A new uni watchdog is coming – with a 1970s Whitlam ideology
There is about to be an organisation with the power to compel them. The bad news is that it is a brand new public service agency.
Legislation to establish the Australian Tertiary Education Commission is expected in parliament this week and with-it Education Minister Jason Clare goes the Gough, the whole Gough and nothing but the Gough.
ATEC is based on faith straight from the 1970s, that government knows best how to use education to expand the economy and increase social mobility. Not teachers, policy officials.
If (Senate depending) it happens, ATEC will be a jewel in Labor’s self-coronated education crown. Clare celebrated the party’s achievement in a recent speech. He honoured John Curtin for creating a universities commission (it established ANU) and praised Whitlam for expanding school completion rates and university access. Whitlam laid, the minister said, the foundation for mass education “that is the rocket fuel propelling the businesses and the economy we have today”.
Clare wants to do more of the same, expanding access to education and training and like Whitlam using the public service policy elite to make it happen.
He certainly does not demonstrate much faith in university managements to do anything constructive. Last week, Clare warned them that tertiary education regulator TEQSA was about to have more authority over universities in general, rather than just checking that individual institutions stuck to the rules. “A lot of the organisations in this room say TEQSA does not need more powers. And a lot of the ones outside this room say they do,” he said.
Clare has also established oversight of university executives’ pay and imposed requirements on the operation of governing boards, called councils. And there are about to be penalties for universities that fail to meet the new code against gender-based violence, including fines, court-orders and limits on their registration as higher education providers.
Certainly, university leaderships’ inept management and apparent indifference to staff, student and community opinion have brought all of this on themselves, leading to the imminent risk, probably reality, of tighter government control.
ATEC is fundamental to what Clare wants. It is ready to regulate universities and encourage them to co-operate with the training sector. The government line is that ATEC will “steward” higher education but what that means is individual university funding, especially for teaching, will be allocated as part of a national plan.
Mary O’Kane, who led the panel that designed ATEC, explained the need for a new approach last week: “One of the aspects of institutional autonomy is that universities determine what courses they offer and what areas of research they will cover. But what happens when we have a national or regional need for skills in new fields?”
The answer is ATEC will, politely but firmly, help universities realise what they do not want to do. Department of Education officials set out the commission’s role to a Senate committee last month. The education minister will tell ATEC what they want and it will tell universities what they must put into “mission-based compacts”. And while universities are supposed to stay autonomous, there will be more limits. Senators heard that on research, ATEC will look across all universities and suggest which ones work on what field. And while each university can allocate government-funded student places where they like, ATEC will “help universities think about where their priorities lie: and how they can … meet the future needs within Australia”.
Plus, ATEC will get into the detail, working on the cost of courses and where extra student places should go. And that is before it picks and chooses which of the endless problems university lobbies want it to fix. Overall, policy expert Andrew Norton predicts, the regulator will make “many invisible trade-offs.”
University lobbies have long advocated for something like ATEC, believing it would be their ally, protecting them from conservative governments and always making their case for funding. But they ignored that what bureaucrats always want is power that they do not have to share and the way to do that is to loyally serve ministers, especially those who share their core beliefs in the power of the state to do good, especially when outsiders do not interfere. There was a skirmish last year when peak lobby Universities Australia warned that ATEC would not be independent if staffed by Department of Education public servants but that is what has happened. ATECs three commissioners will be statutory officers but their workforce will be employed by the department.
Before the election, then Liberal education spokeswoman Sarah Henderson committed to cancelling ATEC in government, calling it “another layer of education bureaucracy”. But that is exactly what the agency will exist to be, in a goodish way – trying to make the immensely complex university system work better and maybe co-operate more with the training systems. In a bad-ish way, making it harder for universities to innovate outside the traditional teaching model.
That everybody always talks about a “system” rather than universities’ competing markets indicates ATEC’s brief is not to blow up the academic establishment so that new public and private providers can compete for students by teaching industry-focused courses that are way shorter, much cheaper and lightning-fast quicker to create as the economy changes. That universities are seen as parts of a system rather than competitors in a range of markets indicates what happens next.
The idea for ATEC dates from an age when the state had a monopoly on teaching and learning beyond apprenticeships. That started to end with the internet as open/no/low-cost digital courses on absolutely everything appeared. And AI is accelerating it. In contrast, the new commission is designed to make the old ways of doing things work better.
Policy veterans Frank Larkins and Ian Marshman say central planning for universities did not work when it was tried over 20 years to 1997, “an era of detailed education profiles, often involving extended contests over a small number of funded places and extensive reporting measured … in metres rather than megabits.”
ATEC will discover fast that universities that do not want to change are very hard to move and that applies to the policy area that needs movement the most – ending the divide between post-school education and training. There has just been a meeting between TAFE and university representatives to talk about “harmonising qualifications” – that this was news demonstrates there is a very long way to go. In the middle ’80s Hugh Hudson reviewed the Commonwealth Tertiary Education Commission, a predecessor of ATEC and reported nothing much was happening on co-operation between higher education and training. “The concentration on sectoral boundaries saps energies, causes disputation and achieves very little in terms of identifiable benefits to community or students,” he reported.
ATEC is going to get a lot of that as universities dig in.
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There is good news for people who believe universities run for the benefit of their staff rather than students and certainly not taxpayers. Who think they teach too many courses about subjects irrelevant to the economy. That they need to be made to serve the national interest