Report card on export education: Could do a lot better

OPINION: I caught up with my old mate Haike Manning for a beer last week.

I first met Manning when he was New Zealand’s ambassador to Vietnam. I had dealt with some more traditional officials with impressive form but not always palpable substance, so Manning was a breath of fresh air.

After giving me an intensive grilling to make sure I wasn’t a complete dropkick and there was value in my offer, Manning simply asked what he could do to help.

Over a couple of 75c beers in a sidewalk cafe in Hanoi (he advised against the 40c beers), Manning helped me sketch out a commercial plan of attack for Vietnam, literally on the back of a napkin. Then, over the ensuing years, he did what he could to help me achieve it.

All with a cheeky demeanour and irreverent sense of humour. Along with counterparts in UAE and Thailand, Manning personified to me the new face of international public servants. People who walked the talk and got stuff done.

Having overseen a strengthening of the relationship between the Socialist Republic of Vietnam and New Zealand, Manning took leave from the public service to apply his entrepreneurial chops to helping international educational providers navigate Vietnam’s exciting but competitive and complex market.

Manning has chosen a fecund niche, insofar as New Zealand is concerned.

In the past 10 years education has moved from a peripheral export activity to being core.

Today, international education is our fourth-largest export earner, supporting 33,000 jobs.

It ranges from a high school taking on an extra handful of students to boost coffers and increase diversity, through to the likes of the University of Auckland with around 7000 international students a year.

Which is great. Well, great except that the industry relies on a bums-on-seats model for the large majority of its international feepaying students.

But what Manning told me is that this is far from the norm. The UK, for instance, is now delivering more of its degrees overseas

Change is coming to the global education market.

(through transnational education) than it is at home.

Australia and Germany also rate pretty well, with around 35 per cent of the value of their respective education industries coming from overseas.

They can do this because they have built a brand and then learnt how to execute consistently with that brand within a consistent foreign delivery framework. No small thing.

It’s no secret that the broader environment for the delivery of education marketing is changing. There are concerns over the quality of students, infrastructure and the use of study as a soft pathway to residency.

And it’s clear that the Labourled and NZ First-supported Government isn’t going to leave the immigration taps turned open.

In this context it makes sense to focus on not just great education export marketing but also the offshore delivery of that education. It will also let us move away from the high-volume, lower-value students from China and India.

Currently most of the universities provide some limited overseas delivery. But less than 5 per cent of New Zealand’s international education value comes from services and products delivered overseas. This needs to ramp up.

To date, our approach to overseas delivery has been haphazard, ranging from loanedout IP through to ‘‘pop-up shops’’, digital delivery and sub-leasing of local polytechnics.

Eighteen months ago, Education New Zealand and the Observatory on Borderless Higher Education explored alternative ways to drive growth, including overseas delivery.

But by the time the thenGovernment issued its 20-page International Education Strategy for New Zealand last June, the idea of a cohesive framework for overseas delivery was reduced to a single line promising to look at ‘‘different modes of delivery such as online or offshore’’.

It’s not clear from the outside that much has happened since, and I fear time is running out.

Change is coming to the global education market. The sector is ripe for tech disruption through AI, virtual reality and blockchain.

I’m not proposing full overseas delivery. Bricks and mortar can be expensive. It can, and logically should, be delivered in multiple ways.

Innovative solutions which drive our overseas delivery and increase the international education options available to millions of Vietnam’s youth would be music to the ears of the Vietnamese prime minister, who will be visiting New Zealand next week.

In fact I think I can hear Manning busy scribbling away on another napkin in Ho Chi Minh, figuring out how that might work.

❚ Mike ‘‘MOD’’ O’Donnell is a professional director and writer. His Twitter handle is @modsta and his favourite Vietnamese beer is the Pasteur Street - Passion Fruit Wheat Bia from Ho Chi Minh City.