We don’t need another review of universities

I hate consultants. I dislike scorpions, snakes and Mark Latham, but consultants really empty my bladder. A consultant is a professional know-all. Their business model is the less they understand something, the righter they must be.

In Australia, you don’t have to hire a consultant to be lectured by one. We have standing bodies happy to press bottomless advice on any slow-moving object.

The two worst are the Business Council of Australia and the humorously named Productivity Commission. Between them they know the answer to everything, from teenage fashion to who killed John F. Kennedy.

Right now, they are pontificating on education. It’s like listening to an actuary explaining how to construct a nuclear reactor: funny, so long as no one tries to build it.

One major obsession is that wicked, overfunded universities have destroyed the TAFE system. If we could only gut the unis, it would rain boilermakers.

Milton Friedman, preserve us. TAFEs have been wrecked by two things, neither the fault of universities. They are chronically underfunded by state governments (Canberra funds the universities). Demented policy settings inspired by competition junkies — who mentioned the BCA? — have let dodgy private providers undercut and undermine them.

But blame aside, do we actually believe that if we can only dynamite universities, students will flock to the trades?

Really? Do we seriously think that unis are full of philosophers who wanted to be electricians and teachers who pine to be carpenters? Don’t business types know something about substitutability of demand?

Undaunted, the BCA and the Productivity Commission progress from the implausibly specific to the generally inane. Anyway, universities are stuffed with students who can’t get jobs and will never get paid.

Fact: The expansion of university numbers took us only to OECD parity.

Fact: Graduates have much higher employment rates than non-graduates.

Fact: They get paid significantly more, too.

And another fact — the Business Council should stick to business and the Productivity Commission to whatever it knows about, instead of pretending to possess universal spanners for every imagined problem.

That, or we should give the classics department at the University of Melbourne a chance to fix the national economy. What have we got to lose? Particularly with the Productivity Commission peddling even more beaut theories on higher education.

How about the idea universities should be penalised for every student who fails? Forget some students deserve to fail. Go for a real dog of a policy where institutions refuse to give disadvantaged students a chance or have every economic incentive to adjust their pass rates.

Or if you really want to damage the national interest, invest in the proposition that universities worry far too much about research, and that not all of them should do it anyway.

Welcome to the remedial class of the clever country. If universities don’t do research on the technology, health and education innovation that will drive our future, who will?

Not business, whose bottom line stops well before altruism. And please not the Productivity Commission. Efficiency probably would demand the culling of Tasmania and the abolition of Easter.

But the great thing about these guys is their confidence never wanes, even as their howlers fill the air.

No reputable university will give up genuine knowledge creation to become a teaching factory for the expendable poor. But dozens of hungry private providers — the Ma and Pa Kettle Business Academies — will rush for the misleading title of university to market their cheap, shonky offerings.

From the guys who brought you the collapse of TAFE, please welcome the policy despoilers of university education.

Of course, the one thing all consultants can agree on is the need for a mega review. Especially if they might get to do it. Or even get paid.

So every aspiring boffin and licensed rent-seeker now demands a comprehensive review of Australian education. But higher education has been reviewed more times than the total ghastly output of Baz Luhrmann.

We expanded universities after the 2009 Bradley review. We reviewed the Bradley review in the Kemp-Norton review in 2013. Along the journey we have had two reviews of the cost of education, a review of university entry selection, and are working on attrition. Plus two aborted attempts by the Abbott and Turnbull governments to turn higher education on its head.

Through all this chaos and sheer waste, the only constant has been global recognition that we have one of best university systems in the world.

As the old rhyme goes: “Consultants, consultants go away, and just nick off”.

Greg Craven is vice-chancellor of the Australian Catholic University.