Jim Barber has a five-step plan for higher education

Professor Jim Barber. Picture: News Corp

Now that the coronavirus has obliterated Australia’s international student market, universities are once again pleading with the government for money. The Australian public has grown accustomed to universities complaining about being unappreciated and underfunded but their tone is more desperate these days because their situation is so dire.

On the face of it, universities do have a fair case: successive governments have failed to provide them with the funding they need, so they’ve gone out and convinced international students to hand over wads of cash to subsidise Australian students and Australian research.

Now that the foreign cash has dried up, surely the government should treat them like other businesses that have lost customers and strap them up until they can get back on their feet.

The problem is that governments tired of hearing universities complain about underfunding long before the coronavirus arrived. The federal government and for that matter much of the Australian public either don’t care or don’t believe them.

This is because everyone except the universities themselves realise that radical reform is long overdue. The universities’ business model is outdated and expensive and if any good can come of this coronavirus disaster for universities, maybe it is that they will finally embrace change.

Universities will rise from the ashes of course but in what form is unclear. As universities around the country struggle for survival, they need to bite down on five fundamental problems that afflict them.

Firstly, there are too many of them. Australia simply doesn’t need 43 universities, especially when they insist on setting up satellite campuses all over the place. At last count, there were 197 campuses across the country. If our universities were doctors, they’d be had up for over-servicing.

The well-intentioned Gillard government, urged on by the Bradley Report of 2008, threw fuel on the flames by removing the cap on government-funded enrolments and opening the flood gates to anyone capable of filling out an application form.

Not only has this lowered the academic standard of students entering universities but also of the academic staff who teach them. The combination of huge numbers and lower standards has left Australian students less satisfied with the quality of their undergraduate education than their counterparts in Canada, the United States and the United Kingdom. Moreover, the oversupply of university places has diverted a generation of young people away from vocational education and handed the country a critical shortage of skilled workers.

Secondly, they must accept that higher education is now a marketplace. Notwithstanding some cross-university collaboration in research, Australian universities are fierce competitors. They divide themselves into separate lobby groups and even within those lobby groups they jockey for students and prestige.

There is nothing wrong with competition of course except that taxpayers are expected to subsidise uncompetitive universities and pay for wasteful duplication of effort. Why is it necessary for every university to employ separate academic staff to design and deliver pretty much identical content in, say, first year mathematics or physics or psychology?

The answer is because the universities can’t afford to lose market share to their competitors so they must teach as much as they can in-house and appeal for government funding to keep the system going. Whether universities like it or not, higher education is now a marketplace and it should be allowed to work. If this happened, some universities would thrive, some would specialise and shrink, and some would close down altogether.

Thirdly, they should stop wasting so much money on buildings. Ever since the advent of the internet, Australian students have been drifting away from class and finding more convenient ways of accessing the information they need to pass their courses.

Newer, less capital intensive teaching methods have been available for years but universities press on erecting new buildings under the false assumption that their students must assemble in one place in order to learn. Ironically, the universities themselves know this isn’t true because they have simultaneously poured money into online learning systems.

The end result is waste and balance sheets weighed down by debt, maintenance costs and depreciation. A former colleague tells me that he teaches a course with around 200 enrolments but that fewer than 20 of them ever turn up to class. Why should they, all of his lectures and teaching materials are online. And if results of a recent space audit at one suburban university are typical, anyone wishing to commit mass murder on an Australian campus will need to turn up between 10am at the earliest and 3pm at the latest.

Fourthly, they need to clean up their industrial relations act. Australian universities have been churning out research publications at an average annual increase of around three per cent per annum for the last decade or so. Universities are also teaching more students per academic staff member than they used to.

All this growth has been taken out of the hides of an army of casually employed tutors and lecturers who endure sweat shop conditions in order to generate revenue that is diverted into research and the lifestyles of their tenured colleagues.

There is a depressingly familiar generational dimension to this division of labour. Tenured academic staff tend to be older, teach fewer students, and have generous ancillary benefits, such as 17 per cent superannuation, guaranteed research time (even if nothing is produced), and entitlement to paid sabbatical leave.

Casual academic staff, in contrast, tend to be younger, do the bulk of the teaching and are entitled to almost nothing but a minimal hourly rate of pay. When enterprise bargaining season comes around, the National Tertiary Education Union makes indignant noises about this state of affairs but because casual staff are less unionised than tenured staff, the union’s efforts are usually tokenistic.

Fifthly, they need to stop obstructing innovation. Higher education in Australia is very heavily regulated by the federal government’s Tertiary Education Quality and Standards Agency. TEQSA is the gatekeeper to participation in the market and it imposes such a regulatory burden on potential new participants that the vast majority of them eventually give up and walk away, but not before burning buckets of cash and years of effort trying.

TEQSA not only holds non-university providers to a higher standard than universities but its regulations are designed to compel all new participants to conform to the universities’ outdated way of doing things. This is no accident because TEQSA and the Act under which it operates are largely the creation of the universities.

Given the magnitude of these challenges, it is tempting to conclude that the size of the task is simply too threatening to universities and too dangerous for governments as they would face the prospect of universities collapsing and remaking themselves in unpredictable ways.

If it were not for the coronavirus, it is almost certain that Australia’s universities would continue to limp along much as they always have. But maybe this coronavirus catastrophe is of such magnitude that radical reform might just be possible.

Jim Barber is a former university vice-chancellor. He is currently both the CEO of Polytechnic Institute Australia and a strategic adviser to private higher education providers in Australia, India and Canada.