Are Australian universities a scam?
How the Commonwealth push for quantity eroded teaching quality.
The young man grips the sides of the podium as though clinging to a wooden door in the North Atlantic Ocean. His voice is a tremor. His eyes bore into his notes. He swallows, then falters and fights to finish his sentence. He is terrified. He is humiliated. He is inarticulate and impossible to understand.
A passerby might assume we’ve stumbled upon an unfortunate student destined to fail their first-year communications course. The truth is far worse.
This is a computer science lecturer from a Go8 university in 2013 – one of the highest ranking institutions in the nation.
Selling education
Around the world, universities market themselves based on rankings derived from research publications, and Australia is no exception. Go8 universities have an advantage in this game due to their historic research endowment and prestigious academic legacy but the core product they advertise is “world-class” education. The two sides of the university operate in tandem. Research raises the reputation which attracts the students who in turn pay fees, though not to acquire research but to receive teaching. The only problem is, there’s not enough funding to seriously pursue excellence in both research and teaching. Therefore, institutions face immense pressure to invest in the discipline which will earn the rankings and maintain prestige.
It’s a safe bet. Everyone believes in the value of attending a university with a great reputation. The main problem, of course, is that students enrolling for a “world-class” education simply do not get what they’re paying for. Universities are unapologetically geared for chasing publication metrics and there are precisely zero reasons that a prolific researcher should make a great teacher. If a researcher happens to be good at teaching, this is at best a happy coincidence. These coincidences do sometimes occur and Australia is home to a number of profoundly talented educators, however an education system built on luck has no hope of ever attaining world-class performance. The advertising claims are hollow.
Universities have no reason to kerb these claims because there is simply no risk. By the time the undergraduates figure out they’ve been duped, they’re halfway through a 3-year program. What are they going to do? Questioning the quality of tuition provided for your bachelor degree is not like making a warranty claim for a toaster. The best you can hope for is that your student survey at the conclusion of the semester leads to improvements for the students who come after you. This lack of recourse was best summed up by a staff member I spoke to back in 2013, “You’re a small cog in a very large machine.” Suck it up, kid.
Reshaping the higher education sector
Australian universities are products of public policy. The reforms introduced by John Dawkins in the late 1980s, which created the Unified National System, have had a singular impact on the structure of the higher education sector in Australia and the lived experience of those who study, teach, and research within higher education institutions.
Dawkins viewed higher education through the lens of an instrumentalist and believed that if Australia was going to thrive in a world of rapidly changing technology, universities and colleges of advanced education (CAEs) had an important role to play by equipping the population with skills for the future. This was an expression of Human Capital Theory, developed by economists Gary Becker, Jacob Mincer, and Theodore Schultz, which linked investment in education with improved industrial productivity.
John Dawkins was a visionary, setting out to equip Australia for the future. Unfortunately, his approach was dominated by a narrow brand of economic thinking and management theory. The dramatic change which Dawkins wrought on higher education was driven by belief in the connection between market competition and efficiency, economies of scale, and market liberalisation. The problem was not in the application of these theories to the higher education sector. It was that these high-level ideas left far too much room for magical thinking.
By coercing smaller CAEs to merge with universities, and mandating corporate performance management practises, Dawkins hoped that economies of scale would naturally arise.
By reducing government funding and placing institutions in competition with each other for research funds, Dawkins hoped the efficiency of research would automatically improve.
By making funding contingent and forcing universities to compete in a unified system without categories for different types of institutions, Dawkins hoped that a diverse and innovative array of educational organisations would spontaneously appear.
No provision was made to preserve disciplines which do not lend themselves to scaling, such as the arts. No provision was made to prevent institutions from diluting their spend on teaching in order to bolster their emaciated research budgets. No consideration was given to the probability that institutions of the same size, following the same mandatory management practises, subject to the same market forces and government-imposed KPIs might not diversify but rather end up adopting a uniform set of strategies to survive.
In the years since the Dawkins Reforms these and other unimagined consequences have remade major Australian universities as stressful places to work and unengaging places to study. Worse still, there is reason to doubt that the current configuration of the higher education sector is suited to the original goal of the reforms, to bolster national productivity.
