sun surf 92

Australia not a 'sun, sex and surf' holiday

By Luke Slattery

The Australian

November 29, 2007 09:43am

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AN Australian higher education was increasingly linked in some key export markets with a "beer and beaches holiday" rather than a valuable learning experience, the Group of Eight research universities have warned.

In perhaps the toughest internal critique of the $10 billion export industry's direction and focus, Go8 executive director Michael Gallagher said universities in the US, Canada, and Scandinavia were beginning to discourage their students from a "sun, surf and sex" experience in Australia.

While it is understood that these tourist messages help the low status universities, the high-end research universities feel they are disadvantaged by the industry's image in their attempts to market themselves on grounds of excellence and to cherry-pick top overseas postgraduates.

In an address at the University of Sydney this month, Mr Gallagher said Australia's international education marketing delivered "messages other than valuing intellectual achievement" and that a "long tail of mediocrity" threatened the international reputation of Australian higher education.

Mr Gallagher, former director of policy and planning at the Australian National University and the nation's top education bureaucrat from 1990 to 1994 and from 2000 to 2002, said that although Australian education had been marketed as a "fair to good average system", tourism and immigration had "intruded into the branding message".