Universities’ research focus is leaving students unprepared

Yiling Wang Nicky Zhang are both post graduate students from Shanghai studying at Sydney University. Picture: James Croucher

It’s nearly a year since US online recruiter Glassdoor shocked the global university and tertiary college world by revealing that major US employers no longer require a degree for top new employees.

Google, Apple, IBM, Penguin Random House, Bank of America, Starbucks, Cisco, and Hilton were among the groups that had changed their recruiting policies, partly because too many graduates did not have the skills they required.

Subsequently, at least in Australia, nothing much has happened in the university sector.

But the US-China trade war is suddenly raising alarm bells in our third-largest export industry. Australia’s education sector is in a dangerous position and that danger puts our entire tertiary education sector in jeopardy.

Universities live in an academic world and are rarely looked at from a business point of view. To date, that academic approach has worked. But the post trade war world is likely to be very different.

Basically, in the words of education analyst Kee Wong, universities offer their students the choice of a series of “hampers” covering areas like law, engineering, commerce and arts.

We have all received Christmas hampers and on most occasions we find things in them that we want but many things that are of no use. And so it is with most university degrees. But too many university hampers have not fundamentally changed in 30 years.

I know my university friends will dispute that statement, and I recognise that some universities have become much more flexible and have modernised their subjects. But too many have not and that means too many students are coming out of a tertiary courses totally unprepared for the workplaces of today, let alone the future.

Many students understand this and they scramble to join large organisations (both private and government) that have training courses that will make them “work ready”. Those organisations take the best students available, so the rest go into the workforce unprepared. Many fail and I run into countless medium sized business people who shake their heads when they describe how unprepared most graduates are for the modern world.

So the universities have a product problem. But it gets worse.

Universities are funded by taking in foreign students who pay full fees. Many of these students come from China.

Chinese universities have adapted their courses to fit the modern world, with a particular emphasis on databases and artificial intelligence: the area where China seeks superiority over the US.

In other words, in business terms, we face a rival which has updated its product. In the past, Chinese universities have not had the capacity to meet the demand, but they are catching up.

And just to make matters even more dangerous for Australia, relations with China are poor, so returning to China with an Australian degree might not carry the same advantage that existed in previous decades, particularly given the rise in the standard of Chinese universities.

On this front, Australia is helped by the fact that the largest education state, Victoria, was smart enough to join China’s belt and road initiative.

Of course the student market covers many other countries. We must also recognise that a proportion of the total student market has come to Australia seeking long-term residency. If Canberra tightens the visa requirements, it will be a disaster for the education sector because without visa seeking students, the tertiary education sector could not be funded.

In normal businesses, the chief executives know they must adapt their products to meet the market. But in the tertiary sector attracting both local and overseas students currently requires a good ranking.

An important part of securing such a ranking is producing research papers that often have very limited relevance to today’s challenges. So large sums are spent to produce such papers to gain ranking, and therefore more overseas students. In an ideal world that money should be spent improving courses and flexibility to match our rivals in China and elsewhere.

I do not claim to have the answers but Australia’s third largest export industry has not recognised that the game has changed. Nor have the federal and state governments, who blame each other. We have to change the debate or we will lose this industry because if overseas students fall then it will go into a downward spiral. Now is the time to recognise that the new situation and to act. It’s not too late.