Fairfax’s Ross Gittins delivered the goods again yesterday with a stinging take down of Australia’s “aimless, money-grubbing exploiting” universities:
Of the many stuff-ups during the now-finished era of economic reform, one of the worst is the unending backdoor privatisation of Australia’s universities, which began under the Hawke-Keating government and continues in the Senate as we speak…
The problem is that continuing cuts in government grants to unis have kept a protracted squeeze on uni finances, prompting vice-chancellors to become obsessed with money-raising.
They pressure teaching staff to go easy on fee-paying overseas students who don’t reach accepted standards of learning, form unhealthy relationships with business interests, and accept “soft power” grants from foreign governments and their nationals without asking awkward questions…
But the greatest crime of our funding-obsessed unis is the way they’ve descended to short-changing their students, so as to cross-subsidise their research. At first they did this mainly by herding students into overcrowded lecture theatres and tutorials…
Lately they’re exploiting new technology to achieve the introverted academic’s greatest dream: minimal “face time” with those annoying pimply students who keep asking questions…
The one great exception to the 30-year quest to drive uni funding off the budget was Julia Gillard’s ill-considered introduction of “demand-driven” funding of undergraduate places, part of a crazy plan to get almost all school-leavers going on to uni, when many would be better served going to TAFE.
The uni money-grubbers slashed their entrance standards, thinking of every excuse to let older people in, admitting as many students as possible so as to exploit the feds’ fiscal loophole.
The result’s been a marked lowering of the quality of uni degrees…
Gittins’ has dissected the issue nicely. But he did forget to mention the insane salaries being paid to university vice chancellors, whereby the average salary package recently hit an insane $890,000, driven of course by the $2.8 billion taxpayer-funded bonanza caused by the uncapping of university places in 2009.
For mine, this uncapping of university places is the greatest policy blunder and the biggest driver of the current problems afflicting Australia’s university system. It has facilitated a form of ‘quantitative easing’, whereby the universities have lowered entrance scores and printed as many degrees as possible to accumulate Commonwealth government funding through HELP/HECS loans.
The end result is that the universities have flooded the market with so many graduates that a university degree has lost its value, despite the significant cost to both students and the Budget.
Given the abject failures of the demand-driven system, I believe that policy should first and foremost look to restrict federal funding and adopt a merit-based system that rations the number of university places based on a detailed assessment of the economy’s needs.
