Pearls and Irritations

The Australian Universities Accord Final Report (the Final Report) was made publicly available on 25 February 2024 by the Federal Minister for Education, the Hon. Jason Clare MP. It contains 47 recommendations for the reform of Australia’s higher education system over the next few decades. As one of us noted shortly after the Accord’s interim report was published on 20 July 2023, that document provided little cause for optimism that either the Accord panel or Minister Clare were particularly concerned with addressing the systemic problems that currently plague Australia’s dysfunctional, inequitable and authoritarian higher education system.

Like the Accord’s interim report, a first reading of the Final Report conveys the impression that it seeks to address some of the symptoms of the demise of Australian universities, but without adequately comprehending or confronting the real causes of the disease or ruffling too many feathers.

One of the most important findings of the Final Report is its acknowledgement that the current funding arrangements are inadequate. However, it is less than clear about how any additional funding will be financed. As Sydney University Vice-Chancellor Mark Scott noted in a recent article in The Guardian, ‘the only revenue measure in the accord paper is a tax on universities themselves’.

The Final Report proposes to scrap the ineffectual and discriminatory ‘Job Ready Futures Package’ introduced by the former Liberal Education Minister Dan Tehan in 2020 and to introduce a tuition fee structure more in line with graduates’ earning capacity. It also argues that some kind of needs-based funding model should be implemented to address current inequities in the availability of tertiary education to students from rural and regional areas, for Indigenous students, and students from lower socioeconomic backgrounds. However, the fact that the Gonski proposal for school funding has never been fully implemented does not augur well for the application of a similar model to our universities.

Australia still lives with the legacy of the bipartisan refusal to adequately fund the country’s education system, which has been compounded by sustained cost-cutting by successive governments. This has resulted in an increasingly grotesque disparity in education funding that disproportionately favours non-government schools. Very few public schools are funded according to need, and private and independent schools receive more federal funding than public universities. Scandalously, Australian university students contribute many billions of dollars more in government tax revenues than the oil and gas industry pays in income tax. These facts clearly reveal just where the priorities of the country’s major parties lie.

Inadequate funding of our universities has its origins in the ‘Dawkins reforms’ of the late 1980s, when the Hawke Government decided it would no longer predominantly fund Australia’s higher education system as it moved towards a mass education model. Universities have had increasing pressure brought to bear upon them to find alternative sources of revenue to supplement any funding offered by the Commonwealth. This has led to a situation where Federal funding has been reduced from around 80 percent of public university revenue in 1990 to around 35 percent today, placing Australia near the bottom of OECD rankings for government investment in higher education. The bulk of that revenue is now sourced from domestic and international student fees.

Although some of Australia’s larger universities have been extremely successful in attracting very high proportions of international students, their current over-dependence on that revenue stream has been accompanied by increased workforce casualisation and class sizes, reduced contact hours for students, systemic overwork of academic staff, chronic levels of wage theft and widespread mental health issues for university workers. The ‘edifice complex’ of university executives and the neoliberal preoccupations of their senior managers has also resulted in an estimated 50 percent or more of university revenues being spent on non-core functions: that is, money not spent on teaching and research. It is therefore disingenuous for VC Mark Scott to claim that ‘every dollar [raised by Australia’s public universities] is invested back in strengthening their teaching and research’. As one of our colleagues has aptly noted, ‘universities are finance investors with a side hustle in education’.

The ongoing failure by government to provide adequate funding to public schools is a direct contributor to some of the disadvantage experienced by prospective students whom the Accord proposes to assist. If Minister Clare is genuine in his commitment to make these students his priority in a restructured higher education system, we suggest that these disadvantages should be pre-emptively addressed by first resolving the gross inequities in school and tertiary education funding that the Albanese Government appears to still believe are acceptable.

We submit that if the Federal Government is serious about improving educational outcomes and stimulating innovation, it should commit to fully and continuously funding all universities. That funding should be in line with inflation and the real costs of delivering quality education to Australian students, while providing sufficient financial support for university research. At the very least, the Government should commit to the establishment of a guaranteed baseline of permanent funding while ensuring that the money universities receive and already hold in assets is directly spent on the purpose for which they exist, i.e. delivering on their core academic activities.

The question should also be raised as to how ‘need’ is to be defined? If every student, including those with diverse disadvantages, is to be offered the best possible education, current levels of academic casualisation must be seriously curtailed and full-time continuing lecturers employed across all discipline areas. Universities have been allowed to sack well over 40,000 full-time academic staff over the last decade, with the loss of literally hundreds of thousands of years of knowledge and expertise. Rarely is this issue raised in any public discussions about higher education in Australia, or the impact that it has had on the quality of tertiary education, including STEM degrees. The latter issue was raised with considerable force by Bob Birrell and Ernest Healy in their recent report titled ‘The Skills Crisis, University Culpability and the Overseas Student Industry’, which argues that Australia’s universities have a miserable record in training locals in key STEM fields. They also point out that current policy settings will further embed the inequitable practice of providing overseas students with a ‘privileged pathway into the elite ranks of key [Australian] professions’.

The Final Report does make frequent reference to the casualisation of the university workforce and acknowledges that academic employment has not kept pace with student enrolments. We make the simple point that current or increased rates of student enrolments are not sustainable without more permanently employed lecturers who are able to conduct research commensurate with their teaching obligations.

There is no national benefit to be gained by supporting more students from a variety of disadvantaged backgrounds unless all the reasons for their disadvantages are fully addressed and supported on campus.

Students require out-of-class tutorial and other support, which also needs to be provided by academic tutors or their lecturers. While some universities provide informal mentoring and support for students by other students (!), this is not an acceptable situation as drop-out rates for first year university students clearly attests. If Minister Clare’s ambition to double the number of Australian student graduates by 2030 were to come to fruition and the current inequities in academic employment levels are not resolved, the whole system will become increasingly dysfunctional and unattractive to prospective students and staff, who will look elsewhere for education and employment opportunities.

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