Universities’ challenging era with less ‘Kool-Aid’

If retiring Australian Catholic University vice-chancellor Greg Craven does not resume his career as a distinguished constitutional lawyer, he might consider auditioning for a role as a talking head. In a provocative interview on Monday with Richard Ferguson, Professor Craven, master of the pithy phrase, says that without foreign students to feed their “drug addiction” (to revenue), elite Group of 8 institutions might have to accept they are “no longer going to be Manchester United on a good day, you’re going to be Wolverhampton Wanderers’’. His biggest concern, he says, is that Go8 vice-chancellors will want to “cannibalise’’ the student cohort of “good, mid-tier universities’’ and “decide Year 12s with ATARS of 65 are now splendid chaps’’. We hope not. For the sake of scholarship, academic rigour and the calibre of the nation’s future professionals, especially classroom teachers, the Go8 should keep the entry bar high. And other institutions, especially those with entry scores languishing in the 50s, would do well to lift it. Not everybody who aspires to a university degree is well suited to tertiary study. Trades training, apprenticeships and on-the-job-experience are better preparation for many people for life in the real economy.

However splendid the students of “good mid-tier universities’’, the average ATAR entry scores in 2020 for ACU (63) and Southern Cross University (66) were far removed from the averages of universities such as Melbourne (92.23), Sydney (85.45) NSW (83.67) and ANU (82). With or without high numbers of international students, the hallmark of Australian universities must be academic quality. Given limited taxpayer resources and the reluctance of politicians, universities and students to lift HECS, it would make sense, if cuts are needed, to limit research to those universities with the strongest research records.

Beneath the bravado, Professor Craven has a serious message that some of Australia’s universities could be set to drop out of the world’s top 100 higher education rankings. He believes the “old system of relying on international students is over, it’s finished”. That remains to be seen. Post-COVID-19, assuming the vaccines being rolled out are safe and effective, students will want to study abroad again. And Australia has more to offer than most nations, provided our tertiary sector retains its reputation for excellence. Pandering to the market or lowering the bar in terms of English proficiency in order to rebuild the numbers of overseas students quickly would undermine the sector. Maintaining academic freedom, including the rights of scholars to question or reject prevailing norms of political correctness in contentious areas, also matters. The blinkered, narrow approach of some universities has been clear in recent years in controversies over Chinese-backed Confucius Institutes, Danish economist Bjorn Lomborg’s futile efforts to set up a centre in Australia, James Cook University’s sacking of outspoken physicist Peter Ridd and problems encountered by the Ramsay Centre on various campuses. To Professor Craven’s credit, ACU is offering a new Ramsay-backed BA degree in Western Civilisation. ACU has also spread its footprint during his tenure, to Bankstown, Adelaide and Rome.

Professor Craven is right when he says the Chinese market for student places in Australia is collapsing. Universities have become overly reliant on it. In 2018 the University of Sydney, for example, drew 39 per cent of its students from overseas. And of those, 69 per cent were from China. Others have recognised the same concern about over-reliance on the Chinese market — or “drinking the Kool-Aid’’, as another experienced vice-chancellor describes it. Like other export sectors, universities will need to diversify their markets this year.