Disadvantaged by official criteria

"HIGH risk, low impact" is the epitaph to abortive political strategy.

"HIGH risk, low impact" is the epitaph to abortive political strategy.

It may also be the legacy of Labor's higher education revolution unless corrective action is taken to redress serious imbalances in its draft policy to improve university teaching and learning.

In the coming weeks, the Department of Education, Employment and Workplace Relations will publish its indicator framework for higher education performance funding.

Following a European trend towards increased university regulation, DEEWR has proposed a series of accountability indicators that will be assessed annually in compacts between universities and the commonwealth.

The funding for performance against the new measures is significant. For teaching and learning, there will be about $135 million available each year. Improvements in teaching and learning will be supplemented by the Higher Education Participation and Partnerships Program. This fund, worth more than $100m a year, is directed at improving the participation of low socioeconomic status students.

The focus on accountability reflects the commonwealth's student-centred growth strategy, which is to increase the number of citizens with bachelor degrees by improving the participation of low SES students.

While the HEPPP provides for increased enrolment of low SES students, the indicator framework is designed to offer universities incentives to improve students' progress and retention rates.

The presumption is that student attainment reflects quality of university teaching. But the assumed causality between university teaching quality and low SES students' progress and retention is where the commonwealth's strategy begins to unravel.

At a January forum on the proposed indicator framework, higher education policy analyst Gavin Moodie presented research demonstrating relatively weak correlation between university teaching and student attainment.

In his presentation on an alternative future higher education performance fund, Moodie demonstrated that factors extraneous to institutional control, such as tertiary entrance scores, mode of study and off-campus or on-campus attendance, were more strongly correlated with student progress and graduate outcomes than teaching quality.

In early 2009, I publicly endorsed the recommendation of the Bradley higher education review that output indicators be introduced as an incentive to improve the participation of low SES students. In particular, I supported degree completion as a measure of institutional proficiency.

Since then, a body of international research has emerged demonstrating that universities which enrol a high proportion of low-income students are likely to disproportionately be penalised under the proposed indicators. An added reputational risk will emerge with the government's MyUniversity website, which will publish institutional results against performance indicators.

Without detailed cohort tracking, it is difficult to deduce whether an individual student's scholastic aptitude and effort, or institutional quality, is most responsible for academic attainment.

However, it is known that student attrition and pass rates are affected by several factors, such as academic preparedness for university and socioeconomic status.

Coming from a low SES background is predictive of depressed university entrance scores, which in turn affect participation in higher education. Unhappily, SES also appears to predict institutional attrition rates. An analysis of 2007 attrition and low SES participation rates across Australia illustrates correlation between the proportion of low SES students enrolled in universities and their respective attrition. High low SES participation is correlated with high institutional attrition. NSW yields exceptions where geography appears to have a significant impact on attrition.

A pattern of low income student concentration and high institutional attrition has also been observed in Britain and the US. The recent British Labour government's efforts to increase the participation of disadvantaged citizens in universities have been measured by the Higher Education Funding Council for England, which reported in 2006 that the universities which had contributed most to the government's participation agenda by enrolling high proportions of disadvantaged students recorded significant non-completion rates.

A 2009 study by the University of London and University of York demonstrated that students from low income backgrounds, in particular, drop out of university at a higher rate than their wealthier peers.

Conservative think tank the American Enterprise Institute has responded to Barack Obama's pledge to make the US the world leader in college attainment with a raft of reports illustrating just how far America is off-target.

The problem? Mass higher education and mass attrition are coessential at the institutional and systemic levels. The institute has found that students from disadvantaged backgrounds and the universities that enrol them in large proportions produce the highest attrition rates.

If universities are to be held accountable for expenditure of public funding - as they should be - it must be for factors that are primarily under their control. Value-added indicators provide a reasonable balance between student inputs such as demonstrated academic ability, time spent on homework and class attendance, and outputs such as student attainment.

In the absence of national examinations for university entrance, an academic standard such as Australian Tertiary Admission Rank could be used as a baseline to calibrate student inputs against outputs.

Students could be grouped by Year 12 results with university grade point averages measured annually against comparable students.

Such a measure would illustrate clearly the degree to which a university was improving completion, rather than simply selecting a small sample of high achieving students who happen to be from low SES backgrounds.

It would also offer a linear, value-added measure of academic input and output that avoids conflation with more social measures of disadvantage.

The draft indicator framework for higher education performance funding comprises a set of indicators framed as neutral output measures to secure university performance against student attainment targets.

However, if the indicators are introduced without calibration for student input, they will undermine the efforts of universities that enrol the majority of low SES and underprepared students.

These universities, which sit outside of the Group of Eight, will rely increasingly on funding tied to student performance due to the Labor government's decision to concentrate research funding.

Under the proposed teaching and learning indicators, the government may unwittingly strip-mine its own higher education growth strategy by eroding the capacity of these universities to thrive.

Jennifer Oriel is a higher education analyst.