A 4% increase in the latest round of offers at Australian universities will place overstretched teaching staff under more strain and lower the quality of education for ballooning student ranks, the higher education union warned today.
The latest figures show that in the wake of the Federal Government’s move to uncap places from this year, the number of offers has risen to 220,000. Under the new “demand-driven system”, universities will receive funding for as many students as they can enrol. Previously, the government regulated the number of places.
The government will retain the power to reimpose caps should too many students enrol in particular courses.
The National Tertiary Education Union said it welcomed the opportunity for more students to go to university, but remained sceptical about the experience they would have on arrival.
“We don’t have confidence that universities will suddenly start employing more staff to handle this increase, because we don’t have any evidence that that has been their approach to dealing with the increase in student enrolments now or previously,” said Jeannie Rea, National President of the National Tertiary Education Union.
“Rather, they’ve just largely employed casual staff to undertake much of the academic teaching, so now in some places you’re looking at half or even more of the teaching of students being done by people who are paid by the hour.”
In 2009 and 2010, universities enrolled an additional 50,000 undergraduate students in anticipation of the shift to the uncapped system. The Group of Eight universities warned that the surge could quickly become financially unsustainable.
Earlier, the Minister for Tertiary Education, Chris Evans, had warned that the demand-driven system would punish universities that allowed the quality of teaching to suffer.
Today, he described the latest rise in offers as “a tremendous result … . By removing the restrictions on the number of places available, the Gillard Government’s reforms have opened the doors of universities to more students than ever before.
“This data proves we are well and truly on track to achieving the target of 40 per cent of Australians aged between 25 and 34 to have achieved a bachelor degree by 2020.”
Skills Australia has forecast that by 2025 a third of all jobs will require a minimum of a bachelor degree qualification.
Professor Simon Marginson, from the Centre for the Study of Higher Education at the University of Melbourne, said that the 4% increase in places was “healthy … but not an outstanding rate of growth.” It had been pre-empted to some extent by bigger increases in the previous two years.
The funding rate for places – comprised of a student contribution and a government subsidy per student, both of which are capped – was below average course costs in at least half the student places. “This inhibits growth in many institutions,” Professor Marginson said. Most of the Group of Eight universities had resisted growth in the past two years.
The rise in enrolments has occurred mainly across campuses in Victoria. It has been driven, in particular, by a rise in the number of students taking engineering and science courses.
The trend suggested that universities were responding well to demand by location and field of study, said Dr Gavin Moodie, principal policy advisor at RMIT University.
“Some universities have increased their offers by lowering cut off scores,” Dr Moodie said. “The effect of lower entry scores on student attainment, retention and completion depends heavily on the amount and type of support universities give students, particularly in first year.
“Lower entry scores shouldn’t lower quality and completion if universities provide additional teaching and other support to students by staff with a strong commitment and expertise in teaching and student support.” He added that universities had enough funding “to employ enough continuing [full-time or part-time] academic staff to maintain teaching quality for their increased students”.
But Ken McAlpine, a senior industrial officer at the NTEU, said the number of casual staff at universities had been increasing at a faster pace than full-time and part-time teachers. The most recent figures from the Department of Employment and Workplace Relations show that the number of casual staff employed for teaching and research at universities increased by 7.9% from 2008 to 2009, and 6.1% from 2009 to 2010. Full-time and part-time teachers increased by 4.2% and 2.9%.
If the Government felt that the rise in enrolments was placing too much pressure on its outlays, then it should increase HECS rates to boost its revenue, Dr Moodie said.
“Recent application figures for England have held up despite a near tripling of fees to £9,000, so it seems that there is scope for increasing HECS more without reducing access.”
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Comments (10)
Jake Lynch
(Director, Centre for Peace & Conflict Studies at University of Sydney)
Interest declared: I am an academic at a big public university, with a large (and growing) student population, at a time when the University management is proposing to cut 150 academic jobs (and 190 general staff jobs).
It must be time for some investigation of the relative cost of running Australian universities, compared with their counterparts in similar countries. Approaching 50c of every $ that comes in, via student fees, research etc, is swiped away to pay for the central bureaucracy, before any of it is available to employ more lecturers etc. Meanwhile the place is full of corporate lawyers, and management wasted a (no doubt large) but unspecified sum, a couple of years ago, on outside consultants to carry out an unnecessary 'rebranding' exercise.
Good topic for an investigation by The Conversation?
Dale Bloom
Laboratory analyst (logged in via email @mail.com)
Jake,
I would agree with that. The following is very interesting.
