The consumer rights of international students in the Australian vocational education and training sector

ABSTRACT

Scholars who analyse the policies that provide for the rights of international students have tended to focus on challenges posed by racism, discrimination and unjustified stereotyping. This discussion has focussed overwhelmingly on the higher education sector but recently has begun to be extended to vocational and training education (VET). We enter this emergent debate by addressing the finding that when international VET students studying in Australia are interviewed about their rights experience, they are prone to focus on their status as consumers of the commodities they purchase in order to gain a high-quality international education experience. Given this response, we examine how Australian officials provide for international students’ consumer rights, analyse the views of international students studying in Australia, and explain why the need to provide for the consumer rights of these sojourners is bound to remain a perennial concern for host governments and institutions.

KEYWORDS:

• International students
• international education
• student rights
• consumer rights
• human rights
• international student experience
• vocational education and training

Acknowledgments

We would like to acknowledge the very helpful suggestions of the two anonymous Reviewers, the valuable contributions of the international student participants and the funding from the Australian Research Council for this research.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Australian Research Council [DP0986590].