Matters of Consequence To Be Addressed Comes the Revolution. (March 16, 2009)

In a carefully crafted and thoughtful article Andrew Trounson in the Higher Education Supplement of last Wednesday's Australian reviews the Minister for Education Julia Gillard's proposals to implement some of the proposals of the Bradley Review of Higher Education and the implied caveats.

Mr Trounson notes:

[F]rom 2012 the Government will scrap allocated institutional caps on numbers of commonwealth-funded undergraduate places in the hope that greater autonomy and competition for uncapped student numbers will drive the sector to expand and meet ambitious new targets to increase the number of Australians with degree qualifications.

To ensure quality isn't sacrificed in the push to expand, the Government will establish a new national regulatory and quality agency to accredit providers and audit standards. At the same time, the Government will make compact agreements with individual universities that are likely to be key in further regulating the system, ensuring, for example, that universities are offering courses that aren't just in high demand from students but are also in line with the needs of the economy.

While "a new regulatory quality agency" is essentially another stick to keep universities up to the mark, what will be the means to achieve it. As Mr Trounson points out: "constraints on capacity, quality requirements and the long-term nature of boosting demand that ultimately depends on improving school performance, means there is a natural cap on government spending."

A program to systematically improve the quality of education from primary school up is required. And that requires developing the human and infrastructure resources.

Ms Gillard says, rather with a wave of the hand the approach will be: "letting student demand, moderated by public and university priorities, determine where public dollars go".

Turning to the matter of having 40% of the 25-34 year-olds obtain bachelor degrees or higher by 2025, Alan Robson, vice-chancellor of The University of Western Australia and chair of the Group of Eight notes: "School-leavers have pretty substantial opportunities to go to university, there isn't a shortage of places. It is more how we deal with providing opportunities for second-chance students who haven't done well at school but subsequently want to go to university."

And the vice-chancellor made the point that Ms Gillard didn't specify that it was necessarily just universities that would be delivering the bachelor degrees. Ian Young, vice-chancellor of dual university/TAFE Swinburne University of Technology agrees.

Mr Trounson sounds the warning: "But just freeing up the student demand market also opens a can of worms. Gillard has still to answer exactly how she will tackle inevitable imbalances and distortions. What will be done to ensure universities don't expand popular, cheap-to-deliver courses such as law at the expense of much-needed engineers, scientists, and nurses?  What will be done to preserve courses such as Latin, for example, where the study may be worth preserving but there is no incentive or directive for universities to keep these low-demand courses going?... There is also an inherent threat to quality that comes with a drive to expand student numbers. Student-staff ratios have already blown out from 13:1 in 1990 to 20:1 in 2006, and with the average age of academics already pushing 50, the sector faces a challenge to expand while ensuring students get quality teaching."

And of course with all of this is the fact whether or not our political leaders want to accept it, the best and brightest of intellects not just want to do research the have an inherent drive to do research, and without that collective compulsion a university degenerates.

The National Union of Students' President David Barrow puts it simply: "Despite claims to the contrary, we remain sceptical that quality will not take a hit. Course quality is at an all-time low (and) we will hold the minister to account for every single overcrowded lecture."

It makes you wonder if Ms Gillard hasn't got the wrong end of the stick, i.e. first raise the quality then go after increasing the proportion with bachelor degrees.

On the other hand Andrew Trounson says that while Ms Gillard needs to clarify how student demand will be regulated to counter market problems, vice-chancellors don't see "a free-for-all. And compacts are likely to play a role here". But how remains to be developed in detail.

It is being suggested that it will be the two smaller Group of Eight universities, The Universities of Western Australia, and Adelaide that will see a significant rise in enrolments, with a consequent drop in those in the "lesser" universities in WA and South Australia. Initially little movement is expected in the other states.

Mr Trounson then throws a grenade: "Load shifting will also be constrained by the need of universities to balance revenue by devoting resources to the high-margin international and postgraduate markets," which doesn't say much for a belief in appropriate increases in resources from government sources.

Finally, the vice-chancellor of Monash, Richard Larkins, states what may be seen as the bleedin' obvious. As Andrew Trounson reports: "[W]ith the right regulation to iron out market imbalances and ensure universities are delivering graduates with the qualifications needed by the economy, not just what the students want and the universities find most profitable to deliver, then the new system can be a success. And while the growth targets for participation are ambitious, he notes the required expansion won't be much more than that which occurred in the 1990s".

Of course there is that small matter of appropriate resources.

Now just how are these rather half-baked proposals from Ms Gillard and Senator Carr going to develop a university sector to match it with the best, which simply means have institutions which attract and hold a reasonable proportion of the world's best minds?

Riddle me that.