Australia’s new access targets ‘need rigorous research’

Targets commissioned as part of Australia’s sweeping higher education review must be the subject of careful consideration, including whether they should exist at all, analysts said.

Targets can “sound good as a reasonable improvement on the status quo” without being informed by proper modelling of their feasibility or even their desirability, according to Andrew Norton, professor in the practice of higher education policy at the Australian National University. “We need a flexible system that will respond to emerging changes in the labour market, [such as] demand-driven funding,” he said.

“I don’t like targets, but if you have to have targets, they should be based on rigorous analysis.”

The terms of reference for the review, dubbed the “Australian universities accord”, include recommendations for new targets to meet the country’s knowledge and skills needs and to boost participation by students from under-represented backgrounds.

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The last major review of Australian higher education, headed by Denise Bradley, set two targets to be achieved by 2020: for 40 per cent of 25- to 34-year-olds to have attained degree-level qualifications, and for people from the most disadvantaged quartile of the population to comprise 20 per cent of undergraduate enrolments. The government adopted both, but deferred the attainment target to 2025.

However, the Liberal-National administration scrapped the targets after winning power in 2013 – raising questions over the political survivability of targets.

Professor Norton said the new equity targets would also require “very rigorous research” about whether people who met the equity criteria, and had realistic prospects of succeeding at university, were “not currently going”.

“Otherwise, you’re either creating totally unachievable targets for the universities or you’re encouraging them to do high-pressure sales on people for whom this is probably not going to work out very well. They’ll get a [loan] debt but no degree.”

Professor Norton said any target for Aboriginal participation would require evidence of a pool of Indigenous Australians who were “missing out” on university despite having the academic capability to succeed.

“Universities have been trying so hard in this space for a long time, inflicting shocking attrition rates on Indigenous students. There’s a fine line between equity and exploitation in some respects, because if they’re not benefiting from it, you’re not doing them any favours.”

Gwilym Croucher, senior lecturer in higher education policy and management at the University of Melbourne, said targets risked “making the perfect the enemy of the good”.

“If we create interventions to try and address the measure, rather than the underlying issue that we’re seeking to fix, then it won’t have the outcome we hope it will,” he said.

Another problem with targets is that they can obscure meaningful progress. The Bradley equity target, for example, has been widely decried as a failure. Education department data suggest that the proportion of low socio-economic status (SES) students increased by just 2 percentage points between 2009, the year after Professor Bradley released her report, and 2020. But that increase occurred against a backdrop of rapid enrolment growth, with the number of low-SES university students rising by 57 per cent while overall domestic student numbers increased by 39 per cent.

“We’ve made big strides in improving equity across higher education,” Dr Croucher said. “That probably happened because people are focused on it. Targets should never be dismissed, because they can be a really useful tool to focus activity and start important conversations, [but] it’s that really ongoing, consistent hard graft that is probably the most important thing.”

john.ross@timeshighereducation.com