After footy training, my son regularly walks into our local Woolies with no shoes. I often pop in covered in paint or dirt or grass, depending on what jobs the day has presented.
We live about two minutes out of one of the lowest socio-economic communities in Victoria. The beauty of our environs is that you are accepted regardless of clothing / shoes / dirt on boots or body. We are all just trying to pull together enough food to get us through another dinner time. Some of us have a greater expectation of getting food on the table than others.
Many of my fellow patrons are the people Jason Clare and a generation of reformers before him have hoped to attract to the base of the nearest ivory tower.
The challenge with these plans, and with the reform plans of many universities seeking to build their equity credentials, is that they are built by, or almost exclusively driven by the institutions.
The conceit of supplier-centric reform is that organisations and/or governments believe they can divine what is best for the marginalised people that many rarely encounter but benevolently believe they can help.
This is not just an equity issue – but a broader policy malaise. When the previous government’s now much maligned job-ready graduates program tried to bend demand by manipulating the price of degrees, I and no doubt any other self-respecting market research / strategist who has sat in bland classrooms with thousands of students over the past few years could see it wouldn’t work – HECS / FEE-HELP price sensitivity amongst prospective undergraduates is really, really low. At the time the policy came out I wrote that it wouldn’t work and a number of others said the same. And so now that has failed, I look cleverer than a long-forgotten group of policy wonks, but the world is worse off because many including my second oldest son are paying through the nose for a degree which most now agree is overpriced. Pyrrhic doesn’t even begin to describe the result.
Neither the fact that I live closer to a low socio economic community than many others, or the minor economic privations of my childhood qualify me for particularly special insights. They are rather a regular reminder of the things that thousands of students, their teachers and parents have told me over the past 15 years.
As someone who has worked with more than half of the universities in the nation and conducted research and developed strategies for many, I can let you in on a quick consultant’s secret. Many higher education challenges arise from market myopia.
The distaste that reverberated from business nomenclature being adopted into the sector over the past couple of decades and dismay over perceived corporatisation of universities seems to have given market research a bad name – so much so that even the word ‘market’ is hotly contested in some arenas. This is perhaps one of the reasons that we too infrequently stop to look at what people actually want before we commission our seventh restructure, creating a slightly more elegant version of what we believe the marginalised masses need.
I am quite excited by the open door to change that the Government has left open with their release of the draft accord, but as the serious work continues to define what is really important, the silence of market research and inattention to demand-side factors are a persistent concern.
Want to know how to get more students from unrepresented groups attending? You can look at all the collated reports, statistics and promising case studies and you can cite exemplars of positive change – that’s a great start. But if you want to grow aspiration and opportunity, you have to listen to stories and perspectives from the people you are trying to help. Sure, fix the schools, fix childcare, fix unis. But if your parents haven’t got enough income to feed the family, or you need to care for a sick relative, or your sibling has a drug problem or are up all night playing games in your bedroom, then you have a demand problem that is not being addressed.
Our current operational impulse in response to the accord is to simply fill the courses we offer with more people from under-represented backgrounds. But what if they want to study something else, or some other way, or in some other location, or they just can’t see how they study because of the need for food / healthcare / mental health care / care for family members etc? The supply side solution will make the stats look better for a couple of years, and then risks failure unless far more detail is understood about the marginalised market we wish to reach.
If we just want a quick jump in enrolments, I can save you a whole bunch of policy time and resourcing. Just recalibrate the focus of your ad budget, package up some accommodation options, redevelop your messaging and put a couple of additional nice people on the frontline and we can pretty quickly grow numbers of students from marginalised backgrounds. But who is ready to look after them when they arrive and are you ready to offer what they actually want, rather than what they feel they need to try to retrofit their life around? The result will please statisticians for a couple of years, but probably few others.
As anyone who shops at my local supermarket will be able to tell you, that’s not a sustainable solution. A couple of months ago they stole all the baskets. Then the shopping trolleys went missing for a bit. There’s mental health, drug, family issues all laid out there in the aisles. These are not people ready to queue up at an open day stand when the campus gates open slightly wider. They are queueing in the hope that their card has enough on it for a couple of groceries that evening. I avoid queuing for the human cashiers because the sadness of successive people as their card is denied and they have to pare down their meagre grocery shop is a constant grind.
The people in my area are really pretty similar to those in the other, fancier suburbs I have also hung out in – they just face more issues, starting with cash. Maslow’s hierarchy has food, safety and shelter at a significantly higher priority level than entry to University or TAFE.
People in lower socio-economic groups also perceive university differently, they consume information via different channels, and have different aspirations. Not worse, or better – just different. Not in a homogeneous way either – meaning that market insights are required for a wide range of underrepresented groupings.
Adjust the way universities and the VET sector appeal to, engage with and facilitate enrolment and transition of these students are perhaps as important as the other measures under discussion in changing equity outcomes.
Market research is not a manifestation of marketisation gone mad. It is critical to development of sustainable long-term policy solutions that will give this chance of reform a decent shot. Practical insights from professional staff who understand the demand equation appear to be a critical gap in the current approach. Yet too often, it is forgotten or disregarded by policy formulators.
If you’re unconvinced, drop by and I’ll take you down to my local Woolies. Hearing and responding to the people you seek to help is fundamental to opportunities for transformation.
