New watchdog must fix university funding malaise
Since the abolition of the Commonwealth Tertiary Education Commission in 1988 as part of the Dawkins reforms, Australia has had no independent authority to guide government policymaking on higher education.
The result has been inconsistent and, at times, a somewhat ill-considered higher education policy with unintended consequences that have affected students and universities and created acrimonious stand-offs between government and the university sector.
None of these is good for our stability, security and prosperity – because strong universities provide the education and innovation that are foundational to Australia’s productivity. No wonder the Universities Accord recommended an independent ATEC, and the government enthusiastically embraced the idea.
The government is preparing the legislation that will make ATEC a permanent feature of Australia’s higher education landscape.
I would urge it to pay particular attention in its drafting to ensure ATEC has four essential features: statutory independence; deep and broad expertise in higher education policy; the ability to support universities to differentiate; and a robust, unimpeachable data-gathering and costing function.
Independent statutory bodies have a long and embedded history in ensuring Australia is one of the best governed societies in the world. Institutions such as the Australian Bureau of Statistics, the CSIRO, the Productivity Commission and the Australian National Audit Office all have unimpeachable reputations and have earned high levels of public trust because they are able to provide objective information and frank and fearless advice to government and the people of Australia – thanks to their legislated independence from government.
Higher education, as we have seen repeatedly, can be a politically contentious policy area. Universities have been subject to political pressure from all sides of politics, and increasingly subject to partisan attacks from those with little understanding of the sector.
Paradoxically, despite educating growing numbers of Australians, universities have no public constituency willing to stand up and defend them when they are under attack. As a sector so crucial to Australians’ collective and individual futures, higher education needs an independent statutory body to provide government with independent, expert advice on higher education policy.
Higher education has become a bigger and more complex sector in the 35 years since the Dawkins reforms. Universities’ operating revenues have almost doubled since the start of the century but less than half of this is public money. The number of students at university has nearly doubled across the past 25 years. The number of courses has proliferated, as have modes of delivery, assessment and flexibility options. Meanwhile, the amount of government regulation, reporting and quality assurance has increased inexorably.
As the sector has grown and become more complex, however, Australia’s corpus of deep higher education policy expertise has shrunk. With the exception of institutions such as my university’s Melbourne Centre for the Study of Higher Education and Victoria University’s Mitchell Institute, there are few centres of higher education policy research and training left. There is little evidence of higher education policymakers joining universities or university administrators joining government. With honourable exceptions such as Andrew Norton’s blog, there are few platforms for the discussion and debate of higher education policy.
ATEC provides an opportunity to build a new team of higher education policy specialists. The government should ensure that its commissioners are appointed transparently and are free of political or policy loyalties. ATEC must be staffed independently of the agencies of government and its leadership must have absolute discretion over its staffing. They should look to hire expertise out of the sector as well as train and grow ATEC’s own while engaging deeply with existing centres of higher education policy research.
I urge the government to think carefully about ensuring ATEC and the Department of Education play different but complementary roles. ATEC should provide strategic advice and data; the department should be dedicated to implementing policy. Each should report independently to the Education Minister.
Arguably ATEC’s most important role is to provide independent costing advice to government and higher education data to government and society.
The current malaise over university funding is arguably the strongest evidence for why an independent source of advice on higher education is necessary.
The former government’s Job-Ready Graduates funding package was predicated on two pledges: that by changing the costs of various degrees Australia could train more people in areas of assumed skills needs; and that in separating education from research costs, the government would fix Australia’s research funding shortfall.
Both pledges were broken, leaving Australia’s universities scrambling to cross-subsidise their escalating education and research costs.
The imposition of caps on international student commencements has put an abrupt limit on the amount of workarounds and cross-subsidies open to universities to meet the nation’s critical skills needs. Meanwhile our current students struggle with the cost of living and watch as their student debt mounts for degrees made nearly prohibitively expensive by Job-Ready Graduates.
There is an urgent need for an independent ATEC to advise government on new costings for teaching and research, fair costs for students and the appropriate legislative settings that help Australia’s existing world-class universities, help the nation.
Emma Johnston is vice-chancellor of the University of Melbourne.
It’s business as usual for the Big Sister racket
The creation of the Australian Tertiary Education Commission on July 1 is a development that has been 37 years in the making.