Five game-changing reforms to fix university productivity

‘Universities can change the way they work with what they have got,’ writes Stephen Matchett

When it comes to improving productivity, universities have not helped lately, as in since the expansion of the higher education system in the 1990s. But there are five things they can do to expand the national skills base without increasing what higher education costs.

It certainly has to happen, as a political leader with a transformative vision for what universities can, must, do once put it: “Education policy is, in many ways, economic policy. It affects productivity, participation, the standard of living and the vital parts of our society both in its physical health and intellectual sophistication”.

But as things stand, higher education lobbies did not get a guernsey to what was going to be the national productivity summit, until the government realised lobbies wanted to argue about tax instead. This was wise. Given half a chance, university leaders would have taken up the entire agenda telling everybody what they could accomplish, if only they had much more public money. “You cannot fix productivity without fixing workforce skills and supercharging innovation – that’s where universities come in,” argues Universities Australia. Problem is, when they arrive at any policy event, they settle in and just make the case for doing more of what they have always done. They only stopped demanding students turn up on-campus to listen to lecturers when Covid kiboshed in-person classes. As for research, the peak science lobby demands business hand over billions of public dollars for research and development.

But if artificial intelligence does turn out to be the electricity of the 21st century, the credit will not go to the public sector science establishment but to entrepreneurs who big tech backed.

The Productivity Commission argues that public sector productivity is hard to improve because the service economy – health, education and care, for example – are not easy to automate. Entirely true, but universities can change the way they work with what they have got. It is not about sacking staff to save money, despite what university managements across the country are presently doing. It is about improving the way they meet existing demand and creating new products that will skill people up for whatever comes next. They could start with five changes.

Focus on teaching

The career aspiration for academics is to spend two days a week on research, a day on admin (called “service”) and two teaching. More on the last is essential. It does not all have to be in- class. New content, new tech, new creative for courses should be a routine part of academic jobs – if only to keep up with students. University managements fear students using AI to cheat but they are also petrified that it will make the way they teach irrelevant.

In contrast, the University of Sydney Business School has been working with students on using technology in teaching for six years to support students, improve courses and reduce workloads for staff – all about as productive as productivity gets.

Reduce attrition

Students starting but not finishing degrees is not as bad as it used to be. It is not that universities are getting better, it’s just that fewer students who do not really want to study what they enrol in start. But the present 13 per cent dropout rate across the system is not great, with people racking up a study debt, unless they bailed right at the start of semester, and generally wasting their time. It is way worse in training; according to the National Centre for Vocational Education Research, about 40 per cent of students did not complete last year.

It is not all the fault of universities and colleges. Young people take time to work out what they want. But providers can still help with more and better information and system-wide advice on what sort of study will suit.

Control their costs

Universities always claim they are underfunded, basically because they are full of creative people who will think of new subjects to teach, new conferences to attend, new ideas to research. And they will spend every dollar the government gives and students are made to pay. But some do it more cost-effectively than others.

According to an analysis of annual reports by Matt Pinnuck (University of Melbourne) it takes distance education-intensive Charles Sturt University $15,000 a year to teach an undergraduate. At the prestigious bells-and-whistles Australian National University it is $37,000. But money does not deliver a better education. On the most recent national satisfaction survey, Charles Sturt students rated their overall education experience at 77, those at ANU scored theirs at 79.

Single skills system

One exists, except the Australian Qualification Framework is so complicated that few have a clue how it works. Adopting reforms proposed in 2019 is on the national education and training too-hard-to-do list, where it will likely remain. Fixing this would make it way easier for people with training qualifications to access university courses that lift their skills and vice versa. The training system is already on to codifying what a qualification means and what people with it can do. It is immense and complex work across the economy but it is way better than in universities where degrees can be statements of attainment that announce courses completed but do not show what know-how graduates will bring to work.

New sorts of courses

There have been generations of galahs in the policy pet-shop talking about lifelong learning. But universities still focus on young people studying for first qualifications, while for everybody else they mainly offer diplomas and degrees that take years and exclude people in the workforce who just want a quick update of their work knowledge, or to pick up a specific skill. The vocational education system has always delivered this. The Australian has a friend in her mid-50s who needed to learn how to drive a forklift – it took a couple of days and cost a few hundred dollars. Apple and Microsoft, Google and Cisco, and all the other tech corporates also teach people to use their products and certify to employers that they can. There are universities that are big in such micro-credentials, but collectively the system has been mucking around for years on a national system.

These are all changes that universities can make for themselves. Plus, there is a new regulator, the Australian Tertiary Education Commission which could help. Universities assume ATEC exists to administer funding and be their friend in government, and it might end up doing only that. But if it decides to extend its brief, it can develop the blueprints for education and training to suit the nation’s needs.

So, who was the thinker who understood that education could grow the economy and improve the human services that lift all our lives? It was former coalition education minister Christopher Pyne who wanted to deregulate universities to increase competition, including on their fees, a decade back. Vice-chancellors backed him, with various degrees of enthusiasm, but overall university communities, including the main union, campaigned hard against his plan and the Senate knocked it back. And things stayed much the same.

Improving productivity is the art of the politically possible and Pyne tried to do too much in one go. The challenge now is for universities to pick up the pace to help expand the economy – what was important then is essential now. It would not be that hard if universities got on with it.