester intake numbers looked way better than they were (CMM May 18).

There is a swag of students who are technically counted as studying in the enrolment / commencement data but who we now know deferred. The still unknown at this stage is that with institutions relaxing their enrolment policies, the deferred number may still reach horrible heights over the rest of first semester.

The data also demonstrates institutes who have been reporting they were significantly down were ahead of the system-wide numbers.

The course variation figures are the ones to watch, certainly for this semester.

Dirk Mulder is CMM’s international education correspondent