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The case for offering distinct choices in education post-pandemic .
Kent Anderson interviewed by Martin Betts
Kent Anderson , deputy vicechancellor at Newcastle University , joined the HEDx podcast soon after a two-year spell in ministers ’ Tehan and Tudge ’ s office guiding recent policy changes . He commented on the divide between chancelleries and ministry that has developed in recent years , and puts it down to the challenge of listening and who is in charge of the sandpit .
The traverse of the landscape of policy changes concluded with an astute assessment of strategy options for those that listen best , and read the tea leaves quickest . This may come from those among the 40 universities with very different starting points and contexts , from private providers , or the Edtech sector .
MB : A number of commentators have said a gulf ’ s been opening up over a number of years between the sector and both the elected offices of our government , and also the department and its administrators . You ’ ve had a chance to see it from both sides . Do you think this is real ? KA : I know the narrative and in some ways it ’ s a very comforting one because it confirms our bias and our worst suspicions . Unequivocally , it did not align with my lived experience . On the government side , I found on both sides of the aisle people who really wanted to do the best for Australia , and the outcomes they wanted to achieve were pretty uniform . The road to those outcomes were quite different . So there ’ s a lot of goodwill and a lot of good intentions .
Part of the narrative is , ‘ they ’ ve really got it in for us and they ’ re just trying to screw us ’. And that is not what I saw , ever . On the other side of it , and here I consider myself a higher ed person rather than a government person , I think we need to own some responsibility for this relationship and for this discourse .
What I saw and what I would repeat to all of my higher ed colleagues is that we ’ re really , really bad listeners . We go in there and tell people what the right answer is in a utopian , perfect world . And we ’ re really , really bad at listening to both the obvious and the subtle signs about the issues that are being addressed , and what are the levers that have political possibility , and then putting forward a suite of creative ideas to address that . Your one single idea that you thought up in your mind is not going to get through the political eye of the needle that will deliver you actual policy in legislation .
We ’ ve seen some interesting policy changes in this last year , including a move towards research commercialisation in a very focused way , and a scaling up of online and offshore international student recruitment . Where do those two elements of policy change come from ? Are they justified ? And are they going to endure ? Minister Tudge and Minister Tehan , the two ministers I served , had lots of commonality , but they are distinct people with distinct visions . Regarding job-ready graduates , I think minister Tehan was driven , firstly , by a real frustration around the inequitable results higher education produces between people that live in the cities and those from the outskirts and the regions . The great inequity is actually a geographical one : if you are born into a regional area , you are half as likely to graduate from university than if you are born in a city .
The other driver for minister Tehan was financial reform of the higher education sector . The amount of funding had been capped . It wasn ’ t indexed , and you needed to fix that because universities were stagnating .
Minister Tudge is a different person . He comes from an education background , particularly from the consulting world , and he is convinced the future vision of education should be much more disaggregated , dynamic and more digital . His real driver , whether it be domestic or international is , how do we nudge
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