VC’ s corner
The path to greater research
A close look at funding schemes here and in the UK reveals the importance of supporting higher degree candidates. By Paul Wellings
One of the recurring higher education policy debates of the past two decades has focused on how much to invest in research and the best way of allocating these resources. This has been a bone of contention ever since the creation of a unified national system of higher education and the classification of former colleges of advanced education as research-active entities.
Some argue in favour of the further concentration of resources into a sub-set of institutions, reversing the policy position from reforms generated by then-education minister John Dawkins’ green paper in 1987. Others favour the geographical allocation of resources linked to existing centres of regional business and industry infrastructure. The unified system was created with the intent, in part, of expanding research in order to cater to the needs of different sectors across the regions of Australia. However, the level of funding to do this has always been constrained and this has limited the success rates of applicants for competitive grants.
The views expressed here are not unique. Similar voices can be heard in the UK, notwithstanding the differences in the scale of the research sectors, the variation in the industrial R & D landscape and the differences in approach to evaluating research excellence.
Both countries have unified sectors. Australia led the way in 1987 with Dawkins. The UK followed five years later. However, the assessment of research quality and the allocation of scarce funding for it have followed different paths in each country. The UK completed six assessments between 1986 and 2008. The 2014 version is under way and includes research impact for the first time. In the UK, the research assessment exercise pre-dated the unified system. From the outset it was used to determine the base research funding and now it is a major factor shaping the core appropriation budget for universities. For the top third of all universities the outcome of each research assessment is material and helps shape the budget over a relatively long cycle. Here, in contrast, we completed assessments in 2010 and 2012, well after the unified system was established. For Australian universities, the consequences of a strong or weak performance are reputational rather than financial, as the total funding pool at risk is small.
These assessments have used various tools to examine the quality of research outputs. The objective is original, significant, world-leading work. The six UK cycles have shown remarkably consistent institutional rankings and broadly similar disciplinary strengths. The system has continued to reward historically strong departments and created limited opportunity for new entrants. All indicators suggest the same will be true in Australia.
There are two strong lead indicators of institutional performance. The first is the number of publications in the top 10 per cent of citations for that discipline. The second is the strength of
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