What the minister got in the panel’s interim report last week dealt with the “big” part. More than 70 ideas were formulated – and many, many more options considered – to overhaul the system. But is it bold and spiky, as the echidna on the report’s cover suggests? That depends on which parts of the report we are talking about. Leaving aside its ideas for changing the university funding system, essentially the report stands on three legs.
One is the plan to overhaul teaching and learning. It’s full of refreshingly bold ideas including a wholesale overhaul of government funding to help universities bring more disadvantaged students into university, such as those from poorer families, those from the regions and Indigenous students.
The report also looks at how university courses can best prepare students for their career – offering more on-the-job training for example – and how digital learning can be best harnessed. It signals changes to the HECS loan scheme to make it more effective and other ways to give needy students better financial support. It also calls for the current high tuition fees – more than $15,000 a year for humanities, business and law students – that were introduced by the Morrison government to be cut.
Leg one passes the bold and spiky test.
Leg two is more technical. It’s about the institutional and regulatory structure of tertiary education. Currently the system doesn’t make it easy for universities to specialise and pursue different missions. The report suggests more diversity, having various universities custom-built for different purposes. We might have institutions that focus on health, physical sciences, social sciences, art and music. We might also have institutions that focus on teaching, rather than research, and concentrate on their chosen mission.
The interim report also looks into the merits of closer links between higher education and vocational education, allowing students to mix elements of both into a course. And to oversee all these major changes it suggests a Tertiary Education Commission to advise government and manage the process, including a shift to a needs-based funding system.
Leg two, I submit, is also bold and spiky.
The third leg is research and here the ideas may appear less bold. It disappointed the research lobby because it didn’t jump on board with a plan to rapidly scale up spending on research and development. Science and Technology Australia, which represents more than 100,000 professionals, labelled it an “epic fail”.
It’s not that the report has no ideas to please the research lobby. For example, it argued for significantly increasing the government money that goes to the Australian Research Council and it acknowledged the problem of ARC grants not nearly covering the costs of research projects.
It also suggested a future fund to support investment in expensive research equipment and an increase in the stipend for PhD students, who comprise a large chunk of the research workforce.
But it did not push for a research spending target that would arrest the decline in research spending in Australia as a proportion of GDP and that’s why the research community is disappointed. They would argue the research element of the report is neither bold nor spiky. They want a straightforward goal for research investment that they can hold government to in future years. However all the indications are that the government is not wanting to play that game.
Is a raw target for research spending actually what we want from the accord review? Rather than starting with a target, we need to do much more thinking about how best to produce benefit from research. The report gets into this, for example suggesting more work be done to understand what research quality is, and how research translates to economic benefit.
And when the accord interim report is examined closely there is a pathway, without necessarily spending more on research, to spend more on the research that matters.
If an outcome of the accord is that universities are no longer required to do substantial amounts of research, it frees many institutions to specialise in teaching and cut their spending on the research side. Some of that money would be used to boost teaching. But some of it should also be available to reassign to other research purposes.
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Education Minister Jason Clare asked for “big, bold and spiky” when he asked his Universities Accord panel to come forward with proposals to reform tertiary education.