Universities to lose world ranking: Australian Catholic University vice-chancellor Greg Craven

Australia’s unis will drop out of the world’s top 100 and face a diminished future without foreign students, vice-chancellor warns.

Greg Craven says vice-chancellors ‘don’t know how to speak Coalition’. Picture: Jane Dempster

Australia’s universities are set to drop out of the world’s top 100 higher education rankings and the elite sandstones must accept a much diminished future after the loss of foreign student fees, Australian Catholic University vice-chancellor Greg Craven warns.

In his last interview before leaving ACU after 13 years in charge, Professor Craven says universities’ $7bn over-reliance on Chinese students is like a “drug addiction” and the nation’s elite institutions could “cannibalise” the student cohorts of mid-tier universities to make up for huge losses in foreign fees throughout the COVID-19 pandemic.

He also warns the nation’s vice-chancellors “don’t know how to speak Coalition” and their failure to grasp politics has led to a series of policy losses in Canberra over the stretch of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Professor Craven said the Group of Eight had to accept their budgets would never be as large as they were before COVID-19 and Australia’s position among the world’s 100 leading higher education institutions was “finished”.

“One solution is very simple: the Go8 universities basically have to accept their budgets will never be what they’re like before,” he said. “How are they going to do that? By trying to save money on staff and teaching … you’re not going to be able to do that, you’re going to have to cut research.

“You’re going have to accept you’re no longer going to be Manchester United on a good day — you’re going to be Wolverhampton Wanderers.

“That’s something the government needs to think about. If that’s right — the days of lots of Australian universities being in the top 100 (world university rankings) is finished. This is after cannibalisation, after trying to kill your neighbour. One has to contract.”

Six Australian universities ranked among the world’s top 100 higher education institutions in last year’s Times Higher Education Supplement world university rankings: the University of Melbourne, the Australian National University, the University of Sydney, the University of Queensland, the University of NSW and Monash University.

The University of Sydney, one of six Australian institutions ranked among the world’s top 100 in last year’s Times Higher Education Supplement rankings.

Professor Craven’s warnings come after a difficult year of job losses at university campuses, with more layoffs expected in 2021.

Universities Australia has projected 21,000 jobs are at risk due to the pandemic and the Go8 fears it could face a research “brain drain”.

One Melbourne University report last year — authored by higher education experts Frank Larkins and Ian Marshman — found 6100 full-time research jobs were at risk from a COVID recession that could cost universities between $6.8bn and $7.6bn from their research funds.

Professor Craven said the over-reliance on China’s student markets was a major problem.

“The old system of relying on international students is over, it’s finished,” he said. “The wider market has collapsed and there is no certainty about when it will come back. And with the Chinese market — which universities were reliant on — there is not just the issue of COVID but possibly sovereign risk.

“They all knew about the issue with China. I would go on panels and publicly warn about this, and the other vice-chancellors would say nothing. It was like a drug ¬addiction.”

In 2019, universities earned more than $7bn in student fees from China and many in the sector fear this revenue could be lost permanently if international borders remain closed and relations between Canberra and Beijing continue to deteriorate.

Professor Craven warned that mid-tier institutions like ACU faced becoming “zombie universities” if they lost foreign students and then elite sandstone universities lowed their entry requirements for domestic undergraduate courses, draining the mid-tiers of their cohorts.

“My biggest concern is that the elite universities cannibalise the student cohorts at good, mid-tier universities. And the predator universities all of a sudden decide Years 12s with ATARS of 65 are now splendid chaps,” he said. “One of the great problems of the Australian system is the elite universities have no interest in mergers, that would defeat their sense of self. All they are interested in is asset stripping effectively — if you regard students as an asset.

“Do they care what happens to the other universities? No … you have a group of elite universities who if they had their choice about what happens to the other universities, it would be that they died.”

Foreign students disembark from an international flight at Darwin Airport in November. Picture: AFP

He said the eight elite universities would move around caps on commonwealth-funded student places to lower their barriers to students if it meant filling their foreign student funding gaps and getting ahead of the nation’s 34 other higher education bodies.

Professor Craven’s warnings come after a difficult year for university vice-chancellors in federal politics.

Universities failed in their attempts to gain access to pandemic financial support payments such as JobKeeper, secure backing for foreign students to return to Australia, stop a new funding regime that will cut overall commonwealth contributions, and avoid having their deals with foreign powers being subject to vetos from Canberra.

The Australian revealed the higher education sector’s peak lobby group has commissioned a review of its performance at the urging of the nation’s university chancellors, who have expressed dissatisfaction with its lack of success in influencing the Morrison government.

Professor Craven said the current class of vice-chancellors largely failed to understand the Liberals and Nationals, and politics in general.

“The problem is the sector, it’s like speaking a language, it doesn’t speak Coalition,” he said. “The higher education sector is deeply embedded in the assumption of the superiority of Labor. Typically if you have a vice-chancellor they’re not going to speak Coalition either and that’s been a perennial problem.

“Most vice-chancellors have three fundamental defects: one, they have that basic Labor assumption; the second is they know absolutely nothing about politics or government. They’re great scientists, great economists — utterly ignorant of politics and government.

“The third problem is they don’t know they’re ignorant. They’re absolutely convinced they understand government but they don’t. That’s much more dangerous … they are actually acting under a delusion.”

The ACU vice-chancellor said on Saturday he was proud of his education legacy which has left him one of the longest-serving university chiefs and one of the highest paid.

Professor Craven said the university – a key learning hub for the nation’s nurses and teachers, as well as theologians – had come back from the brink of disaster and could make Australian Catholics proud.

“In the 13 years, we’ve basically taken ACU from a point where a lot of people thought it faced failure to something which is undeniably a real university and a highly successful one,” he said.

“The Catholic intellectual character of the university has been strengthened. When we began, we basically had no research. Now we’re in the top 250 or 300 rankings, which sounds all right until you remember there are 10,000 universities in the world.

“We’re in the top six Catholic universities in the world … now the university has 35,000 students and we have a campus in Rome.

“I can honestly say this is a university Australia can be proud of and Australian Catholics can be proud of.”