Win for VCs on powerful regulator but hold off on celebrating too soon

The proposed ATEC has an agenda to ‘transform university education that will take a generation to implement’.

While universities scramble to adjust to government quotas on international student numbers, they are about to escape even closer control from the not especially popular Department of Education, which wanted to run an immensely powerful new regulator. It’s win for vice-chancellors, just not for long.

The proposed Australian Tertiary Education Commission will allocate higher education funding, oversee enrolments and keep institutions in line with government policy. It is the core recommendation of the Universities Accord, an independent review of post-school education commissioned by federal Education Minister Jason Clare. Implementing a longstanding Labor ambition, ATEC will negotiate target-setting “compacts” with each publicly funded university.

Unsurprisingly, the department wanted ATEC for its own, but a committee of independent academics and university and training officials advising Clare is set to reject it.

In a speech last week Clare distanced himself from his department’s advice. “I hear what people are saying about it needing to be necessarily independent of government and there’s work going on to make sure that’s represented,” he said.

Universities have long argued for an independent commission, to protect them against ministers intervening on specific funding allocations for teaching courses and vetoing research projects.

Observers familiar with issues the committee addressed say it is focused on ATEC independence. Clare can ensure this by including a requirement in establishing legislation for ministers to publicly present expectations and instructions for the agency and for ATEC to publish all advice to ­government.

Independence for ATEC is also non-negotiable for the National Tertiary Education Union. National president Alison Barnes says: “ATEC must be independent from the department to ensure higher education isn’t used as a political football.”

And raising a key question for Clare on who will lead it, Barnes says: “Commissioners and staff must have strong experience in higher education and an understanding of the main issues affecting staff and students. It’s critical ATEC is run by people who are working for the public good, not the interests of big business, which has had an increasingly concerning influence on higher education policy.”

However, while the committee also will recommend what an observer calls “a sensible incarnation” of the accord plan, this will provide ATEC with an agenda to transform university education that will take a generation to implement. Higher education policy veterans Frank Larkins and Ian Marshman warn that the government’s proposal for the new agency risks the autonomy of university decision and burdens universities “with excessive reporting and process compliance”.

QUT vice-chancellor Professor Margaret Sheil. Picture: Anthony Weate

But despite enormous authority and a “to do” lasting to mid-century, Queensland University of Technology vice-chancellor Margaret Sheil warns how ATEC will work best is not settled. Sheil is well-placed to assess how university regulators with wide powers can work with government and universities. She is a previous chief executive of the Australian Research Council and last year produced a well-regarded plan to update its operations, commissioned by Clare.

Sheil says the challenge for ATEC is less about where staff will sit than how it will work. Will it be a Productivity Commission style “souped-up think tank” or operate like the Commonwealth Grants Commission, which advises the federal government on distributing GST revenue to the states and territories? She likes the latter, pointing to big problems the new agency needs to address that are all about funding now.

One is the Job-ready Graduates course funding model established by the Coalition that pays universities to teach on the basis of ideology, not education. Degrees the former government liked, such as nursing, are well supported. Next year the government will pay universities $19,000 a year for each student, who will be charged $4600, repayable by the loan scheme formerly known as HECS. But people studying most humanities will be slugged $16,900 (a year!) while the government contributes just under $1300.

The other is reforming funding formulas. Headline grants for research don’t cover infrastructure and administration costs. And the present model for teaching support costs is widely criticised as a simplistic example ignoring all the kit needed in engineering degrees.

Fix these, Sheil suggests, and a lot of issues for ATEC to address go away. The other immediate question that needs sorting is how the commission will get on with the universities it will regulate and the other agencies it will work with. This will take staff who are policy experts, speak fluent academic and can build ATEC’s intellectual capital. Plus they will need the know-how to do the job vice-chancellors really want, protecting them from officious administrators and meddling ministers.

But there is another risk with ATEC as now intended – that it gets too big for its boots. This happened a decade back when the Tertiary Education Quality and Standards Agency got carried away and started sticking its bib into the detail of university operations. A review by governance experts Kwong Lee Dow and Valerie Braithwaite recommended it back off, reporting universities were irritated with “over-regulation, unnecessary demands for informa­tion and an unwillingness to meet face-to-face and discuss rather than send long pieces of correspondence”. It’s a message that is still current for the seven commissioners who will run ATEC.