Data collection for Job-ready Graduates overhaul ‘a massive task’

Australia will harness lessons from the hospital system in overhauling the unpopular Job-ready Graduates (JRG) scheme of university fees and subsidies – but creating the “massive data collection” needed to inform a new pricing regime will be a mammoth task, an influential economist has warned.

Stephen Duckett heads a team working to establish a “common chart of accounts” for universities, modelled on the National Hospital Cost Data Collection. Developed during the 1990s, it is a nationally consistent compilation of each hospital’s costs of providing services at the individual level, broken up by the treatments administered and personal characteristics such as age, gender and indigenous status.

“This is where I want to get to with universities, but…we are a very, very long way from that,” Duckett told the Australian Centre for Student Equity and Success symposium in Brisbane. “We’re…trying to see to what extent there is enough commonality with enough universities.

“We are not going to get every university to provide us data because they don’t have it themselves.”

Duckett, a former secretary of the federal Department of Health, is now a commissioner with the Australian Tertiary Education Commission (Atec). His working group is trying to determine universities’ costs in providing services such as teaching, research and student support, broken up by institutional characteristics like location, scale and mission. 

Education minister Jason Clare said the group’s report, due next year, would be a “fundamental input” in “fixing” JRG – a scheme that had “failed students”, Clare told an August summit. “It needs to be fixed, and I need the inputs and the advice on how to do it.”

Duckett said the group would not be able to start its pricing work “until we’ve got the data” in six to nine months’ time. The data collection would focus on information universities already compiled about the resources they expended on common subjects.

“I’m hoping…about 20 universities will contribute. Hopefully that’s about half the universities, representative across the types of universities. From that, we will get what we’re tentatively calling the ‘Australian universities data collection’.”

University of Queensland analyst Clare Hourigan said assembling the information would not be easy. Hourigan, Atec’s incoming assistant secretary of system planning and funding, said the task was complicated by the different ways academics divided their time between teaching and research – and how the nature of their research often influenced their teaching.

“There are mechanisms we can use,” she told the symposium. “There are ways in which we can apportion costs. [But] I’m conscious of…the capacity and capability in the sector to pull this kind of data together. It is hard to find people who can do that work. The data piece is going to be a big challenge for the sector over the next few years.”

Regional development expert Narelle Pearse said that while the transparency of hospital costing data was admirable, universities and hospitals had fundamentally different aims. “We actually want more people coming into our sector,” she explained. “Healthcare doesn’t.”

Pearse, chief operating officer of Central Queensland University and a member of Duckett’s working group, said the “interconnected” nature of academic work made it hard to divvy tasks into discrete categories. “Does anybody here want to keep a six-minute timesheet?” she asked the symposium. “If we wanted to be that accurate, we’d all have to become accountants.”

john.ross@timeshighereducation.com