Coronavirus: UNSW VC Ian Jacobs aiming for world top 50 spot, despite 500 job cuts
The University of NSW will lay off nearly 500 people including academics as it deals with a $600m COVID-induced budget shortfall.
The University of NSW, one of the nation’s largest higher education institutions, will lay off nearly 500 people including academics as it deals with a $600m COVID-induced budget shortfall over the next two years alone.
Vice-chancellor Ian Jacobs will outline on Thursday his planned restructure of UNSW — the first of its kind by a Group of Eight institution since the pandemic began — eliminating hundreds of academic and administrative positions. Staff have already been offered the chance to apply for voluntary redundancies, before compulsory lay-offs begin.
The job losses come as the Group of Eight, which represents the largest universities in the country, warns that the cuts are “just the tip of the iceberg”.
Group of Eight chief executive Vicki Thomson told The Australian the job losses at UNSW were a precursor for significant redundancies across the sector.
“What this shows is, like all areas of the economy, the university sector is not immune to COVID-19, especially big research universities like the Group of Eight,” Ms Thomson said. “I suspect this is just the tip of the iceberg as universities make their plans for the next calendar year.”
Professor Jacobs told The Australian that more than $500m in identified savings could not prevent the job losses, but high demand for domestic students wanting to study during the pandemic had saved the university from more extreme cuts.
“In March, I thought we were going to lose more than 2000 jobs … we will now still have 500 staff more than we had in 2016,” he said.
“We have been surprised at the big domestic demand and the number of international students who are sticking with us and studying online, and it gets us to this number. That doesn’t reduce the pain and anguish job losses create. We deeply regret it and the voluntary redundancy process will be as thoughtful and sensitive as possible.
“In 2021, we project we will be at a loss of $370m. More than 75 per cent of that will be recouped by non-job-related cuts and exhausting our reserves, but it still leaves $75m in losses.”
The university has made up for a financial hit of $300m- $400m this year without cutting full-time staff, and identified $295m in non-staff savings next year, but 493 full-time positions will still be lost in 2021.
While the job cuts will be spread across the campuses, the vice-chancellor said the burden would mostly be carried by UNSW’s administrative divisions, with several dean and vice-president positions to be dumped.
UNSW, like all sandstone universities, is facing significant financial pain due to the closure of Australia’s international border.
Fellow Group of Eight universities Monash and Melbourne are also projecting a financial hit this year, of $350m and $300m respectively, due to the loss of foreign students.
Universities Australia modelling in April found the sector was likely to lose more than 20,000 jobs this year due to the pandemic.
Centre for Higher Education professorial fellow Vin Massaro said the predictions of mass job cuts were beginning to bear fruit.
“It’s inevitable,’’ he said. “The loss of the international student market is disastrous. It’s really the primary source of revenue for universities. I doubt that the market will recover till well into next year, so they will have even less money to work with at the moment. We’ll see these sort of job cuts around the country.”
While the universities and the federal government are deep in talks over the future of research funding, the sector has all but abandoned asking Scott Morrison for JobKeeper wage subsidies to be extended to it, or for any additional financial assistance.
National Tertiary Education Union president Alison Barnes said the job losses would have been prevented if JobKeeper had been extended to universities.
“This is devastating news,’’ Ms Barnes said. “Close to 500 UNSW employees face a completely uncertain future. Responsibility for these losses lies squarely with (Education Minister) Dan Tehan and the federal government. They have stubbornly refused to extend JobKeeper to Australian universities and failed to provide anything close to an adequate support package.”
The lack of foreign students has been exacerbated by the suspension or delay of programs to bring small batches of students from overseas into Australia. NSW, Victoria, the ACT and South Australia have all pushed back pilot programs due to Melbourne’s COVID outbreak.
“If we had international students returning by semester one, 2021, it would be a game-changer,” Professor Jacobs said. “But it’s simply too hard to predict what will happen. Just look at Victoria.”
The latest cuts would seem to threaten Professor Jacobs’s long-held ambition to boost UNSW up world university rankings, but he said he still believed it could make the cut as early as this year.
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