Campus reform, not a bailout

On Wednesday we reported the striking image of Australia’s research system facing a “ground zero” scenario without the overseas student fees that subsidise fundamental scientific and medical investigation. But higher education is not the only sector facing a painful, post-pandemic adjustment. This crisis is an opportunity to refocus on what is indispensably valuable.

International education has been a remarkable commercial achievement, in part explained by the lure of migration. But it would be foolhardy to plan as if there will be a speedy return of this $37.6bn export industry, not just because mass student arrivals are unlikely without a vaccine and China, our main inbound market, seems intent upon punishing us economically. Those rivers of fee income came with risks. Universities had been warned for years of their overreliance on the Chinese student market. There have been troubling questions about academic standards and a distortion in institutional priorities.

Universities had an incentive to oversell the skills of graduates who became migrants, but many have brought dynamism and adaptability to the workforce, sometimes in jobs that locals will not do. The story of this country is one of migration enlarging opportunity and prosperity. By all means we should encourage universities to recruit overseas students but on a more modest scale with careful attention to academic quality and diversity of source markets. This contribution to job-creation and living standards is obviously desirable. But the Morrison government is right to resist a sector-specific bailout, especially when higher education is in need of reform. We need education and training more sharply focused on the national interest as we enter the first recession in three decades. The “knowledge economy” argument for dramatically expanded higher education has been overplayed. In university administration, there is waste, inefficiency and empire building, alongside skill and hard work. Casual academics, the grunts of the empire, have already begun to lose their livelihoods yet vice-chancellors remain overpaid and they preside over bloated social engineering bureaucracies at odds with academic values.

The national cabinet should get serious about a long-overdue revival in technical education, consistent with the rediscovered need for economic self-reliance. And the country desperately needs rigorous, decluttered school education, without which higher-level reforms in the system will stumble.

It should not be a goal to get through this downturn with today’s university model intact. Estimates by education experts suggest seven of 38 institutions are high financial risks as they burn through cash and reserves. It’s far from clear that we should fund so many look-alike mass universities, rather than encourage experiments in scale, technology and specialisation. Why not a health and medical university closely linked with commercialisation? Or a publicly funded, teaching-only liberal arts college that has scholarly aims higher than the critical theory activism churned out by sandstone universities?

In seeking a bailout, the university lobby tells a familiar story of the social and economic value it represents. Certainly we should seek to preserve world-class research infrastructure and talent. But there is more at stake, such as the ideal structure and integrity of higher education. And the Drew Pavlou affair at the University of Queensland is a reminder that ordinary people often grasp the liberal purpose of a university better than those in charge do.