Australia's universities at a crossroads
By George Morgan-
28 December 2017 first published 27 December 2017 - 11:15pm
................... Five years ago, the Labor government started giving universities a bag of money for every undergraduate they enrolled – with few limits. This sparked a five-year feeding frenzy in higher education that only ended in mid-December when the Turnbull government announced it would reimpose caps on publicly funded undergraduate places.
The
'uncapped era' had benefits and costs.
It widened access by bringing in people who in the 20th century would not have gone anywhere near a university. This presented pedagogica
l challenges for those of us teaching 'first-in-family'/ working class/ minority students, but university managements have generally not provided sufficient resources to allow us to meet these challenges.
...................
Rather than employing more staff to deal with increased student numbers, they cut corners while telling the world they had
"improved productivity". This meant casualising and outsourcing teaching work, cutting face-to-face hours or replacing them with online.
Many of the new students have been short-changed and this is reflected in the drastic increase in the numbers of those who fail to complete their degrees....................
Although they all deny diminishing the quality of education,
vice-chancellors frequently complain that higher education has for a long time been underfunded, notwithstanding the uncapping of places. This is true. Despite the misgivings of conservative politicians about the ballooning costs of higher education, public funding for Australian universities is less, as a proportion of GDP, than almost any OECD nation. And
universities receive much less per student today than was the case 20 years ago....................
But this is only part of the reason
teaching and research is so woefully under-resourced. When undergraduate places were uncapped,
universities became more corporate and competitive. They spent vast sums on
'strategic initiatives' including marketing, branding, recruitment, on sprucing up the buildings and grounds to attract prospective undergraduates.
Money that should have flowed through to the chalkface didn't.
...................
For many institutions, this was
not money well spent. In market systems, there are always winners and losers and it is very difficult for the newer universities to compete with the sandstones. They now enrol a smaller proportion of high and middle-achieving school leavers than in the past because the more prestigious universities have courted those students aggressively.
Many of the degrees in regional and suburban universities have been kept afloat by reducing admission standards and offering alternative-entry pathways (practices that have recently become subject to greater state regulation)....................
The unjust thing about this is that the quality of teaching and learning is often no better in the older universities – and in fact many perform much worse in student satisfaction surveys than their newer counterparts.
But student choice is mostly (and probably rationally) driven by provenance and the perception that, whatever the learning experience,
a sandstone degree provides more leverage in the job market....................
After the boom years of the first half of the decade, enrolments have plateaued in the last two years and the
smaller institutions are feeling the pinch. The details of how the government plans to distribute
publicly funded degree places between universities in the more regulated environment remains unclear....................
There have been vague statements about measuring university performance, including graduate employment outcomes, but what is clear is that the university system is now much more divided and unequal than it was
before the folly of hyper-competition and that these deeper divisions will likely remain in place....................
In commenting on the policy changes, Minister for Education Simon Birmingham stated that universities must develop
"a stronger focus on supporting students". But
this is disingenuous and is hardly likely to be achieved by cutting funding. And it certainly won't be achieved unless there is fundamental reform to university decision-making.
This means
clipping the wings of a generation of university managers who have been encouraged in the uncapped system to act like hairy-chested entrepreneurs. And it means providing more power and resources to those engaged in the
'core business' of teaching and research. Without such reforms, many of the current problems will remain in place....................
George Morgan is Associate Professor at the Institute for Culture and Society at the University Western Sydney University.
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