Be careful what you wish for, Australian universities told

Australian universities have been accused of complicity in the “much maligned” 2020 reforms they now want reversed, and of being overconfident that a current reform drive will have the desired effects.

In a grilling from journalists in Canberra, Universities Australia (UA) chief executive Luke Sheehy was asked why the sector had not fought harder against the pandemic-era Job-ready Graduates (JRG) changes to tuition fees and teaching subsidies.

Sheehy had blamed JRG for the sector’s “parlous” financial position, saying it had deprived the sector of almost A$1 billion (£500 million) in course funding. “That’s the equivalent of around 33,000 student places,” he told the National Press Club (NPC), during an address coinciding with UA’s annual conference.  

NPC director Julie Hare said the sector had failed to “advocate strongly enough” against the JRG proposals before their 2021 introduction, rationalising that it was “politically savvy” not to oppose changes that would mainly hurt students. Vice-chancellors had similarly failed to take a stand against a 2014 proposal to deregulate tuition fees, Hare noted.

Sheehy said university representatives had requested changes to the JRG package, but parliament had passed the reforms unamended. At the time, universities were suffering from the 2017 freezing of their teaching grants. And a promised analysis of research underfunding had never materialised. “We got a dud deal and we’re accepting that now.”

He said universities had been subjected to “boom and bust” funding for years. In 2014, they had been told to charge “as much as you like” in fees paid upfront through the Higher Education Loan Programme (Help). “We were told by the same government, three or four years later, that we [must] curtail…Help debt,” he said.

“The core mission of teaching and research is structurally underfunded. We used to top it up with international students. Now we’re being told we can’t have as many as we need.”

Sheehy’s central argument was that universities had a role in every aspect of the government’s macroeconomic reform agenda, but were not adequately funded to do their work. He said the Universities Accord had outlined a “critical national imperative” to boost economic prosperity by educating a million additional students by 2050.

“We’re told this target could add as much as A$240 billion to the economy. Australian households would be more than A$20,000 better off if we achieve this task. The threshold question to both sides of politics, in an election year, is will you fund education and research fully and properly so we can…get on [with] our core mission to deliver [for] Australians?

“It’s about rational, good policy to get us match fit for…2025 and beyond. We’ve spent years on the accord. Now let’s commit to the architecture we need to get this system right.”

Asked how he could be sure that the accord reforms – unlike JRG – would substantially alter student demand, Sheehy said students would be attracted to tertiary education if they had “really clear signals” that it would land them jobs.

Challenged to quantify exactly how much more money the sector needed to achieve the accord targets, he said it was impossible to say because previous attempts to pinpoint the cost of university teaching had been “completely not fit for purpose”.

Some universities needed more money than others because they were less attractive to international students, he added. “How long is a piece of string? How much research does the country want us to do? How much research does business want to do with universities?”

Outgoing UA chair David Lloyd said it was difficult to specify exactly how much more money the sector needed, but it was a very large amount. One approach would be to multiply the average annual cost of teaching delivery by the number of additional graduates desired, and triple the result because most undergraduate degrees took three years.

But Lloyd told Times Higher Education that estimates of average teaching costs were dubious, and such a calculation would also overlook extra expenses like the costs of building and running laboratories and organising practical placements. “We are underfunded against mission by a significantly larger amount,” he said.

john.ross@timeshighereducation.com