Aussie excellence puts education on the map

Australia’s leadership in financial services education appears to owe as much to strong, Government-backed marketing as it does to innovation and leadership.

That said, it is a measure of how highly Australia’s financial services educational regimes are regarded that in the past two months, one of the world’s big four accounting firms has been in Sydney looking to recruit our best and brightest to work within its US operations.

According to Gillian Cappelletto, general manager for CA programs and admissions with the Institute of Chartered Accountants in Australia (ICAA), the presence of the big US accounting firm recruiting in Sydney came as little surprise.

She says it is a measure of the high regard other countries have for the ICAA’s CA program which, with that of Canada, is considered as being amongst the best in the world.

“We are regarded as being leading edge in terms of competencies and methodologies,” Cappelletto says.

The picture is similar for the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology, which over the past five years has witnessed significant growth in demand for the degree courses encompassed within its twinning program with the Singapore Institute of Management.

One of the facilitators of that twinning program with RMIT’s School of Accounting and Law, Antony Young, says Australian degree courses are well regarded because they are perceived as adding value.

“Australian educational institutions are well regarded in South-East Asia because the sophistication of our local financial services model means they (the degree courses) are considered to add value,” he says.

Young believes that there are excellent opportunities for Australian educational institutions elsewhere in South-East Asia, with Indonesia representing at least one possibility.

It is a view backed by theFinancial Planning Association’s (FPA) national manager for International Certification and Standards, Ken Bruce, who says there has already been discussions with Indonesia regarding qualifications around the Certified Financial Planner (CFP) mark.

Bruce says that while there is commonality across those organisations affiliated with the Financial Planning Standards Board, the educational regime developed by the FPA is being used by Hong Kong, Malaysia and India as a benchmark.

He says this is because of the FPA’s long-standing involvement in the development of educational standards and the advanced nature of the local financial services environment.

No one in Australia’s academic institutions or elsewhere underestimates the value of educational services as an export commodity.

According to the planning and research branch of leading Canberra-based educational agency IDP Education Australia, in fiscal year 2001-02, the value of Australia’s education exports was $4.15 billion.

It says this figure incorporates the value of education provided to international students plus the expenditure of those students while they are in Australia.

It does not, however, include the value of education provided to a student who remains overseas, either by an Australian institution through distance education, or by the presence of an Australian resident who is teaching or lecturing overseas (both are classed as education exports). The value of these education exports was $193 million in 2000-01.

The bottom line is that education represents Australia’s 14th largest export overall, and the third largest services export after tourism and transportation.

The IDP research is backed by official Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade statistics that show that more than 1,000 institutions in Australia are registered to deliver courses to international students and that Australia has the third largest number of international students in the English speaking world.

However, there is another element to the attractiveness of Australian educational institutions in circumstances where they have been actively marketed by organisations, including IDP, as a cheaper destination than either the UK or the US.

According to material used by IDP as part of its marketing, the cost of obtaining a bachelor of business is 33 per cent cheaper in Australia than Canada, 35 per cent cheaper than the UK, and 54 per cent cheaper than in a US public university.

Indeed, IDP provides interested international students with a breakdown of their yearly educational and living costs in Australia — a process that ranks this nation as being only fractionally more expensive than New Zealand.

The attractiveness of Australian financial services qualifications to students in South-East Asia is also owed to the promotional efforts of the Federal Government through agencies such as the Australian Financial Services Training Alliance (AFSTA), which boasts most of the major financial planning organisations within its membership, as well as theAustralian Securities and Investments Commission, theAustralian Prudential Regulation Authorityand the Australian Vice-Chancellors Committee.

The AFSTA is administered by Axiss Australia, which has as its mission statement the promotion of Australia as a global financial services centre in the Asian time zone, and which boasts the backing of both the Commonwealth Treasury and the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet.

The level of activity in selling Australian financial services education to the region was evidenced by the Axiss Australia mission to China last year, which was specifically aimed at leveraging off the increasing demand for financial skill development in China following its inclusion in the World Trade Organisation.

In discussing the purpose of the mission, Axiss chief executive Les Hosking says Australia’s excellence in finance education and training was well recognised.

“It is one of the preferred overseas education providers for students from Singapore, Indonesia, Thailand, Hong Kong and Malaysia, and more than 40 per cent of the 112,000 overseas tertiary students studying at Australian universities are studying finance-related disciplines,” he says.