Here’s a road map to make the accord a success

There are things the government can do to maximise the odds of making the Universities Accord a success.

It could go either way. If all the pieces fall into place for the Universities Accord – with goodwill on all sides and a modicum of luck – then Australia’s tertiary education system is on the stairway to heaven.

But if obstacles to the accord – political or budgetary – loom too large, or if there’s a run of ill fortune that steps up the pressure on the tertiary education system, then what is finally delivered could fall a long way short of the hopes being invested in the accord, which was launched last week by Education Minister Jason Clare.

The first thing to understand is the ambition of the accord and what inspires it. Right from when he was appointed nearly two years ago Clare was a powerful advocate for a better deal for the disadvantaged in higher education. It weighed on him that young people from poorer backgrounds, the regions, the Indigenous community or other disadvantaged groups had a significantly lower chance of getting to university than more privileged Australians. The other key policy driver is workforce skill projections that say far more people will need university training in the modern economy.

Putting the two together, the attractive policy solution emerges to give the less privileged a better pathway to university which, at the same time, solves the looming skills shortage. This is the accord’s transcendent vision – a grand plan to lift university participation to 55 per cent of young people (from 45 per cent now) by 2050.

But solving the puzzle is not quite as simple as this. There are major barriers to getting more disadvantaged students into university. We already have the Higher Education Loan Program – abbreviated as HELP – which allows students to postpone their fees until they are earning a comfortable income. There are also schemes for student income support. And there is already extra study and mentoring help provided by many universities for students who come in lacking the academic preparation needed to do well, which unfortunately is the situation of many disadvantaged students.

But experience has shown these programs alone are not enough to lift the higher education attainment level of the less privileged up to the national average.

So the accord proposes to do more. It will give universities extra funding to pay for the extra support needed by these students. It will also make preparatory courses for university degrees free, and it will expand the number of government-subsidised university places to accommodate the extra students.

It will also ease the burden on students who need to do compulsory work placements (for example, teaching and nursing) by paying them. This is important for students who rely on part-time jobs while they study which they have to give up while on placement. And it will make the transition to repaying a HELP loan easier by charging them a percentage of the part of their income that is over the threshold, rather than applying the percentage repayment to their whole income.

Another strand of the accord proposes to break down the barriers between higher and vocational education so that it’s easier for students to transition from one to the other.

There are many more such measures, all geared to expanding access to higher education and breaking down the barriers between the two sectors of higher education to get more efficiency and better results.

Overall it's a complex plan, and it faces three major problems. One is how to implement it, which requires many changes to laws and regulations and a huge amount of guidance to ensure things happen efficiently and in the right order. Another is how to pay for it. And the third is how to keep the plan on track for over 25 years, until 2050.

To guide the transition, the accord proposes a new higher education overseer that is both omniscient and omnipotent. To be called the Australian Tertiary Education Commission, it will run higher education and possibly vocational education as well.

It will decide what each university’s role will be in the planned expansion of the system, how much funding each will get and for what purpose, and it will also take the university regulator under its wing. It will also encompass the Australian Research Council, giving it power over research funding.

Such a powerful body has obvious dangers. If run by an enlightened management it could be the engine of the accord’s success. If it makes mistakes or is run badly, the result is catastrophe.

But the biggest problem for making the accord successful is finding the money to pay for it. We know the government has no appetite to put more money into higher education, at least not now. So the idea – which sounds very like jumping out of a plane holding on to a parachute with a plan to strap it on the way down – is to get the structure of the accord in place now and wait for more funding to come in the 2030s.

Accord panel chair Mary O’Kane points to the graph above to show how – given the current slack demand for university places due to Covid and the strong job market – the real costs of expanding the system don’t arrive until the 2030s when increased numbers of students start to break away from the status quo. (In other words, the accord has a long runway, allowing more time to strap on the parachute before taking the leap.)

What else is available to make the student expansion affordable to the government? The big fundamental change, overlooked by many, is the accord’s call to end the requirement for all universities to do a significant amount of research. The research requirement adds a huge amount to university budgets. Most academics are funded to spend 40 per cent of their time on research, and research in the sciences also requires expensive infrastructure. The research imperative is the main reason the cost of educating students at universities is way more than high school.

So the plan is that, guided by the all-powerful ATEC, new universities will spring up that are teaching focused. Or existing universities might move to be more teaching focused and less research focused. Besides freeing up money to enrol more students, it could also release more research dollars for research-intensive universities.

Another recommendation of the accord is to allow TAFEs to becoming mini universities, giving them the ability to offer degrees and accredit them themselves instead of relying on outside accreditation which currently holds them back in the higher education space. This will also help to expand the higher education system at minimum cost.

But there’s another option not canvassed in the accord which would also boost affordability. This is to give government funding to private and independent higher education providers and thus add their full resources to the effort to expand student numbers. To get access to this public money the privates and independents would need to submit to tight ATEC control. But it would be a win-win to which would increase student numbers faster and probably very efficiently. A recent study by the Higher Education and Research Group found the private Torrens University is by far the most efficient of Australia’s universities in educating students.

Labor is not traditionally inclined to support independent providers. It should rethink because it might help it reach the accord’s goals and also win support from the opposition (which traditionally favours independent providers) for the 25 year reform process. Labor certainly needs to do something to get the opposition on board because without its support the accord will never get there.