Budget 2020: Lifeline for universities to save research

Universities have won a one-off $1bn boost for research as part of the Morrison government’s push to boost innovation and rebuild the economy.

Universities will also benefit from another budget announcement of an extra 12,000 student places in 2021.

Universities have won a one-off $1bn boost for research as part of the Morrison government’s push to boost innovation and rebuild the economy.

The funding will help fill universities’ billion-dollar budget shortfall, which followed the loss of tens of thousands of inter­national students, and is likely to save the jobs of thousands of university researchers.

The money will be “backing our best and brightest minds whose ideas will help drive our ­recovery”, Treasurer Josh Frydenberg said.

The Group of Eight universities said last month that, in the ­absence of more research funding, 10,000 researchers were ­likely to be poached by overseas institutions. It also warned that 4000 ­researchers’ contracts would end over the summer and were not guaranteed to be ­renewed.

Universities will also benefit from another budget announcement of an extra 12,000 student places in 2021. The places will help meet a higher-than-expected demand for degrees, as people opt to study instead of work in the depressed job market, and school leavers abandon plans for a gap year. These extra student places will cost the government $299m over four years.

The government is also extending the innovative short courses launched in July to help retrain those who lost their jobs due to COVID-19. The budget supplies $252m over the next two years to subsidise a further 50,000 short courses in areas of job demand. This is on top of the 20,000 six-month courses set to be delivered this year by universities and independent higher education providers.

With the additional student places and the extra $1bn for research, universities have received more than they expected from this budget. The boost to research money has not been drawn back from the allocations made for later years, as had been expected, and funding has been made available to increase the student intake next year to meet the extra demand for study that usually comes in a recession.

However, the budget has not clarified one of universities’ major concerns: whether the government will fulfil its promise to index student course funding to inflation.

Although inflation indexed funding was promised until 2030 in Education Minister Dan Tehan’s Job-ready Graduates package in June, the indexation provision has not been included in the legislation for the changes.

Without mentioning indexation, the budget papers say the government will guarantee Commonwealth Grants Scheme payments (funding student places) from 2021 to 2023 “and will maintain CGS funding caps at or above previous years’ levels from 2025”.

“This is estimated to cost $238.9m over four years from 2020-21 (and $2bn over 10 years to 2029-30), and will support universities in managing the economic instabilities created by COVID-19,” the budget says.

The budget also allocates an extra $459m for the CSIRO over the next four years “to address the impacts of COVID-19 on its commercial activities”. The CSIRO has been particularly hard hit by the COVID recession, as commercial partners have scaled back their involvement.

The budget also includes $42m, to be spent over the next four years, for a “strategic university reform fund” to help universities partner with industries in their local area in innovation ­projects.

And the University of Adelaide will be given $20m over four years to set up a machine learning group to be called the Centre for Augmented Reasoning.