News & Views item - January 2011

 

 

The Aging of Australian Academics. (January 17, 2011)

It's one of those topics that graces the inside pages of Australia's broadsheets on occasion -- most recently some 375 words in The Sydney Morning Herald's online January 16th edition under Sarah Whyte's by-line: "Ageing academics set university time bomb".

 

Mind you in March last year Universities Australia (UA) released a study, Investigating The Ageing Academic Workforce: Stocktake: "jointly commissioned by Universities Australia and Professions Australia to establish whether existing research on the ageing of the workforce addresses the issue of whether there will be sufficient suitably qualified academic staff - to teach courses to prepare future professionals, and to meet universities' future educational and research needs", which on the evidence galvanised just about no one into doing anything of consequence. And when one takes into account the lag period between undertaking meaningful remedial action and obtaining competent replacement academics, the nation is looking toward an impending disaster.

 

According to Ms Whyte: "Half the full-time academic workforce is over 50, the Department of Tertiary Education says. But experts say the best students are being put off an academic career by limited job security and poor pay," while Lynn Meek, director of Melbourne University's L.H Martin Institute says: "This is one of the biggest issues facing higher education - the retirement and the ageing of the workforce, and the difficulty in recruiting young people.'' Nevertheless she states that few universities have a plan for replacing senior staff who retired, which is borne out by the following table taken from the UA report, which shows concern by 16 of the 17 of Australia's 39 universities who responded to the report's request for information but only 6 of which had "workforce development strategies" in place.

 

 

It's notable that only four of the Group of Eight universities responded (ANU, Adelaide, UQ and UWA) of which Adelaide and ANU replied that they had "workforce development strategies in place".

 

One of the serious problems facing Australian Academe is the significant lack of incentive for young Australian's to undertake an academic career.

 

 

Figure 10 of the report shows that a higher percentage of Australian academics than those in any other country surveyed had considered, or taken action, toward making a major job change. Moreover the survey found that of those who had taken concrete action to change jobs a high proportion had opted to work outside of higher education and an even higher proportion had moved to an academic job in another country.

 

Finally the age-structure graphic based on ABS census data gives a clear indication of the situation facing our universities.