Cracks in unis’ shiny chrome and steel need serious infill — and serious money

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.