“student loan debt now tops credit card debt among Americans. When some else is paying a lot of the bills, students are less sensitive to the price, thus allowing the colleges to care less about keeping prices under control. And the nonprofit nature of institutions reduces incentives for colleges and universities to be efficient.”
http://edition.cnn.com/2011/12/02/opinion/vedder-college-costs/index.html
Is the same thing happening in this country, where costs are shifted onto the taxpayer, or shifted into loans that the student has to pay at some time in the future, and if they don’t pay, then the costs are again born by the taxpayer.
But ultimately, the universities have minimal interests in reducing their costs, and so much money going to universities mysteriously disappears into a management bureaucracy.
Dale Bloom
Laboratory analyst (logged in via email @mail.com)
There are some question regards all this.
How many HECS repayments are regarded as “doubtful” and unlikely to be repaid by the student, and is the national HECS debt likely to rise in the future.
Will the “40 per cent of Australians aged between 25 and 34 to have achieved a bachelor degree by 2020” include 40% males as well as 40% females, or just predominantly females.
Doubtless such question will not be answered.
Fred Pribac
(logged in via email @internode.on.net)
The article makes the point:
"Under the new “demand-driven system”, universities will receive funding for as many students as they can enrol."
To me this sounds like a recipe for: (a) academic instability, (b) a boon for studies that although highly popular may be lacking in evidence based academic rigour (refer to the debates on naturopathy etc in universities) and (c) an erosion in the relavence and impact of a university degree.
The last two paragraphs of the article are also telling and suggest that this may be a precursor step to increased fees imposed on students.
I might be hopelessly naive here but if the governement was serious about shooting for a 40% level of university training by 2020 (or whenever) with fair and balanced opportunity for all, then perhaps a reduction in student fees and an increase in government funding to universities might be a suitable model.
Mat Hardy
(Lecturer in Middle East Studies at Deakin University)
"(b) a boon for studies that although highly popular"
That's been going on for years though. Witness the number of media/film/drama courses or how many students are currently studying forensic science throughout the country. Academic rigour has nothing to do with popularity.
Gavin Moodie
Principal Policy Adviser (logged in via email @telstra.com)
The department estimated that the accumulated Hecs debt was $23 billion at 30 June 2011 of which it estimated that $5.2 billion or 23% would not be repaid.
Women have increased their share of domestic higher education enrolments over a long time and were 56% of domestic students in 2010 and therefore are likely to be higher in 2020. Currently 40% of Australian women between 25 and 34 are graduates and men are around 35%. The Australian Government did not specify a young graduate target by sex…
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Jake Lynch
(Director, Centre for Peace & Conflict Studies at University of Sydney)
You're right of course to say that:
Much of the central cut of higher education funding is spent on central libraries, laboratories and the IT system.
However, these are basic, stay-in-business items that are needed just as much in the universities of, say, the UK, as they are here.
Pointless central spending would include, in my view:
* Bureaucratic procedures for 'ethics clearance' for social science (as opposed to medical) research;
* Burgeoning legal departments reporting to senior management;
* Proliferating senior managers with fancy titles and salaries to match.
Comparing how much it costs to run universities here, with their equivalent institutions in other comparable countries, would show how much is wasted on such things.
Dale Bloom
Laboratory analyst (logged in via email @mail.com)
Gavin Moodie,
Thank you for your reply.
Trying to piece together information from different sources, the “doubtful” HECS debts were 20% of HECS loan repayments in 2006, which amounted to $2.6 billion.
http://www.cis.org.au/media-information/opinion-pieces/article/566-one-cap-does-not-fit-all-in-hecs-debt-
Now this has risen to 23% of HECS loan repayments, amounting to $5.2 billion.
Assuming these figures are correct, “doubtful” loans unlikely to be repaid, have increased by about 100…
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Gavin Moodie
Principal Policy Adviser (logged in via email @telstra.com)
I don't think doubtful debt as a proportion of Hecs repayments is a good measure since they both change according to different factors and sometimes in different directions. I suggest that a better measure is doubtful debt as a proportion of total debt.
Norton (2012: 40) has an informative graph which shows the total debt and its 'fair value' increasing in parallel, so I'm not sure it's a problem.
However, if Hecs write offs are too high an obvious change which in my view would in any case…
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Dale Bloom
Laboratory analyst (logged in via email @mail.com)
Gavin Moodie,
Thanks for that link.
The Gratton report does include the following:-
“But the indicative total costs are high and rising. As student numbers and fees increase, this will become a more important issue.”
To reduce or stabilise the debt, the likelihood of a student enrolled in a specific course not being able to repay their debts has to be considered.
Which students, and which courses.
Likelihood of getting a higher paid job (or any job), and how long a graduate will remain in the work force to repay their debts would also have to be considered, or Australia finds itself in the US situation with many graduates facing high university debts they have to pay back at some time, while “29.7% of flight attendants, 24.4% of retail salespersons and 17.4% of baggage porters had a bachelor's degree or higher.”