Academic workforce ‘hollowed out’, study finds
Australia’s middle academic workforce has ‘hollowed out’ since 1994, amid the growth in casualisation and well-paid professorships at universities.
Australia’s middle academic workforce has “hollowed out” since 1994, amid the growth in casualisation and well-paid professorships at universities.
New data crunched in the Research Handbook on Academic Labour Markets found fixed-term and casual contracts grew significantly from about 36,000 in 1994 to 63,000 in 2020 – a 75 per cent increase.
Full-time employees also grew about 70 per cent from 44,000 to 74,000, but it appears this was largely concentrated at higher academic ranks. The proportion of associate professors grew by 9 per cent to make up 25 per cent of the full-time academic workforce, while the proportion of professors doubled (from 7 per cent to 14 per cent), research by higher education academics Peter Woelert and Gwilym Croucher of the University of Melbourne found.
While the relative size of the academic workforce remained the same, the size of the workforce relative to student numbers has “declined substantially” from 11 to 17 students per academic staff member.
Associate professors Woelert and Croucher said the workforce had become “increasingly polarised” from 1994 to 2021.
“The ongoing bifurcation between employment conditions and remuneration for senior academic staff versus junior academic staff employed on casual contracts begs the tricky question of whether there needs to be efforts to achieve greater equality across academic ranks,” they wrote. “The fact that the majority of junior academics in casual employment are female, while those in more continuing employment occupying the senior academic ranks remain in the majority male, only reinforces the urgency of addressing this question.”
Associate professors Woelert and Croucher also said that due to the “precarious employment conditions for junior academic staff and the perception that casual roles provide little scope and support for substantive academic activities such as self-directed research … mean that there is considerable risk of losing these individuals to other careers, thus reducing the pipeline of academic talent in Australia”.
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