Australian funding proposals elicit praise and protest

Australia’s government says its new funding system will “open the doors of opportunity” by bankrolling more university places and offering sweeteners to boost enrolments from regional and disadvantaged communities.

But critics say the new arrangements have a “blind spot” around postgraduate education and will constrain participation by curtailing unsubsidised enrolments.

A bill introduced into parliament on 25 June legislates a system of “managed growth” where the Australian Tertiary Education Commission (Atec) doles out places to universities from a “total allocation pool” set by the government.

Education minister Jason Clare said the pool would be expanded by 230,000 over the next decade, accumulating an additional 16,000 places each year in 2027, 2028 and 2029 and 19,000 a year thereafter.

Atec will have the power to allocate extra places to meet demand from disadvantaged and regional students. It will be able to request more places from the education minister if it underestimates demand. It will also allot an estimated 20,000 extra places over the next five years to help universities with too many unsubsidised students to adapt to the new regime.

The bill also legislates “needs-based” funding of at least an extra A$1,535 (£804) for each new indigenous or socio-economically disadvantaged “equity” student, and A$1,398 for each new regional campus enrolment. Universities will be able to use the additional money to pay for academic assistance such as tutoring or mentoring, or to give students scholarships or emergency financial support.

Clare said the current equity top-ups averaged just A$600 per student. He said the package would provide universities with an extra A$3.6 billion over the next decade.

The legislation ushers the “big structural changes” needed to realise the Universities Accord target for 80 per cent of Australians to have tertiary qualifications by 2050, Clare told parliament. “Talent is everywhere,” he said. “It’s opportunity that’s not, and this bill will help change that. It will change lives.”

But the Council of Australian Postgraduate Associations (Capa) said the package would exacerbate regional disadvantage by limiting its scope to undergraduate education.

Capa president Jesse Gardner-Russell said the bill offered no extra places or funding at the postgraduate level, even though the attainment gap between metropolitan and regional Australia was far more pronounced in postgraduate than undergraduate degrees. He said census data showed that regional people were approximately 40 per cent less likely than their city counterparts to have a bachelor’s degree but 60 per cent less likely to have postgraduate qualifications.

Gardner-Russell said the new system addressed the “narrower” gap but not the wider one. “Today’s legislation entrenches a two-track higher education system which says that undergraduate studies are for regional Australians and postgraduate degrees are for metropolitan Australians,” he said.

“I grew up in regional Australia. I know what it takes to get to university from the bush, let alone to go further. This bill tells a regional kid they can have the undergraduate degree, but the postgraduate qualification that gets them into the profession is a city privilege.”

Monash University higher education expert Andrew Norton said the proposed system would allow universities to boost their admissions by accepting an extra 5 per cent of unsubsidised students, up to a cap of 750. This would limit universities’ “flexibility” to accommodate extra local demand, he wrote in The Conversation.

Norton said the most recent available figures showed that nine universities were over-enrolled by more than 5 per cent. “Nervousness about over-enrolments will likely drive student numbers down below what they could have been,” he warned.

The system also requires the education minister to set the total allocation pool in the middle of the preceding year, well before demand can be gauged. Norton advised “modest” expectations from the new regime.

“Policies introducing both greater bureaucratic control and enrolment growth seem to be at least partially contradictory,” he wrote. “Total enrolments probably will increase, but not by as much as would have been possible with a more flexible system.”

The 2050 Alliance university grouping said the new system was welcome but would need “continued improvement” – particularly around equity definitions and the linking of needs-based funding with outreach programmes.

Shadow education minister Julian Leeser said the system put the interests of universities ahead of the interests of students. “The government is opting for a centrally planned model and deciding where places will go, because it thinks it knows best. A student from the bush who wants to study in Sydney will probably get a place, but…a student from Sydney [who] wants to study in Sydney might have to go to the bush.”

The bill does not change tuition fees, which now exceed A$55,000 for arts and business degrees as a result of the unpopular Job-ready Graduates (JRG) reforms of 2021. A Senate committee report published on 25 June recommended against a Greens bill to reverse the steepest JRG fee hikes.

Greens education spokeswoman Mehreen Faruqi protested in a dissenting report. “At the time JRG was introduced, Labor MPs labelled it as an act of ‘economic and cultural vandalism’. Now in government, Labor does not have the courage or desire to urgently rectify a bad policy.”

john.ross@timeshighereducation.com