Economist: cut funding for universities that miss equity targets

An Australian policy analyst has proposed a two-pronged approach to inclusivity, with extra funding to help universities meet equity targets and “significant financial penalties” for those that fail.

Economist and former Department of Health secretary Stephen Duckett, who is deputy chancellor of RMIT University, said institutions that consistently flouted agreed equity targets should face “a significant impact on their budgets”.

For example, universities that broke a commitment to have 20 per cent of their students from disadvantaged backgrounds might only be funded for five times as many places as their equity enrolments. This would keep disadvantaged students’ share of places at the desired level.

“[It] would certainly gain the attention of university administrations,” Professor Duckett asserted in a submission to the Universities Accord panel. “Mission-based compacts should signal tougher price consequences for failure to address equity targets.”

Responses to the accord panel’s interim report fell due on 1 September. The panel asked interested parties to limit their advice to three issues and three pages.

Professor Duckett, who stressed that he was responding in a personal rather than a university capacity, said inclusivity could be boosted through a “system of price incentives” embedded in a new funding model. This could be achieved using loadings to cover the additional costs of teaching equity cohorts.

He said higher education’s “smorgasbord of small programmes” exacerbated universities’ reporting burdens without resolving the problems they were supposed to address. “Pricing signals on universities could replace many, if not all, of the small programmes. This…would give universities more freedom and reduce the reporting burden, as payments would be made based on existing student data collections.”

The Innovative Research Universities (IRU) said participation targets would not be achieved “if all universities are expected to deliver on them in an identical way”. Its submission advocated “realistic institution-level targets” premised on “each university’s strategy and the distinct community it serves”.

“Institutions should have the flexibility to move resources to meet need,” the IRU submission added. As an example, teaching subsidies could be used to fund enabling programmes.

The Independent Scholars Association of Australia (ISAA) warned that a bigger higher education system would not necessarily be a “fairer” one. Its submission said that, without significant support, people from groups that “have long been outside the system” would be perceived as having squandered the opportunity of higher education.

“The system itself will contain the seeds of their exclusion,” the submission said. “Collecting more data to better understand the needs of students from these groups can itself lead to exclusion, because the collection can be biased to existing norms.”

But the Group of Eight (Go8) advocated a “national equity data institute” among a suite of measures to make participation more equitable.

The new agency would bring together the Australian Education Research Organisation, the National Centre for Student Equity in Higher Education and the National Centre for Vocational Education Research in a “single or federated structure”, the Go8’s submission said. “We must know what works, what hasn’t worked and why, if we are to evolve our tertiary system and maximise access across the population.”

The University of Melbourne noted that equity students were generally less likely than other cohorts to complete their courses. “Just working to increase the completion rates of existing students…would make a difference to the education outcomes of under-represented cohorts,” Melbourne’s submission said.

john.ross@timeshighereducation.com