University funding issues are serious and deep

Professor Carolyn Evans, vice-chancellor of Griffith University.

The interim report of the Universities Accord panel is awash with ideas. Sensibly refraining from calling them recommendations, the panel has put together an inclusive and expansive set of considerations for the future. Neither the panel nor the minister expect them all to be implemented but they were refreshingly open to retaining options to ensure a robust and informed discussion.

The next stage of the Accord will need to be far more focused. The danger of having so many options is that respondents will cherry pick their favourites or look at each idea in isolation. What will be needed is not just a collection of good ideas but a systemic approach that considers how such ideas will intersect with each other and the existing system.

Two issues illustrate the point: administrative structures and financial sustainability.

Everyone in higher education knows it is subject to a huge number of legal and administrative overlays, reporting to various elements of both federal and state government. There is clearly desire within the Accord to reduce the financial and human costs these overlays create.

Yet the interim report explores the creation of many new bodies. In addition to the flagship Tertiary Education Commission, there is reference to a First Nations Higher Education Council, a teaching and learning body, a national skills passport, a national jobs broker scheme, research brokers and an enhanced role for the Commonwealth Ombudsman.

These are in addition to already substantial engagements with the Department of Education, the Tertiary Education Quality and Standards Agency and the University Foreign Interference Taskforce at federal level and human rights, ombudsmen and corruption commissions at state level. While each is valuable, dealing with them diverts resources away from core teaching, research and engagement. These fragmented government bodies overlap and conflict. More is not always merrier.

The notion of mission-based compacts allows for greater distinctiveness and focus (possibly negotiated with the commission) sits uneasily with substantial considerations around targets for a wide number of outcomes. These outcomes include a student charter, Indigenous content requirements, greater government direction on governance bodies, and ensuring consistency with foreign policy objectives.

These are not bad ideas – most of them have merit. A more systematic approach will be needed to decide if the key focus will be a light touch regulatory environment with mission-focused differentiated universities or whether government will set a far more detailed list of required outcomes of each university with substantial oversight to drive a broader change agenda. It is not possible to have all the benefits of diversity and individuality while also increasing central administration, reporting and regulation.

Even more challenging questions arise around how we create a sustainable and robust financial framework for universities.

The sector has been expected to do more with less for longer than a decade. All the financially sound universities are those that attract substantial numbers of international students. Unfunded mandates placed on universities – school and community engagement, new infrastructure (physical and digital), the full costs of research, compliance with national and cyber security requirements – are all dependent on international student revenue.

Without proper public debate or deliberate decision-making, the cost of running universities has been increasingly shifted from government to students, with international students paying a particularly high proportion. This has left those universities less able to enrol international students and with thin domestic markets because of their regional locations in a financially perilous position.

Solutions to this require substantial, systems-oriented, whole-of-government attention.

Shuffling money around by levying international students is not a real solution. It requires trust from the sector that government will use the money more wisely than the universities which earned it, and that it will not disappear altogether – trust sorely lacking given the history of the Education Investment Fund. Given the amounts involved, it would be a Band-Aid at best.

The questions of what the government expects from universities and how much funding (from all sources) can be marshalled to support them must be considered in an integrated fashion. This may seem self-evident yet has been repeatedly ignored, with additional obligations and mandates placed on universities with no consideration of their expense.

The funding issues are serious and deep. They cannot be answered fully unless we know whether the federal government is willing to replace some of the funding taken from the system or shift some of the burden back from students to the public purse.

If there is not proper consideration of these issues, the noble aims of the Accord will be put under strain as universities struggle with the resources needed to implement them.

At present, the Accord is a rich buffet of ideas and options – full of delicious possibility but prone to causing indigestion to those who try to take in too much. The final report will need to be a degustation menu with a limited number of courses, crafted to work well with each other and where excellence rather than quantity is key.

Professor Carolyn Evans is vice-chancellor of Griffith University.