The email arrived without warning: Dani Nguyen’s scholarship at Swinburne University had been cut off.
If she didn’t pay the full fees, she could lose her place – and visa. Nguyen had just days to find thousands of dollars to stay in Australia. Her case is among a number reviewed by this masthead in which student marks had slipped by less than 1 per cent. “It’s robo-debt for scholarships, all run from this black-box email,” student union president Kishaun Aloysius said.
Other universities have no such policy and many students only need a 60 per cent average to qualify for a scholarship – usually worth tens of thousands of dollars – in the first place. “I tried to send all the documents through explaining why I’d had to go back home to see my aunt,” said Nguyen, whose aunt had died since she received the termination email in July. “I just got this automatic response back saying it wasn’t enough to overturn the decision.”The official campus advocacy service for students is itself owned by the university and managed in part by Swinburne executives.
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