A new direction needed for unis, says Glyn Davis

The vice-chancellor of Australia’s most successful research university says the demand-driven university system is unsustainable.

The vice-chancellor of Australia’s most successful research university has warned that the demand-driven university system is unsustainable and called for a new direction rather than a quick fix.

“The demand-driven system has opened universities up to a much larger number of young Australians — with the attendant risk to standards — and so commands bipartisan support,” said Glyn Davis, of the Univer­sity of Melbourne.

“Neither side wants to ­address the affordability of the demand-driven system ahead of an election, but their answer to the dilemma will drive all higher-education policy to follow.”

Governments have tried to stem outlays created by the added cost of the system by ­annual cuts to the sector, starting in 2011. Universities Australia, the body representing all 40 publicly­ funded universities, estim­ates that $3.8 billion has been slashed from the sector since 2011, at a time when universities were meant to be driving the new knowledge economy.

Professor Davis noted that higher-education budgets have been raided by governments needing funds for other projects.

Only 10 days before the federal budget, Education Minister Simon Birmingham refuses to confirm whether the government is sticking with the policies rejected by a hostile Senate in 2014: deregulation of university fees raising the possibility of $100,000 course costs and a 20 per cent funding cut to contain ballooning costs.

That demand-driven system removed caps on student numbers in 2012, resulting in a rapid uptake of students. Universities were encouraged by Kevin Rudd and his education minister Julia Gillard to enrol an extra 50,000 local students by 2013; the sector exceeded that figure by 3000.

In 2008, Victoria University had 9541 full-time-equivalent students; four years later it had 11,488 on the books.

Enrolments at the University of Notre Dame grew from 2016 in 2008, to 4162 in 2012; while Deakin University student numbers grew from 15,430 to 20,123.

A Parliamentary Budget ­Office report this month anticipated the cost of student loans associated with the enrolment boom in a deregulated market to blow out from $1.7bn in 2015-16 to $11.1bn in a decade

Swinburne University of Technology vice-chancellor Linda Kristjanson said the higher-education sector had already seen the “terrible consequences” of deregulation and “poor market­ design” in the ­vocational education sector.

“The case has not been made for fee deregulation in higher education,” she said. “I think all parties now accept that.”

The opposition launched its higher-education policy last year, promising an extra $2.5bn over four years for universities and negotiations over student and course numbers with each university.

Universities Australia chairman Barney Glover, the vice-chancellor of the University of Western Sydney, said the sector had been in a holding pattern for almost two years and urgently needed a new direction oriented around Malcolm Turnbull’s nationa­l agenda and not another funding cut.