Successive federal governments have propelled a ‘backdoor privatisation’ of Australian universities. It’s shameful.
If it wasn’t for their success in fattening their own salaries, I’d be tempted to feel sorry for the nation’s vice chancellors. They’ve been screwed around for years by federal governments of both colours, and the mess they’re in gets ever deeper.
They are another victim of our long dalliance with ‘‘neoliberalism’’. Now to sort out this and other messes a misguided experiment has left us with.
Successive federal governments have engineered a kind of backdoor privatisation of our universities. They remain owned by the states and heavily regulated by the feds, but have increasingly been told to pay their own way.
The feds have sought to greatly increase the proportion of school leavers going to university but limit the cost to their own budget. They’ve done this partly by requiring students to cover some of the cost of providing their degrees themselves, but mainly by encouraging unis to attract overseas students and charge them full freight.
I’m happy to defend the fairness and good sense of the original HECS – the higher education contribution scheme – but successive governments have increased and distorted the fees in ways that can’t be defended. The most egregious is the Morrison government’s crazy ‘‘job-ready graduate’’ scheme, under which it reduced the fees for some degrees, but doubled them for arts and some others.
Last month the federal Education Department revealed that the cost of a three-year arts degree is likely to reach $50,000 for students beginning their studies in 2025. The alleged purpose of the increase was to discourage young people from taking courses that didn’t lead to jobs where the demand for workers was great. Predictably, it didn’t work. And only an ignoramus would regard an arts degree as of little value.
Last week the new vice chancellor of Western Sydney University, Professor George Williams, complained bitterly about this, saying young people were being priced out of their dreams and fearful of being left with a HECS debt for the rest of their lives. No one understands better than the Albanese government that the fees charged for different degrees should be based on the graduate’s likely lifetime earnings. But it is hastening at a snail’s pace, hoping to fix it one day.
Many problems have arisen from the universities’ ever growing dependence on raising revenue from overseas students. The big eight unis devote much effort to finding ways to game the various league tables of the world’s universities, knowing a high rank will allow them to charge higher fees to overseas students.
But now Guardian Australia has reported that many overseas students can’t speak basic English, yet were passing courses and being awarded degrees. Cheating and plagiarism is widespread, it’s been told. I’m sorry to say I have no trouble believing such claims. But I have more trouble sharing unis’ alarm over the Albanese government’s plan to impose uniby-uni caps on how many overseas students they admit.
Although federal politicians are happy to share the credit for our unis’ high international rankings, and delighted to have them less reliant on the federal budget, they’re just as liable to turn on the unis when dependence on overseas income becomes a problem.
The hard line the Morrison government took with overseas students during the pandemic contributed to the unexpected surge in overseas students after the borders reopened.
It’s idle for universities to deny that the surge has contributed to the shortage of rental accommodation. And it’s understandable for the government to want to ease the pressure on rents. But the surge is likely to be temporary and the various measures the feds have taken to correct their own mistakes are likely to fix the problem without any need to resort to caps. Sometimes pollies wield big sticks without intending to use them.
Some economists have questioned the official estimates of the value of overseas students’ contribution to the economy – up to $40 billion a year – which vice chancellors use to claim credit for being Australia’s third-largest export. The calculation seems inconsistent with the way the value of other services exports are measured. On a more consistent basis, the $40 billion might be nearer to $20 billion. If so, it’s support for my conclusion that the pollies’ backdoor privatisation of the unis has left us with the worst of both worlds.
Academics complain that their uni seems to have more administrators than academics. But what do you expect when you take a government department and demand that it start behaving like a profit-making business?
Just as the chief executives of big businesses are hugely overpaid, so now are vice chancellors – who, admittedly, do run huge organisations. The employees at the top justify their high remuneration by their success in holding down the wages of the employees below them. But the most deplorable thing the universities have copied from the private sector is the way they’ve used casualisation to rob young academics of any job security.
Republished from The Sydney Morning Herald, August 07, 2024 [paywall]