News & Views item - September 2005

 

 

Max Corden Reviews Developments in Higher Education Policy from Dawkins to Nelson in this Year's ANU Sir Leslie Melville Lecture. (September 21, 2005)

    According to ANU's announcement of the fourth annual Melville lecture, Professor Max Corden left Australia in 1989, just as the ‘Dawkins Revolution’ hit the nation’s universities. The ‘Nelson Revolution’ was launched soon after his return in 2002.

 

Professor Corden is Emeritus Professor of International Economics at the Johns Hopkins University and a Professorial Fellow in the Department of Economics at Melbourne University and according to The Australian was the intellectual force behind the dismantling of Australia's tariff wall.

 

In any event he doesn't mince words in the title of today's lecture:

 

MOSCOW, MARKETS, OR TRUST:

 The Uncertain Future of Australian Universities  

 

According to Professor Corden the title refers to three ways of decision-making, all of them problematic.

 

He told The Australian's Dorothy Illing, "[M]ost students will not need to be subsidised [by the federal government] at all, though they will be able to access the HECS system. There will just be some special scholarships for the very disadvantaged or the exceptionally brilliant. Indeed I would not be surprised if we move into a wholly full-fee [but FEE-HELP supported] situation."

 

But Professor Corden did avow that the government would continue to fund research training, research and capital improvements. Of course the critical question is to what extent.

He attacks the high level of intervention in universities by the Minister for Education, Science and Training, Brendan Nelson, and draws some parallels between him and Labor's John Dawkins. According to Professor Corden the two men adopted greater centralisation while embracing a market economy model to sustain our universities - "Dawkins through the introduction of HECS and foreign fee-paying students and Nelson by allowing universities to set fee levels and expanding the student loan scheme.  Both champion high degrees of micro-management by Canberra, to which he applies the epithet, Moscow on the Molonglo.

 

"The Moscow system that we now have in Australian higher education was set up by Comrade Dawkins and has been elaborated since by Comrade Nelson."

 

And according to Dorothy Illing he,"echoes former AVCC chairman and long-time University of Sydney vice-chancellor Bruce Williams, who, in a recently published book, ...urges the establishment of an independent universities commission to advise the federal minister and to offer critical comment. 'I think that's become doubly important because since the Dawkins changes [the 1988 unified national system] the federal minister has become in effect director-general of higher education and that's dangerous,' Professor Williams told the HES last month."

 

Mind you the probability of the current government taking any notice of Professor Corden's views is next to naught unless perhaps the Queensland National Party Council instructs Senator Barnaby Joyce that he champion some part of them and threaten legislative mayhem.

 

In fact Corden is advocating a highly elitist approach with regard to tertiary student enrolment. It is similar to that followed by many of the US top private universities who have enunciated the principle that no student who qualifies for entrance will be precluded from attending because of insufficient funds. Of course those schools have very high entrance standards. And in the case of the three tiered system in place in the Californian public university system the University of California is also highly selective in the students it admits but students with lower entrance scores find places at one of the campuses at either California State University or one of the California Community Colleges.

 

It oughtn't to be forgotten that other nations come much closer to the approach established by the Whitlam Labor government of virtually free tertiary education for any student who qualifies.

 

One example:  In very mercantile minded Switzerland students pay approximately  A$1000 per annum as their enrolment fee. Furthermore, there is no distinction between Swiss and foreign students or undergraduate and graduate students.

 

ANY student,  independent of his/her nationality pays the same amount.

 

Oddly enough in the latest world rankings by the Institute of Higher Education, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, ETH, the Swiss Fed Inst Tech - Zurich, ranks 27.

 

[Note added September 24, 2005: A TFW reader informs us, "In The Economist for 17--23 September, there is a bar chart of percentages of international students in different countries, for 2003. It looks like Australia is 18%, Switzerland is about 17.5%, and the next two are NZ and Austria, both on about 13%. The UK is about 11% and the US a little less than 4%.]