Education Minister Jason Clare wants to strike an “accord” with universities. The idea is to inject some fairness back into Australia’s increasingly unfair education system. As Clare told the National Press Club in July: “If you’re a young Indigenous bloke today, you’re more likely to go to jail than university.
“We all pay a price for this. The cost of all these kids missing out.”
Clare has commissioned engineer Mary O’Kane to lead a big policy review of higher education, similar to the effort by Denise Bradley during the Rudd-Gillard years. The universities accord is also shaping as a name-brand education policy for Clare and an Albanese government which has so far assiduously avoided any kind of progressive schools policy.
“The universities accord is the biggest and broadest review of our higher education system in 15 years,” Clare told Parliament last week.
Many in Australia’s sprawling higher education would agree with the need for a policy refresh. Universities educate 1.6 million students annually and employ more than 120,000 highly trained workers. The big Australian universities have become large and aggressive institutions, with thousands of staff, annual turnovers well over $2 billion, and vast property holdings in some of the best locations in Australia.
Australian universities are also, at least in crude numeric terms, international successes. Enrolments are up, international students have long been one of Australia’s most lucrative export markets, and Australian institutions really do punch above their weight in the all-consuming obsession of university rankings. (Not that the ever-growing university marketing spends will let anyone forget about rankings, mind you.)
But for those who work and learn in the sector, the prosaic reality is decidedly less sanguine. I’m writing this article straight after finishing a tutorial for 30 post-grads in the faculty of arts at Monash University where I teach and research. Thirty students is now the normal size of a tutorial in the faculty of arts at Australia’s largest university, larger than classes in most primary or high schools. The classroom is small and dingy, and the ed-tech is little more than a whiteboard and an old digital projector.
Behind the chrome and steel exteriors of the architect-designed campus buildings, class sizes are blowing out. Students are increasingly disconnected, and staff are insecure and overworked. Sophisticated university data about “indicators for learning and teaching” elides a more dismal reality of short-changed students and declining teaching quality. This disquieting environment is presided over by a class of wealthy vice-chancellors earning million-dollar salaries.
The cracks in the altar are most visible in the way universities treat their workforce. Most Australian universities have admitted to wage theft, and the back-pay bill at institutions such as the University of Melbourne stretches into the tens of millions. The victims are nearly all casual academics, who for decades have been treated like disposable gig workers.
Given the sector’s disenchantment, O’Kane’s review has raised hopes for a more favourable policy environment. After all, Bradley’s review did turn out to be important. Acting on her recommendations, Julia Gillard let Australian universities enrol as many students as they liked. The new “demand-driven” system turned the spigots on a big stream of new undergraduates (although Labor subsequently cut funding per student to try to square the budgetary circle).
This benefited the big metropolitan universities that found they could simply out-compete their smaller colleagues for enrolments. But the quasi-market created by the Bradley policy era encouraged rampant university corporatisation, to the detriment of students and broader society.
O’Kane’s interim report has lofty ambitions. It argues that more than half of all new jobs will require bachelor’s qualifications or higher, and that as a result Australia needs to enrol many more students. We are going to need more scientists, more teachers and more qualified carers.
“Our higher education sector,” O’Kane argues, “must become much, much stronger.”
But most of the interim report’s recommendations are small and piecemeal tweaks that will make only modest improvements to a creaking system. Enrolling more First Nations students is a good recommendation that nearly everyone can support. So too is killing off the 50% pass rule, which withdrew Commonwealth funding from failing students, one of the most punitive measures of Dan Tehan’s disastrous Job-ready Graduates legislation in 2020.
The report also makes a welcome call for better university governance. Recent scandals have not flattered the well-heeled appointees who draw sinecures at top institutions: governing boards of Australian universities have demonstrably failed to notice or stop the wage theft and sexual assault that has proliferated on their campuses. The interim report doesn’t mince words, stating that “large-scale wage underpayment is a clear failure of institutional governance and management, for which [university] councils are ultimately accountable”.
