Dan Tehan’s next task is to overhaul research funding

Education Minister Dan Tehan is expected to announce research funding reforms before the October budget.

Federal Education Minister Dan Tehan.

Education Minister Dan Tehan is expected to unveil a higher education research package before the federal budget is announced on October 6, which universities hope will make up for revenue that was lost in the course funding changes announced last week.

Mr Tehan’s funding reforms are expanding the number of university places by 39,000 in the next four years while remaining budget neutral, with extra places paid for by higher student fees, more efficiencies, and reductions in the surplus from teaching activities.

This means that universities will lose some of their ability to cross-subsidise research from profits made from teaching domestic students.

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“The package does have an impact on our capacity to cross-subsidise research,” said Group of Eight chief executive Vicki Thomson.

“That comes on top of reduced revenue from international students which highlights the urgency of sustainable research funding for our universities.”

Ms Thomson said that Mr Tehan had recognised the urgency of research funding reform and the Group of Eight universities, which carry out most of Australia’s university research, looked forward to discussions with the government.

Last Friday, in a speech to the National Press Club in which he announced the course funding changes, Mr Tehan said he wanted to work with the higher education sector to achieve “a sustainable pipeline of funding for research”.

Universities are still analysing the impact of Mr Tehan’s funding changes.

“It’s complex. Clearly, many universities have got questions. And at this stage, until we have the opportunity to have these questions addressed, it’s really hard to understand what the impact will be at an individual university level,” said Federation University vice-chancellor Helen Bartlett.

Professor Bartlett chairs the Regional Universities Network whose seven member institutions will benefit from many initiatives in the package aimed to benefit regional students, including a higher rate of funding increases.

She said universities would be affected differently by the funding package because of their different student composition. The government, for example, proposes to slash government subsidies on humanities units while boosting them for teaching and nursing

“If you take a majority of regional universities, their high volume courses would be teaching and nursing. And actually very few regional universities would have huge numbers of students in the humanities, for example, or in law. This is where you’re going to see some disparate impacts,” Professor Bartlett said.

The Australian Technology Network, which represents technology universities, said it was also spending time working through the detail of the changes.

ATN executive director Luke Sheehy said the group was concerned about the announcement in the package that universities would receive different course funding increases depending on the location of their campuses and population increases in their area.

“One area of particular concern is the way funding growth rates is tied to campus location. While many ATN universities are located in the centre of our capital cities, we teach a diverse range of students, many from our growing outer suburbs and regions,” he said.

Regional universities will receive the largest annual increase, at 3.5 per cent, with high growth metropolitan universities getting a 2.5 per cent increase and low growth metropolitan universities receiving only 1 per cent.