International Mobility Of Australian University

Introduction

The mainstay of the services export from Australia happens to be the international education exports which are the third largest earners of foreign exchange after commodities like iron ore and coal. In the recent times, Australia has been increasingly chosen by the global students as a favored choice for pursuing higher education abroad. Thus, it becomes necessary to study the trends witnessed in this sector over the last few years so that any perceived bottlenecks either on a national or regional basis can be well understood and the revenues generated can be further increased. In the above background, the given essay aims to demonstrate the use of host of statistical tools which have been deployed in the given article to increase the information value and relevance for the reader.

Discussion

The data summarized in the article chosen has been sources from ABS (Australian Bureau of Statistics). It is apparent that all the variables defined have numerical values coupled with a precise and clear definition of zero and corresponding point thus imply the at the data belongs to the ratio type (Flick, 2015).  For summarizing the given data, a host of graphical illustrations  have been utilized coupled with use of various techniques available under the aegis of descriptive statistics.  The exports from Australia has been sub-divided on a regional basis which provided information about the current exports and then based on the regional potential suitable measures to augment the same may be taken. Further, the recipients of these exports have been also clearly identified and presented which is a useful data to estimate future numbers (Hair et. al., 2015). A high utility exists for this information as the same may be used both by the government along with universities in order to promote the educational services further to the correct audience i.e. students who would be interested and also offer solutions to enable them to avail these services. Further, the policy initiatives taken previously by the government and the universities can be suitably modified using the actual comparison and deviation from estimated numbers (Hillier, 2006).

The article uses descriptive statistics as the prime focus of the article is to describe the various aspects of the population also and develop a time series comparison so as to put the current numbers into perspective for the users to understand the underlying trends. Also, various graphs are aiding in summarizing the aspects of the population (Hastie, Tibshirani. & Friedman, 2011). Besides, the graphical and tabular representation  also allow for universities to take  dedicated measures for increasing the overall exports of education services. There is no scope for inferential statistics use as the focus is solely on describing the characteristics of the population data and thus no inferences need to be drawn from any samples (Hillier, 2006).

The given article does not employ any measure of central tendency but also extensively used variation techniques. One of the critical ones in this regard is the computation of yearly variation in the shares of not only the various importers of international education services but also in the total dollar amount of exports of educational services (Flick, 2015). Through the variation analysis, the relative trend in the growth rate of the various importing countries has been recorded which enables to identify the nations which have an increasing or decreasing share. The government and universities need to analyze the potential issues faced by nations whose share is declining so as to provide a boost to the education exports. A potential improvement in the given article pertains to representation of previous year figures for the regional breakup of the education exports which will allow making comparison of the regional performance and taking requisite measures (Eriksson and Kovalainen, 2015).

Summary

The importance of the international education exports in the Australian context is well established in the given article. The trend analysis in terms of education exports on a periodic basis enables derivation of maximum revenues from this particular aspect. The source of data is ABS while the data type is ratio. The statistics to be used is descriptive statistics since the objective is to summarize the population characteristics by employing graphical illustrations along with extensive usage of variation so as to derive key trends which can then be used for decision making by the critical stakeholders especially the government and university. Also, the reader can understand the regional breakup of international education services being offered currently and if in this regard previous year estimates were also offered, then the same could have been used for evaluating the performance of the various regions using variation as the enabler.

References

Eriksson, P. and Kovalainen, A. (2015). Quantitative methods in business research, 3^rd ed., London: Sage Publications.

Flick, U. (2015). Introducing research methodology: A beginner's guide to doing a research project, 4^th ed., New York: Sage Publications.

Hair, J. F., Wolfinbarger, M., Money, A. H., Samouel, P., and Page, M. J. (2015). Essentials of business research methods, 2^nd ed., New York: Routledge.

Hastie, T., Tibshirani, R. and Friedman, J. (2011). The Elements of Statistical Learning, 4^th ed., New York: Springer Publications.

Hillier, F. (2006), Introduction to Operations Research, 6^th ed., New York: McGraw Hill Publications.