O’Kane’s call for a tertiary education commission to better coordinate a fragmented sector is one of those “back to the future” recommendations common in policy reviews. Higher education used to be carefully regulated, with student places doled out frugally campus by campus. Ironically, it was Labor under Dawkins and Gillard that freed up the universities to compete like corporations in the international market. The current winner-takes-all model is failing regional and rural communities, and students from low-income backgrounds. But unless given real powers and enforcement teeth, it’s not clear a new federal universities body will be able to achieve much useful coordination.
None of this adds up to wholesale reform. Making progress on the universities accord’s larger ambitions seems unlikely without concomitant funding. And that’s where the rubber is going to need to hit the road for Clare and Albanese. In fact, universities are not in the rude health their splashy marketing campaigns make out. As Adam Lucas observes in a perceptive recent commentary, one of the reasons university completions are falling is that students find the modern university a low-quality and alienating experience.
Teaching quality is at risk because universities are using teaching revenue, especially international student fees, to cross-subsidise research. They do this because research drives university rankings, which in turn drives prestige and enrolments. For the big metropolitan universities that rake in most international enrolments, the cycle has fuelled impressive growth. In contrast, regional and suburban universities are struggling.
The absence of any meaningful policy direction for research is a notable omission from the interim report. A university without high-impact research will quickly fall down the rankings, which in turn hurts enrolments. But public funding for research in Australia is low and falling, and the federal government doesn’t even fund the full cost of research grants it hands out.
As the Australian Academy of Science rather diplomatically noted in response, the report says nothing about “the inherent instability of asking universities to rely on international and domestic student fee revenue to fund Australia’s research base”. Behind the scenes, scientists have been scathing.
In one of its brighter moments, O’Kane’s interim report argues that “the overall goal of reform must be growth for skills through greater equity”. But greater equity and more graduates are going to require more money. And there doesn’t appear to be much appetite for splashing public funding on higher education among Clare’s Labor colleagues.
Disclosure: Ben Eltham lectures at Monash University, where he is the president of the National Tertiary Education Union branch.
The Interim Report’s contents all but assure more of the same for Australia’s universities. More decline in standards, more money poured into black holes, more pointless courses, and most of all, an endless gravy train for the parasites that feed off the public teat – some of whom authored the report.
The interim priorities are the usual hot mess of non-sequiturs, platitudes and drivel. The Government will love it.
A real reformed higher education sector in Australia would see the number of universities halved over 15 odd years. It would dramatically downsize the number of pointless and meaningless courses. It would raise barriers to entry to ensure excellence, most of all to international students. TAFE and technical colleges would be refocussed to their true and historic purpose – not competing with the preening universities now trying to grab a another slice of revenue. It would stop the garbage about equity/underrepresented groups and such. How embarrassing for our collective status as a country that the report bemoans the 50% pass rule caused ‘undue stress on students’! So failure should be just ignored on grounds of equity! How quaint!
Nowhere in the report is the stark fact that employers public and private have utterly failed in their duties to train employees. Its now all left to the consumer and the publicly funded universities and TAFEs to do it all. So there is no possible end of demand. The last thing we need is more ‘equity’ and more graduates churned out from courses and degrees simply established to churn bodies in and out. Who cares if they pass? Who cares if they fail? Someone else is paying the bill and the students – many of whom should never have been admitted – are kicked to the curb with a debt.
Australia’s collective laziness and staggering lack of ambition is encapsulated in the report. Even the front cover photo – an echidna wandering in the dirt – shows how not bothering is now our national pastime.
And finally – higher education is not an export industry. Its more like low rent tourism. Except with a side benefit of cheap labour to deliver takeaway food and staff call centres.
Poor man my country.
I’m old enough to remember when education was free including university. The concept of “making money” by luring rich foreign students was completely foreign. Th munis were a publicly owned asset for the benefit of our own population’s intellectual capacity.
Rewrite: I’m old enough to remember when educations was free, including at university. The concept of using it as a money making vehicle was foreign (USA model I suppose which impressed Howard). Universities were a public asset, there for the improvement of our own people.
