Universities make a case for no cuts to funding

Maintaining higher education funding levels will boost productivity and growth in the economy.

Minister for Education Simon Birmingham during Question Time in the Senate chamber. Picture: Mick Tsikas/ AAP.

The main university lobby group has called on the Turnbull government to maintain higher education funding levels to boost productivity growth in the economy.

In its submission for the 2018-19 federal budget, to be delivered in May next year, Universities Australia says that universities make up a “substantial part of Australia’s nation-building productive infrastructure”.

It urges the government to abandon “arbitrary and unnecessary cuts and to guarantee the funding that universities need to generate the nation’s next productivity boom”.

The group’s budget wish list includes:

● Retaining the demand-driven system which allows universities to enrol as many subsidised students as they want.

● Maintaining current funding levels for student subsidies, ­research block grants and educational support for disadvantaged students.

● Deferring the plan for performance-based university funding.

“Investing in innovation and human capital is what Australia needs right now,” the submission says.

Despite the focus in the submission on next year’s budget, universities’ immediate problem is the government’s midyear economic and fiscal outlook statement, expected next week, in which Education Minister Simon Birmingham could make discretionary cuts to university funding in place of the cuts in last year’s budget, which the government was unable to pass through the Senate.