‘Free’ education being ‘taken for granted’ in Australia, says v-c

Some of Australia’s most revered policy innovations have inadvertently undermined universities’ “social licence to operate”, a Times Higher Education conference has heard.

Macquarie University vice-chancellor Bruce Dowton said two 20th-century reforms – the abolition of university tuition fees under 1970s prime minister Gough Whitlam, and the introduction of the Higher Education Contribution Scheme (HECS) the following decade – had contributed to a community mindset of taking higher education for granted.

“There’s this social psychology in Australia that somehow higher education should be free and, therefore, it doesn’t have a monetisable value,” Professor Dowton told the THE Live ANZ event.

“Australian society [does] not value the benefit that a university education brings in as tangible a way as the US.”

He said the “monetised value” of education had been brought home to him during the decades he spent as a medical academic and administrator in the US. “Having educated three youngsters in elite, private universities, I felt it every semester when I had to wire hard cash – and a lot of it – to those universities.”

Professor Dowton stressed that he was not advocating American-style fee deregulation. He said HECS was one of the most equitable higher education funding systems in the world, but it had nevertheless created a “conundrum for Australia”.

Policy discussions about higher education funding are often framed as “either-or” debates, he said. “We haven’t positioned the discourse in the right way, and universities have some responsibility for that. Something has to give way for…the Australian community at large to understand the tangible value of investing in higher education, however that investment happens.”

In a frank panel discussion, university leaders conceded that their pay packets had contributed to the perception problem. University of Queensland boss Deborah Terry said the attention commanded by vice-chancellors’ salaries made them “a distraction from the core issues”.

Professor Terry commended work to inject transparency and consistency into how Australian vice-chancellors’ salaries are devised and reported, which is being undertaken by the University Chancellors Council. “They’re the appropriate body, because senates and councils…set vice-chancellor salaries through their remuneration committees.”

University of Auckland head Dawn Freshwater said that while vice-chancellors’ pay was managed differently in New Zealand – where the Public Service Commission provides guidance and reporting of chief executives’ remuneration – she supported open discussion on the topic.

While many vice-chancellors had taken 20 per cent pay cuts during the pandemic, that was just a “short-term” solution. “This is a global concern,” Professor Freshwater said. “It’s something we need to unpack.”

The panel refuted suggestions that universities had prematurely retrenched staff despite recording only modest financial losses. Many universities had confined job cuts to voluntary redundancy schemes, which sometimes ended up “oversubscribed”, with staff keen to leave for personal reasons or because “they wanted to make room for younger academics”.

But panellists said administrators needed to be realistic about the financial impacts of the pandemic and their interplay with regulatory requirements such as the 3 per cent surpluses normally mandated by New Zealand’s Tertiary Education Commission.

Professor Dowton said “prudent financial planning” required consideration of medium- as well as short-term impacts. “Losing an undergraduate student for one semester means you’ve lost that student for six semesters,” he pointed out.

He said Macquarie had scrapped programmes with low enrolments not only to save money, but also so that staff could be redeployed to more viable courses. “We’ve been very careful…to respond to the reality of workload increase for the staff who remain,” he told the conference.

Edith Cowan University (ECU) vice-chancellor Steve Chapman said administrators had appraised the pandemic’s impacts carefully and been upfront about the implications. “We would have an optimistic scenario, a realistic scenario and a pessimistic scenario, and we’d explain that to staff.

“The worst thing you can do is leave people unsure about [whether] the university has a plan. You need to make it very clear that we have several plans – we have scenario-planned for the various things that can happen.”

Professor Chapman said the make-up of ECU’s student body and operations had shielded it from the pandemic’s harshest financial impacts, and no retrenchments had been necessary. But he cautioned against complacency, with “difficult decisions” still confronting the sector.

“Everybody was seriously worried in 2020, but I’m expecting [borders will still] be closed in the middle of next year. The big financial impacts weren’t early, and they’re not here yet. The recovery period is probably going to be a decade, not a couple of years, so let’s not kid ourselves that we’re out of difficult waters.”

john.ross@timeshighereducation.com