How uni survived COVID-19 pandemic

THE University of Southern Queensland is focusing on investing in the future as it continues to find its path out of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Vice Chancellor Professor Geraldine Mackenzie said the university had sharpened its efforts in online delivery throughout the health crisis and life was returning back to the three campuses in Toowoomba, Springfield and Ipswich.

The university, unlike counterparts across Queensland and Australia, has not had to lay off staff because of the pandemic.

“So far we’ve been able to weather it by cutting down expenses and saving cash wherever we could and being very, very careful,” Professor Mackenzie said.

“By the same token we’ve been very careful about recruitment.

“The focus now is on investing in the future, that’s what’s really important as we don’t want to lose the opportunities that are coming.”

While a number of universities around Australia are reliant on international students, and the course fees they bring in, USQ had a relatively low number of international students, which helped the university avoid some of the issues faced by other universities.

The pandemic meant in semester one, and now semester two, a vast majority of the those international students weren’t able to come to Australia to study.

“For us we’ve been lightly touched as we had comparatively few international students, and hardly any students from China, which was a developing market for us,” Prof Mackenzie said.