Quantity over quality
The fundamental flaw in the Dawkins Reforms was lack of technical depth. In applying the philosophy of one school of economics, and following dominant neoliberal trends of the 80s, Dawkins emphasised generic ideas of markets and competition without considering the unique characteristics of the tertiary education market, or the mechanisms responsible for generating real value in the higher education sector. In short, he re-jigged the system without ever stopping to understand how it worked.
Despite earnest lip service to preserving the quality of teaching, scholarship, and research, the Dawkins Reforms were only ever serious about delivering one result: a greater number of graduates with less government funding. This was achieved, but at a cost.
The Dawkins Reforms framed university productivity in terms of the number of graduates produced, while quality assurance was deemed the responsibility of the universities themselves. It is difficult to imagine an equivalent in any other sector. It was as if the government had commissioned the rapid delivery of an enormous fleet of new submarines but left it to the manufacturers to decide whether or not they should be waterproof. The Tertiary Education Quality and Standards Agency now enforces a standards-based approach to quality assurance in the higher education sector, but TEQSA only materialised in 2011 and affords institutions an enormous amount of latitude through mechanisms such as self-accreditation.
The story of quality is told most clearly by looking at the same statistics that are touted to be the proof of greater productivity. In 1990, tertiary institutions had on average one staff member for every 13 students. By 2020, the number of students per staff member had increased to more than 21. No miraculous innovation in the teaching process occurred in the intervening years, neither was there any change in the basic needs of students. If anything, the mandate to admit more and more students each year has led to cohorts that require much more individual support, while staff numbers are failing to grow with the student population.
It is illogical to describe the result as an improvement. Forcing such a dramatic increase in the workload of teachers does not magically create better teachers but compounds stress for staff and reduces the time available for personalised student engagement.
Mass casualisation of the workforce is another source of acute pressure for staff. While vice-chancellors receive generous remuneration packages, at least two-thirds of university staff are employed on short-term contracts. As recent uni students would know, many teaching staff are PhD candidates or undergraduate students who recently completed the course they have been hired to teach. Such arrangements might make sense for coordinating the local primary school soccer team, but none of this could be expected to produce a world-class education experience.
The implications for the overall quality of graduates are grave. Staff report being pressured to pass students regardless of the quality of their coursework. Multiple institutions have been accused of admitting international students without the basic English language skills required to undertake their programs. Given the pressure from government to attain high rates of “efficiency” and the significance of pass rates to institutional reputation, the incentives for universities to manipulate marking standards are strong.
These concerns call into question the very project of constructing a system of mass higher education. What is the merit in being able to say that 5.5 million Australians have bachelor degrees if the quality of those degrees is in flux?
To assess university productivity in terms of quantity without consideration of quality undermines the whole point of production. Nobody would be impressed with Toyota producing 9.3 million vehicles in 2023 if each car lasted only one week before breaking down. Quality is what makes production valuable.
This brings us back to the magical thinking of Dawkins. It was never going to be enough to draw a link between higher degrees and industrial productivity, then force universities to accommodate more students with less government funding. Greater numbers of graduates could not be expected to create a more productive Australia if the strain caused by enrolling thousands of additional students undermined the quality of their training.
What about industry?
If government’s goal for higher education was greater industrial productivity, the fitness of graduates for employment should have been front and centre of the reforms. Of course, input from industry and professional bodies has always been sought but redesigning the higher education sector for better industry integration is much more difficult than pushing more students through the doors. It is easy to treat universities as a black box, pressure them to pump out more graduates and call this progress. It is much more difficult to carefully examine the core factors underpinning effective vocational training and design a system which can support these factors at scale. This is not a job for economists but for education experts, scientists, and engineers.
The Dawkins Reforms did not create an environment that promoted this type of analysis and innovation, rather they created an environment of corporate performance management and penny-pinching budget cuts. Today’s universities are pushed to optimise for reduced costs and the maximisation of graduate numbers.
With this in view we must ask some basic questions of the higher education sector as well as industry expectations placed on entry-level employees. Technical disciplines such as science and engineering provide a useful case study, but the principles apply to all vocational training.
