Coronavirus: Lack of federal support leaves universities vulnerable

Thousands of university jobs could be lost amid the COVID-19 crisis.

As Australian universities lead the global race for a vaccine for COVID-19, they are being completely dudded by the federal government’s multitude of assistance packages.

Despite hundreds of billions of dollars of taxpayers money flying out the door to try and save jobs and businesses across the country, the federal government has seen fit to deny the university sector access to the JobKeeper program, do nothing to help it survive the expected collapse in international student numbers, and seems to not care that tens of thousands of jobs (at a minimum) will be lost as a result.

Throw in the fact our higher educational institutions will plummet down the world rankings without the revenue from international students they have used to top-up inadequate government funding (we trail the world on state funding) and the spiral the sector faces is obvious.

So what should happen?

It is certainly not as simple as saying institute JobKeeper and all will be well. Certainly, access to the scheme would buy the sector time to work out what to do next, but the day of reckoning would still be just over the horizon. A long-term decline in government funding relative to rankings, the size of the student cohort and compared to institutions the world over, has left Australian universities very vulnerable.

When you talk to politicians in Canberra, they simply say “the sector needs to reform”. Thanks for that, but how exactly? By shrinking? If so then politicians need to accept that fewer Australians will get a degree, less groundbreaking research will occur (we can look overseas for that vaccine just for starters), and of course a sizeable number of job losses will follow.

Oh, and government funding may not need to go up – because the sector will have shrunk – but it will increase relative to the output of graduates.

If our political leaders don’t want a brain drain, and hope to maintain the percentage of Australians who get a university degree, then they need to either massively increase funding to cover the lost overseas full-fee paying students, or accept that research positions at universities need to be cut back (because teaching positions can’t), which is a problem for two reasons: we plummet down the international ranking, and logically our universities achieve less, certainly in terms of ingenuity.

Or I suppose the cost burden for getting a degree could be passed on even more to domestic students – upping the share of HECS the student pays.

The point is there are no easy options. And frankly a government just throwing its hands in the air and saying good luck with your problem is them abrogating their public policy responsibilities. It smacks of anti-intellectual lowbrow politicking. Right at a time when the Treasurer told us there is no place for ideology in a crisis.

The problems within universities are the making of the politicians – demanding more domestic students graduate with less funding, thereby forcing universities to look overseas for cash from full-fee paying students, forcing them to spend more on researchers to bolster rankings to attract foreign students, all facilitated by a back door visa program for foreign student graduates, which helped get them here and helped the government falsify its growth numbers to claim years of economic success.

The music has stopped and there aren’t enough chairs to go around.

Peter van Onselen is a professor of politics and public policy at the University of Western Australia and Griffith University