Why short-lived ‘research breadth’ rule failed in Australia

A rule that required Australia’s universities to conduct “world standard” research in at least half of the fields they teach has been discarded before it was ever properly put into practice, leading to mixed opinions.

The “research breadth” rule, introduced in 2021 following a review of Australia’s provider category standards, could have resulted in universities losing their title if they did not meet the required benchmarks.

It replaced an earlier rule that universities must deliver postgraduate research degrees in three broad fields, with no specifications around quality. Reviewer Peter Coaldrake said this standard was too easy to satisfy and risked devaluing universities as institutions.

But the new rule is currently unenforceable because the government lacks a means for judging research quality, and has never found another way to judge whether something is “world standard”. Excellence in Research for Australia, the national research assessment exercise, was last conducted eight years ago and was officially jettisoned in 2024. 

That did not stop the panellists overseeing the biggest research review in years, the Strategic Examination of Research and Development (Serd), from recommending the rule’s removal. “[It] has limited the ability of universities to focus on areas of comparative strength and reduced the ability to generate scale,” Serd’s final report says. “This has led to a broadly homogenous approach, resulting in too many broad-based universities.”

The report says universities should be given the “flexibility” to undertake research in as few as three narrow fields. The 12 May federal budget confirmed that the government had accepted the recommendation and “tasked” the Australian Tertiary Education Commission “with providing advice”.

“This will help us build a system…around the know-how of each university and the needs of the nation,” education minister Jason Clare said. “[Having] universities of different sizes and who do different things…will be good for the universities [and] the people who study there.”

Monash University higher education expert Andrew Norton said the research breadth requirement was an “unnecessary burden” on smaller universities and its introduction in 2021 – the same year as the Job-ready Graduates reforms stripped “implied” research funding from teaching grants – had “failed basic tests of policy coherence”.

Norton said that while all universities and academics wanted to do research, the “opportunity cost” of the rule was excessive. “Most research is not self-financing,” he noted. While removing the rule might encourage some universities to “redirect” some of their research spending into other activities, retaining it could prevent them launching courses in fields they had not previously taught.

However, policy expert Claire Field said the change would be “highly problematic” for the financial viability of universities outside the prestigious Group of Eight (Go8) network. She said non-Go8 institutions would abandon research in some fields, weakening their research metrics and consequently their rankings.

This would further increase the Go8 members’ allure to international students, forcing other universities to recruit ever more heavily from nationalities that struggled to obtain student visas, exacerbating the wealth gap between rich universities and the rest.

Field, a consultant and former regulator, said the abolition of the research breadth rule would also create a “vicious cycle” in domestic education. The highly ranked institutions would increasingly monopolise top-performing students from disadvantaged backgrounds, leaving other institutions struggling to meet their enrolment quotas – partly because private institutions, some located nearby and charging similar fees, would lure more students away from public universities.

The change could also force many academics to accept teaching-only roles or uproot their families to move to universities that still supported their fields of research, Field said.

“I cannot believe that we’re going to progress reforms likely to drive more funding to the wealthy research-intensive institutions, leaving some regional and outer metropolitan universities populated largely by teaching-only academics and potentially struggling to reach their enrolment caps, all because as a country we don’t think it’s reasonable to fund our universities well enough to produce quality research.”

But Norton queried whether the proposal would have much impact on reputational league tables, saying the universities that had changed their research activity to satisfy the research breadth rule had never ranked particularly well anyway.

“People choose these universities because they are convenient ways of getting to outcomes that have nothing to do with university prestige,” he said. “This is also true of many international students who are searching for the cheapest way to a visa with Australian work rights.”

Notwithstanding views that the rule unreasonably burdens smaller universities, many have strongly backed its retention. And notwithstanding suggestions that the rule’s removal could disproportionately benefit the Go8, the group strongly backed its creation.

“It is critical to the context of what it means to be a university…that universities undertake research in a range of fields,” Go8 chief executive Vicki Thomson said in a submission to Coaldrake’s review. “Research and teaching must be undertaken in those institutions best placed to deliver both.”

john.ross@timeshighereducation.com