Tap the power of faith-based colleges to transform higher education

Australia’s first Faith-based Higher Education Summit will be held this month.

Australia has an unusually large independent school sector, almost all of which is faith-based, and a smaller but growing faith-based higher education sector. Though it has been largely ignored in the Universities Accord discussions, faith-based institutions have the potential to transform our higher education system.

Faith-based higher education predates our public universities (just as faith-based schools predate state education). St James College, on the same site as the current St James Institute at King St in Sydney, began in 1845 and has a claim to be Australia’s oldest higher educational institution.

The University of Sydney was founded in 1852 as a non-denominational institution by the mostly Anglican and Presbyterian lay gentry of Sydney. As shown in the fine book Reason, Religion and the Australian Polity: A Secular State? by Stephen Chavura, Ian Tregenza and John Gascoigne, secular in Australia meant non-denominational Christianity.

There have been moves to reintegrate Christian theological education (and education in other faith traditions) into our higher education system, from the Martin report in the 1960s through to the establishment of a single federal higher education regulator, the Tertiary Education Quality and Standards Agency, in 2011.

A significant development has been faith-based col­leges teaching in areas beyond theology and which have serious research and research training aspirations. My institution, Alphacrucis, is one of these, founded in 1948 as the Bible College of the Australian Pentecostal movement, now a university college offering courses up to doctoral level in education and business, with plans to progress to university status.

Avondale, the Seventh-Day Adventist college, became a university in 2021. Buddhists have their own institution on the same path, the Nan Tien Institute just south of Sydney. Australia’s largest religious group, the Catholic Church, has had the Australian Catholic University and University of Notre Dame Australia since the 1990s.

None of this violates the secular principle, which does not mean exclusion of faith from the public sphere or our education system but equal treatment of all faiths, including no faith. It must be said with sadness that Christians when in power have failed to uphold this ideal but it remains the ideal we should be striving for in the radically plural religious environment of contemporary Australia.

History shows there is no better way of managing diversity of faiths.

There are several ways new faith-based institutions might transform our higher education system:

• Faith-based institutions as new entrants bring innovation and different operating models to our system. Costs are much lower in this sector (even adjusting for the fact little expensive medical and scientific research is conducted) and the evidence on quality of teaching and research stands up well. The hub model of teacher education pioneered by my colleagues Mark Hutchinson and David Hastie is an example of transformative innovation that will lower training costs and increase teacher quality across the system as it is copied by other institutions.

• Faith-based institutions add diversity to a higher education system that lacks it – our public universities tend to offer the same range of subjects, taught by people with similar viewpoints, in institutions trying to do much the same thing. Faith-based institutions draw from diverse communities – recent migrants and Indigenous Australians are much more religious and at the lower end of the socio-economic spectrum than Australians of British ancestry.

• Faith-based institutions can reignite the educational conversation about meaning, purpose, and especially hope. Contemporary Australia, especially young Australians, badly needs this and is not getting it in our highly specialised and corporatised public universities. All Alphacrucis students take a reflective world view course, and students at Notre Dame and ACU take their core curriculum.

If Australia is to realise these benefits of faith-based higher education then the regulatory and funding settings need attention.

The Alphacrucis PhD program is accredited by the same body TEQSA according to the same rules as public university PhD programs, yet our students pay hefty fees (which we must charge because ineligible for the approximately $50,000 funding public universities receive for a PhD completion), plus a 20 per cent loading on their FEE-HELP debt, as well as being ineligible for government Australian Postgraduate Award living allowance scholarships.

Furthermore, colleges such as Alphacrucis even are ineligible to apply for Australian Research Council grants that fund so much of the research PhD students undertake. It is miraculous that faith-based colleges have been able to build viable PhD programs with these anti-competitive barriers. It says something about the unique perspective and quality that students see in faith-based programs. Similar examples could be provided about regulatory and funding settings for domestic undergraduate education, and international education.

Paul Oslington is professor of economics and theology at Alphacrucis University College. The inaugural Faith-Based Higher Education Summit will be held at Parliament House Canberra on Monday October 30, hosted by federal Education Minister Jason Clare in conjunction with the Australian Christian Higher Education Alliance. This is the first time representatives of the sector have come together, joined by Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist and Jewish scholars. Pacific government representatives are also attending.