To Those That Strum While the Higher Education Sector is Fiddled. (August 25, 2004)

    Not for the first time the Minister for Education, Science and Training has admonished Australia's university sector (specifically the Australian Vice-Chancellors' Committee) for setting  the questionable target of having 60% of the population gaining a university qualification. Dr. Nelson points out that would place the floor at an IQ of about 90, ten point below the nation's mean score and, "if you were to have a 60 per cent completion rate, you would actually be dumbing down the sector."

While the view put forward by the AVCC is pretty silly the fact is they're not in the race when it comes to dumbing down Australia's university sector. The Coalition government has been at it for the past eight years and is doing a first class job of it. Eighteen months ago  David Hughes, past general secretary of the National Union of Students wrote in the Sydney Morning Herald:

Perhaps the minister might like to spend a day in the life of a casual academic - being paid by the hour and trying to fit research and teaching around an ever increasing administrative workload that has arisen because universities can no longer afford as many non-academic staff. ...[he] turns a blind eye to the funding crisis that is slowly turning our education sector second-rate, and threatening Australia's knowledge base. The minister ignored a parliamentary review entitled Our Universities in Crisis, ignored alarming figures showing spiralling class sizes and dropping contact hours between academics and students, and chose instead to hold another review.

Things haven't got any better. At the time TFW asked, "Is it unreasonable to suggest that compared to what even our most prestigious universities require to upgrade their staffs and infrastructure, the increase in available funding will be marginal? And that assumes there will be no further erosion of public funding for the higher education sector.

    "It may surprise many Australians that the recently released Productivity Commission report assessed  the contributions to higher education through private funding in the United States is 54%, in Australia it is shown to be 47% (including HECS) while Canada clocks in at 39%. In short, currently we are 7% behind the motherland of the private university in private funding and we will be encouraged to narrow the gap."

It may be clever political sleight of hand to focus almost entirely on university student numbers and undergraduate student fees to the virtual exclusion of the quality of university infrastructure and the quality of research/teaching staff but it has little to do with improving an ailing higher education sector. Were an Intelligence Quotient floor of 125 (~95% percentile) be in place, would that raise Australia's universities to the level of the top world universities? Would it bring them to a par of what the EU is striving for whereby a productive long term nexus between universities and industry can be realised? Only with the strong and confident university sector on the one hand and an industrial sector proactively interested in research and development on the other will that occur. And not without resourceful government action will that happen.

Perhaps a Labor government would really breathe new life into Australia's universities and research and development sectors. Perhaps it might even move to attempt a bipartisan compact. Perhaps. On the other hand so far the Coalition has made its disinterest transparently clear.