Tehan’s reforms are hastening the separation of teaching and research

Peter Lee, chair of the ATSE Education Forum and former vice-chancellor of Southern Cross University.

Education Minister Dan Tehan’s recently released blueprint for changes to funding of universities is a curate’s egg, and has the potential to reshape the nature of universities in this country.

Firstly, and with great pleasure I acknowledge the extra resources that are being channelled to support regional, rural and remote students, indigenous and non-indigenous; and the support provided to regional higher education provision. Of course I would take this view having had the dual privileges of leading a regional university and being on the Napthine Review of Regional, Rural and Remote Tertiary Education. For far too long the under-representation of these students in higher education has been left unaddressed. The loss of social cohesion between those living inside and outside the metropolitan areas represents a threat to our nation, let alone the loss of productivity for the nation and the health and welfare of the individuals concerned if this situation is allowed to continue.

Secondly, the introduction of more funds to link universities and industry is a particularly good initiative. Australia, as it emerges from the COVID-19 crisis, will need to be a smart nation. Allowing industry and universities to find new efficient and effective means of generating our national wealth is vital. As the former Treasurer Peter Costello has remarked, some commercial enterprises will not re-emerge and we need to find new commercial entities to replace those to employ our populace. Universities have a role to play to bring new ideas and new methods to create these new entities, but that can only be successful in partnerships with industry. The new grants will assist to lubricate the wheels of these two worlds.

My main concern is the source of the funds for these good new initiatives. Minister Tehan has been frank in admitting there is essentially no new money in this package. Hence, we need to look carefully at the consequences of where the money has been removed to obtain a better evaluation of the value of the package as whole.

The initial reactions to the package were focused on the winners and losers from a student perspective. The increase in HECS-HELP for many humanities, arts, law and other students were decried, while the decrease in fees for students in STEM and languages welcomed.

I remain sceptical that such changes will produce significant shifts in demand for different disciplines. Other commentators have already expressed similar thoughts. Short course and micro-credentials have been aimed at more mature age people who are price sensitive. School leavers are generally insulated from price signals by the deferred cost intrinsic to HECS.

More recent commentary has delved further into the weeds and pointed to the mixed messages that will now apply to the providers of education. The total amount of money to a university for an engineering student for example has declined, while the total amount of money for a law student has increased, so, the signals to students and universities are at odds.

It is in these changes that some fundamental shifts are being propagated. The justification for the changes in the total amount per student to a university by discipline is based on the cost of teaching a particular student. This is based on the Deloitte Access study on the cost of teaching performed a few years ago. While many will be distracted by the arguments about the relative cost of teaching a particular discipline, there is a more fundamental change occurring.

The traditional academic staff member was one who did some teaching, research and administration. While the proportions of time allocated to each function have varied over time, the old allocation of 40 per cent, 40 per cent and 20 per cent respectively still retains some currency, providing that performance can be demonstrated in each. The Deloitte Access study did acknowledge these other duties in the modelling to derive a cost of teaching.

What we now seem to be heading for is that government is only willing to fund the “cost of teaching” component. Any research (and presumably administration) time will have to be funded by other means. Given that many competitive grants schemes do not allow the salary of the principal investigator to be covered by the grant unless the investigator is a full time researcher, it is hard to see where the extra money will come from to cover the research component of an academic’s workload. This has partly driven the dependency of international student income to close the gap in resources.

The future may be that we will see an even more complete separation of functions. Research-only staff conducting most of the research, while teaching-focused staff teach classes and provide scholarly input to the pedagogy of the discipline. I suspect that we will see only a few of the latter directing teams of casual and fixed-term staff. Some may argue we are already at that point, but the latest funding changes are likely to further accelerate the trend and philosophically embed the principle that the federal government grant is for the teaching function only.

Emeritus Professor Peter Lee is chair of the ATSE Education Forum.