Why does it take four years to complete an engineering degree? Why do most engineering companies hire full-time graduates instead of part-time cadets who complete their degree alongside paid industry employment? Are graduates preferred because some mystical dust settles on their heads the morning after the graduation ceremony, enabling them to become instantly competent at any position within industry? If only. Graduate engineers require extensive on-the-job training and most end up leveraging only a tiny fraction of the broad curriculum covered in their degree.
Four years of an undergraduate degree is four years spent removed from the context of industry; four years that a young professional is not developing an understanding of how the workplace functions; four years spent optimising study and regurgitation techniques for performance in an examination hall instead of learning to work in a cross-functional team, contributing solutions to the urgent problems facing the nation today. In this regard, our engineers have an inferior setup to their counterparts in the skilled trades who are supported with academic training while they learn on the job.
A closer look at productivity
The current degree-based vocational training system is transparently inefficient. Inasmuch as universities take a long time to produce generalists with limited practical skills, insulated from on-the-job experience, they are not bolstering but hindering the productivity of our nation.
Another consideration not often acknowledged when assessing university productivity is the strong baseline from which gifted students are starting.
Many young Australians are utterly brilliant. They are hard-working and determined and they form resourceful networks to support each other. You could take these young adults directly from the Year 12 classroom and drop them into an industry and they’d find a way to succeed. It is critical to recognise this tenacity in our nation’s youth because it reveals the fact that in many cases, students are excelling in spite of our universities and not because of them. Prestigious institutions cover over sub-par teaching by pointing to the excellent performance of their graduates even though this performance derives not from the training of the institution but the notable talents of the students they attract.
The problem is worse than misattributed credit. Distorted education systems hurt gifted and average students alike. Not only are we missing out on a massive portion of the population with the capacity to excel who are denied the quality teaching and training which could unlock their potential, but one-size-fits-all programs mean we are delaying entry to the workforce for some of the most valuable minds in the nation – putting them through time-consuming box-ticking exercises built to satisfy a system that wasn’t designed to maximise industrial utility in the first place.
As long as universities continue to compromise the quality of their teaching in favour of research, fee-paying students will be forced to compensate with their own creativity. Today, massive numbers of students routinely skip lectures, which can only be viewed as a strategic use of resources on the part of undergraduates even as it underscores the scam that university education has become. Ask any student and they’ll tell you – a higher calibre of tuition is frequently available for free online. Lectures, tutorials, sometimes direct lines to industry experts – all online and often free. The only thing students can’t get elsewhere is an exam paper with the university logo.
Conclusion
As The Dawkins Revolution summarises, “[Dawkins] turned colleges into universities, free education into HECS, elite education into mass education, a local focus into an international outlook, vice-chancellors into CEOs, and most academics into both teachers and researchers.”
The end result is a higher education sector which awards multi-million dollar salaries to vice-chancellors and fumbles serving staff, students, and the nation as a whole.
Given the gap between university training and the jobs to which students aspire, young Australians enrolling in higher education today must grasp every opportunity to immerse themselves in industry. Industry leaders ought to do their bit by getting undergraduates in the door early to develop sustained, high-value relationships.
We need elected representatives who are serious about setting up young Australians for success. It’s not enough to wave the public policy wand and hope that the details all fall into place. We cannot crow about our commitment to quality while continuing to bury the issue in bureaucracy. Actual reform requires a first-principles analysis of the mechanisms required for delivering world-class education. Technology advances through meticulous research and design and our education system is no different.
Dawkins was right about the pivotal role of higher education driving the prosperity of the nation. This is precisely why the mistaken formulation of university productivity as nothing more than a high number of graduates incurs such a heavy cost. We need a pipeline that recognises and leverages the capabilities of young Australians and gifted teachers to rapidly expand the capabilities of our workforce and spur innovation.
Without additional reform, Australia risks becoming like that humiliated computer science lecturer: terrified and useless, while a global audience looks on with a mixture of pity and disdain.
Photo by Nathan Dumlao on Unsplash.
Great work Sam!