Now other Australian universities have revealed they are also cancelling hundreds of courses they have been operating in partnership with institutions across Asia.

Cost and quality issues appear to be the main factors and most of the courses that have been closed were being run in Hong Kong, the mainland and Singapore.

In each of these places, foreign universities have been moving in to grab a slice of the education export market while new local institutions have been established that now offer increasingly fierce competition.

UNSW itself has slashed its overseas operations, from 20 a decade ago to two - an engineering undergraduate degree in Vietnam and a design master's course in Singapore.

Central Queensland University, which has long boasted of having the highest proportion of foreign students of any in Australia, will close its programmes in Shanghai, Singapore and Fiji after a sharp decline in enrolments.

Last year, foreign students comprised 53 per cent of the nearly 21,000 students enrolled on CQU's Australian campuses. But after a 25 per cent decline this year, the proportion has dropped to less than 47 per cent of the 17,650 enrolled.

Although not affected to the same extent, Curtin University of Technology in Perth has 9,000 students offshore and will shortly cancel three of its programmes in Asia.

The university says it will continue operating in Hong Kong, Singapore and Sarawak where it operates a campus with more than 2,000 students.

The University of Technology, Sydney, will pull out of Hong Kong and Malaysia, reducing the number of offshore students it enrols from 2,500 to 1,000.

Adelaide's Flinders University has already withdrawn from Hong Kong and Singapore, where the market has become overcrowded, and now has just 13 offshore programmes.

In contrast to these moves, RMIT University in Melbourne is planning to boost its presence overseas, although it will pull out of two small operations.