Fully agree. It’s all very well to aim for more indigenous tertiary students, but if they haven’t received a proper education prior to that time then they are simply not equipped to complete a university course worthy of the name. And basic deficiencies of language, which is the principal problem, cannot be remedied at university. The problems with indigenous education are in the primary and secondary sectors, and the solution is not to accept them into university and allow them to remain there despite perpetually failing, or award them a degree they haven’t earned.
Still cannot see anything offensive that has blocked my comment – ??????????
What’s your definition of a “pointless course”?
Fair enough – its somewhat subjective. Nevertheless, the proliferation of undergraduate degrees in Australia in the last 15 years offers plenty of clues as to what is a course that offers substance and grounding in core disciplines – and what is repackaged marketing with the primary purpose not of learning, but of revenue generation. Monash Uni – to cite one example – variously offers BA degrees in business, business administration, commerce, banking and finance, marketing, actuarial science and more. All largely do similar subjects. But each product line creates its own weather patterns of staff and costs without offering any greater value to students.
Relentless credentialism has also driven the explosion of courses at university levels that properly belong at TAFE which used to be focussed on the hands on technical domains but now too are student churn factories. Most of the ‘skills’ that our elite decry are lacking should be taught via apprenticeships/early years within employers, i.e. communications, marketing, media, HR, administration, even some allied health. But we have allowed business to avoid responsibility for training and skills – shunting it into the higher ed sector where a buck can be made.
Credentialism is also a reaction to the jobs shortage / labour oversupply.
When dozens to hundreds of people are applying for any given job,
employersrecruiters need an easy way to cut the potential list down to a more manageable size.Requiring any degree – or a highly specific degree – to even be considered delivers this and, as a bonus, shifts responsibility away from the recruiter to actually properly vet candidates.
Also an excuse to increase the number of low-skill, low-value, easily exploited immigrants to suppress wages and increase profits.
The high standard of our education is often touted as an attraction for international students, but having taught in the sector, I would say the pathway to immigration is more of an incentive.
Excellent article, Ben.
We keep hearing that universities can’t keep asking for more public money, but since the Howard years Australia has been at or near the bottom of OECD tables on public spending on higher education (as proportion of GDP) – why does that have to be inevitable? It is a political choice.
Research: Australia does very well in university-based research. it does poorly in private spending on R&D, so the ever-popular idea of giving industry more say in research priorities is a very bad one – why give a sector more say over something it isn’t very good at or hasn’t prioritized itself? And too much of our research is done by people on short fixed-term contracts. We urgently need a more sustainable national research workforce strategy, with more secure employment for research staff.
And university governance – undemocratic, characterized by management and corporate capture. Urgent reform needed.
Private industry in general is too risk averse for innovative research. Where it shines is in refinement and mass production.
Public institutions are basically the opposite. Since they don’t have to make a profit, they can engage in research for the sake of research, or research with low probabilities of success, or research into things that may not have any obvious paybacks.
The problem is that the “managers” in government and public service will see similar “managers” in universities. All have reached their positions on the basis of servility, obsequiousness and rule-following, while competence is unnecessary and can even be seen as a hindrance.
That is why our universities are starting to resemble communist China – nothing to do with ideology – the VC is considered close to god, and there is almost no room for dissent on any matter.
Don’t expect any “reform” by the Australian managerial class.
I used to supervise students up until ten years back, and I have to say the quality of them diminished as the years rolled by. I don’t think it was their fault, but they were often ill-prepared for their placements, and lacked a certain knowledge and skill set that the earlier students possessed. At times it was hard to get in touch with their university coordinators, and many of us were starting to mutter things about production line education.
Thank you for this. I have one quibble. You state, “international students have long been one of Australia’s most lucrative export markets”. This is an oft-quoted myth.
as MacroBusiness has repeatedly stated, see below, much of the “exports” are in fact, expenditure by students on accommodation etc, but a large portion of this expenditure is earned locally. The “export” figure is a statistical fiction, one that the universities don’t want exposed.
https://www.macrobusiness.com.au/2021/06/australias-fake-education-exports-exposed-again/