Uncap university places in the bush, says regional lobby

Subsidised university places would be made available to all qualified applicants in country areas, but not in cities, under a proposal to overcome “entrenched sectoral inequalities” in Australia’s “two-tier” higher education system.

The representative body for regional institutions says a partial uncapping of undergraduate places would be part of a broader push to inject “regional differentiation” into the nation’s “metropolitan-centric” university policy settings.

In its submission to the Australian Universities Accord, the Regional Universities Network (RUN) says current arrangements lack the “nuance” to fully recognise – let alone tackle – low participation in rural areas.

The submission accuses the accord panel itself of glossing over the problem in its discussion paper, which observed that former higher education reviewer Denise Bradley’s attainment target – for at least 40 per cent of young adults to have degrees – had been “met”.

Although that might be the case in Australian cities, where attainment is nudging 50 per cent, the RUN submission points out that people raised elsewhere are around half as likely to have higher education qualifications. “The Bradley Review attainment targets remain entirely unmet for the one third of [the] population living in regional Australia,” it says.

RUN executive director Alec Webb said that if metropolitan Australia was a nation it would rank eighth among Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development countries for higher education attainment, while regional Australia would rank about 35th.

He said the late 2017 axing of the demand-driven funding system had come at the worst possible time for regional universities that had invested in new courses and facilities. “They were increasing their enrolment base [but] were essentially hamstrung at that point in time,” he added.

He said the demand-driven period had demonstrated that there was unmet appetite for higher education in rural areas. Many country students had subsequently moved to the cities in what often proved to be one-way journeys.

“Four out of every five regional students who relocate to a major city to study never return to the regions after graduation,” the submission says, adding that this direction of traffic is already becoming dominant. “Fewer than a third of regional students commencing university in 2005 moved to a city. By 2015 it was 57 per cent.”

RUN wants the 2017 freezing of undergraduate places reversed for regional universities. Mr Webb said the former government’s move to uncap university places for regionally based indigenous people, as part of the 2020 Job-ready Graduates reforms, had shown that demand-driven funding for “particular cohorts” of students was “politically palatable”.

He conceded that other university groups might feel RUN was breaking ranks in raising such a suggestion. “Some of their solutions, which tend to be metro-centric, [seem] equally uncollegiate,” he said. “We’ve tried to…take a data-driven approach to formulating some solutions to a pretty horrific gap in educational attainment.”

RUN’s submission is among about half a dozen that were lodged with the accord panel on the eve of an 11 April deadline. Its 27 recommendations also include a “universal higher education service obligation” modelled on a stipulation for privatised phone company Telstra to maintain services in the bush.

Mr Webb said the obligation would apply to both universities and the government, with the former expected to maintain a full range of courses in “thin” markets. “That requires us to have [funding] to offer courses that would otherwise economically not make sense,” he added.

john.ross@timeshighereducation.com