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Young: funding needs major overhaul
The Go8 has urged Australian senators to support federal government moves to deregulate university fees as part of a greater plan to diversify and strengthen higher education.
By Andrew Bracey
Speaking at the National Press Club, Go8 chair professor Ian Young said a major overhaul of existing university funding arrangements was needed to prevent Australian institutions from falling behind their international competitors, particularly in research.
In endorsing the Coalition’ s push to deregulate fees, Young said changes were needed to reward and foster higher-quality research. To do so, he argued, would allow Australia to capitalise commercially on its research and technology advancements and build a more sustainable economy that was less reliant on agriculture and mining.
Young, speaking in July, pointed to figures indicating that Australia ranked last when compared with other Organisation for Economic Co-operation and
Go8 chair professor Ian Young
Development( OECD) nations – including countries such as the UK, US, Sweden, Slovenia and the Netherlands – when it came to collaboration between business and higher education. Education funding reform, he said, was the way to enable Australia to build its technology, science and innovation sectors in order to compete with other nations into the future.
“ If we choose not to be a creator of knowledge we will get left behind,” he told the National Press Club.“ It will increasingly be the creators of the new ideas that are also the ones who will develop the technology and benefit from the wealth it generates. It would be a great tragedy for our nation, for our universities, for our future generations, if our senators pass up this opportunity and leave us with no reform, harsh funding cuts and the likelihood of ever-declining funding for research and education.
“ That outcome would mean everbigger universities, ever-bigger classes, more casual staff, less internationally important research. It would mean decay of our system.
However, Young did warn the government against plans to increase the rate of repayment for HECS-HELP debts, saying that the system was helping ensure that“ academic ability, not financial background, is the only barrier to university entry”.
He added that students should not be expected to carry the full burden of the additional funding requirements facing universities into the future but acknowledged that change was needed to move away from existing per-student funding arrangements.
“ We have created a perverse incentive that rewards universities for enrolling as many students as possible and teaching them as cheaply as possible – that’ s what our current system does,” Young said.“ The nature of our university system forces us to be average. We have very few terrible universities, but we also have no truly outstanding universities.”
Young also suggested that under a deregulated system Australian universities would probably lower enrolment rates, as they would no longer need to rely on high student numbers to underwrite research funding shortfalls.
Australian university student populations of 40,000-plus more than double those of comparable research-focused universities internationally, such as Stanford, Cambridge and ETH Zurich, which Young said had between 15,000 and 18,000.
“ The outstanding California Institute of Technology [ has ] only 2200 students,” he noted. Our universities are huge by world standards. This is bad for the quality of the education we provide to our young people and bad for the quality of research.
“ Research concentration is essential. It builds the critical mass of talented staff and students required for the chemistry to work – to build the innovation required.”
Young’ s call for smaller student populations has since gained the support of the Business Council of Australia, with president Catherine Livingstone arguing that too many of the nation’ s school leavers were enrolling in university.
Livingstone told Fairfax Media that the price signals expected to result under the government’ s proposed deregulation of the sector might encourage prospective students to consider other professional training and education pathways instead.
“ I would say there are too many people going to university and not enough going through the VET system,” she said.“ It does not preclude them from later entry into the university system. I just think some students would be better off with vocation and skill training and having work experience.” ■
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