Australia’s Universities: Last of the Great Socialist Enterprises?

This brings me to why universities will be forced to change.

Higher education is increasingly an international enterprise. With the advent of the Internet, satellite television, mass recruitment of overseas students, and the establishment of campuses in distant locations, every university in the world can reach students any place in the world. Our universities are now in a global competition, and with formidable competitors.

Let me give you an example. I spent the early years of my career at the University of Texas, in the medical school. I still receive the campus newspaper, the Daily Texan, 22 years after leaving. Recently, the newspaper contained an advertisement for a business manager for the Department of Obstetrics and Gynaecology. The advertisement went on to describe the department. Among other pertinent facts, it noted that there were 90 academic staff and that the department budget exceeded 27 million US dollars.

These are astonishing figures.

All of the departments of Obstetrics and Gynaecology in all Australian Universities combined would not even have half that number of academics, and we run entire medical schools on budgets of less than $27 million This is the kind of international competition we face.

If Texas decided to beam courses into Australia via satellite television or to teach to Australian students over the Internet, or even to open a branch campus in Australia, we could not stop them—and we should not be surprised if that is exactly what they decide to do. The famous MIT (the Massachusetts Institute of Technology) has opened operations in Singapore and in Cambridge, England.

What applies to teaching also applies to research. Cutting-edge research requires enormous resources. Universities without these resources will simply be left behind.

To make matters more desperate, we are not only under pressure from rich research universities, but also from low cost, high volume, private universities. The largest private university in the USA is the University of Phoenix, which enrols more than 40,000 students at campuses around the country. These students study at night in easily accessible rented office accommodation. To make things simple, students study one subject at a time. All of the subjects are popular ones - business and IT mainly. The staff consists of part-time teachers who work for casual rates; they teach from standardised curricula and they are not paid to do research. There are no sports facilities, student lounges, or refectories, so the University of Phoenix has a low cost structure. This means it can charge modest fees and still deliver a profit to its shareholders.

Australian universities are being squeezed from both directions. Our salaries and facilities do not compare with those offered by prestigious international research universities nor can we compete on price with low cost private providers such as the University of Phoenix. If we want to survive, then we have no choice but to change. Deregulation of the university system will be the engine that drives change.

I will now turn to what Australian Higher Education will look like when change finally occurs.

Australian higher education currently exists in a policy vacuum. We seem unable to have a sensible debate about its future. No one seems to have noticed, but a demographic time bomb is ticking away. Without any increase in the proportion of the population attending university, my own state of Western Australia will need to enrol 30,000 new students in the coming two or three decades. The present funding arrangements will not be able to accommodate this avalanche of new students and muddling through will not work. To prepare for the future, we must change now.

First, we need an explicit policy decision. Are we going to make higher education available to all Australians who can benefit, or will we continue to restrict access to universities. Higher education for all Australians sounds impossibly utopian. How can we afford it? But restricted access also has costs. In today’s world, an educated population raises the standard of living of the whole community. Limiting access may turn out to be more expensive for Australia, and more destructive of our economic and social aspirations, than opening education to everyone with the desire and ability.