‘Hollowing out’ of Australian workforce poses ‘pipeline’ concerns

Decades of staffing changes in Australian universities have left the sector ill-prepared to accommodate normal demographic growth, let alone the ballooning student numbers envisaged by the Universities Accord panel.

An analysis of employment patterns has found that the university workforce has become “hollowed” out in the past two decades and now faces a mass departure of senior staff, with many remaining academics insecurely employed in very junior roles.

Researcher Gwilym Croucher said his findings raised questions about how universities could provide enough places “to keep population parity with current enrolments”, let alone expand to the degree proposed in the accord’s interim report.

“A large proportion of the professoriate is getting closer to retirement age,” said Dr Croucher, from the University of Melbourne’s Centre for the Study of Higher Education. “Have we inadvertently dissuaded some of our best and brightest from focusing on academic careers right at the time we’re going to need to expand [their] number?”

His analysis, based on federal Department of Education staffing data, compares patterns in 1989 – amid a major surge in student numbers under John Dawkins, who was then education minister – with the situation in 2021.

By then, one-quarter of academics were professors or associate professors, compared with less than one-sixth during the Dawkins revolution. Within the professoriate, the proportion aged over 54 had risen from less than one-third to almost one-half.

The share of people in the lowest “level A” rank of tutors and research associates had also increased – from 25 per cent to 29 per cent – with less than 10 per cent of these junior academics employed on an ongoing basis.

Meanwhile, the proportion of lecturers and senior lecturers had dwindled from 58 per cent to 47 per cent and had become increasingly casualised. By 2021, less than three-quarters of senior lecturers and just under half of lecturers had secure employment.

Dr Croucher said these developments reflected trends across the wider Australian workforce. “You end up having more senior staff, less middle ranked staff and larger numbers of junior staff, often in pretty precarious short-term contracts and casual positions. But it’s quite pronounced, especially at the moment, in Australian higher education.”

He said casual or short-term employment was “not necessarily a disadvantage”, particularly for guest lecturers with industry expertise or professors with hefty research grants, but it could prevent budding academics from building the “track record” necessary for promotion.

His analysis also found that enrolment growth had vastly outstripped the rise in teacher numbers over the past two decades in all fields, particularly education and the humanities.

Dr Croucher said this trend was probably “not quite as bad as it looks”, with the increased use of teaching-only academics and “third space professionals” – people such as learning design specialists, who would once have been classified as academics but were now counted as general staff – affecting the statistics. Nevertheless, student-to-staff ratios had clearly increased.

He said universities needed flexible employment arrangements, particularly in the absence of research funding policies enabling them to offer more permanent jobs. “That sort of pressure has got to be balanced against the need to make sure that…employment in universities can be secure and rewarding,” he said.

“The question for the sector is: has the pendulum swung too far towards having insecure and precarious employment? Many people would argue that…it has swung too far that way. There needs to be some rebalancing.”

john.ross@timeshighereducation.com