From Albury via Swinburne University, arts student and business graduate Maddison Sklenar was hoping to make a splash in Asia next year.
“I freaked out because this is my last degree that I want to complete before applying for jobs overseas,” the 23-year-old said.Swinburne University told staff it “proposes to cease these units and majors because they are not considered to be strategically aligned to our future”.It is not the only Victorian university to announce cuts to its language units: La Trobe University has proposed discontinuing Greek, Hindi and Indonesian.
But Andrew Norton, Professor in the Practice of Higher Education Policy at ANU, said the government’s price signal to students was likely to fail. Financially stressed universities were dropping language units because they were expensive to run and had low enrolment numbers.“In this more difficult financial environment, universities can’t carry the courses that aren’t paying their own way, and therefore languages and some others are in the firing line,” Professor Norton said.