VC’ s corner
The new frontier of academics
Staff may have to adapt to technological advances in future, while also having deep disciplinary knowledge. By Caroline McMillen
32 | Issue 2 2013
The expansion of Australia’ s higher education system in the past 50 years has created a sector that has delivered research excellence on the world stage, demonstrated leadership in international education and responded productively to the challenge in the Bradley reforms to support more Australian students from all walks of life to achieve a university degree.
While the sector has impressively navigated the challenges of structural reform, international competition and doing more with less – its collective capacity to continue to deliver globally competitive research and innovation and contribute to the national skills and productivity agenda will require a step change in the level of debate on building Australia’ s future university workforce.
To date, such debates have primarily focused on the demographics of the ageing workforce or headline industrial issues, and have usually been held in the context of the immediate impact of the growing pains of an expanding system on the current university workforce.
These and many other issues are material and important to both institutions and individuals, however, planning needs to occur outside the heat of polarising“ bargaining” environments on how Australia can grow a future university workforce to meet the challenges of a fiercely competitive global research and education system.
As foreshadowed by the federal government’ s Australia in the Asian Century white paper, the world’ s economic centre of gravity will shift inexorably towards Asia over the next 30 years. By 2020, it is estimated that more than half of the world’ s middle class will live in Asia, and countries across this region are rapidly increasing the capacity and quality of their education systems.
While the projected demand for higher education across Asia will outstrip the supply of places until at least 2025, there will be intense competition from within and outside of Asia for international students. Parents of prospective students will choose universities carefully and often on the university’ s standing in world ranking systems or in international disciplinary league tables.
At first glance, Australia looks well positioned as the investment to date in building the global standing of our relatively young university system has delivered impressive results. The median age of the country’ s universities is just 26 years but in 2012
Australia had 14 universities ranked in the Times Higher Education Top 100 universities under 50, and 10 ranked in the QS Top 50 universities under 50.
The Excellence in Research Australia 2012 assessment found that there were 1348 fields of research rated at world standard or above across all Australian universities. This strong performance has been built on two decades of growth in both the volume and quality of research output which has occurred in parallel with an increase in the number of staff with doctoral qualifications – particularly in the younger group of Innovative Research Universities( IRU) and Australian Technology Network( ATN) universities.
But there are challenges ahead, analysis shows that while R & D expenditure grew 2.5 fold in universities in Australia between 1992 and 2008, this appears to be a consequence of an increase in the number of research active staff, rather than an increase in expenditure per researcher *. Thus while research funding has increased, it may be as difficult for researchers to access research funding in the current environment as it was some 20 years ago. One of the under-explored implications of the Bradley targets is the potential to further accelerate Australia’ s research output. The risk, however, is that the staff recruited now to meet the immediate challenge of the education of the greater number of students in lecture theatres and tutorial rooms, may not be equipped or supported to respond as our counterparts in Asia build powerhouses of research and innovation.
Australia’ s global competitiveness in 2020 and beyond depends on the skills and talent of the academic cohort we hire today, the environment we create around them and the capacity to leverage engagement with global peers.
Just as a hypothetical, imagine the impact of positioning the future workforce with all nations across Asia, including Australia, through an“ Asian Research and Innovation Council” in 2020 to drive programs similar to those that have driven research expansion in the European Union. If Australia is to be able to harness such an opportunity on its regional doorstep then we need to plan to ensure that we remain an attractive destination for outstanding academic staff from across the world and that the brakes are not applied to the further growth of a first rate research and innovation workforce at this critical moment in the Asian Century.