Opinion
Intrigued by the excursion into discord without insight, logic or pragmatism that has passed for publications observing Australian HE in recent years, I am embarking on a new side project, a book on the future of the sector.
I started with a blank sheet of paper and can’t repress my engagement bent, so decided to kill a few minutes coming up with a spectacular title, as part of a series of procrastinations engineered to avoid putting fingers to keyboard and getting started on the content.
I quite liked ‘Pride cometh before an organisational restructure.’ It actually does mean something – the observed phenomenon of universities choosing to believe they have done as well as they can with their curriculum renewal, marketing strategy, recruitment outreach and application and enrolment processes, so when faced with financial decline, they move their sclerotic apparatus to a default response of job cuts.
Instead with some collective humility and a recognition that the community doesn’t want what they are putting forward, organisations can change and avoid the cuts – or reduce their scale. Critically, when staff are also presented with the research and invited to help solve the issues at hand, you invariably get, if not a better outcome, then at least a better communications result.
I’ve done it a dozen times or so, working with teams that are not yet too toxic and leaders humble enough to listen. I’ve also run into road blocks where institutions and staff say they want solutions, but then resist solutions that take them outside of the status quo. So yes, effective change can work. But the change has to begin with listening to the outside world and responding, and be grounded in evidence-based strategy that can be communicated and justified to all – not simply desperately clinging to a romantic notion of what should be or an executive-level plan rolled out without a fact-based explanation.
When the sector collectively wakes up and looks in the mirror prepared to admit that student rights to reject courses that are supposedly good for them, and begins to build a future around responding to and influencing the inalienable right of every individual to choose their own study regime, the world suddenly looks very different. The words you are using to precisely describe your course which your audience may not understand, they have to change. The pictures on your brochures, the words that have worked for you in the past on the open day stand, they too may have to change. The public good isn’t served by preserving a 1990s idyll of academic utopia – but by a better informed public choosing courses, supporting research funding, prosecuting the case for a streamlined regulation system because they know they need their tertiary institutions.
There are some other titles which could weigh a little less heavy. ‘Controlling your Council; the anti-governance benchmark for institutional success,’ and it’s hard to go past the more tabloid “Golden handcuffs, immortality of pet projects and the Chancellor who turned a blind eye,” but while they all provide a chortle, they don’t really capture the essence of what I think we need to hear.
The sector is hurting, but not broken. AI, JRG, spiralling Federal Government regulation, HECS-HELP indexation, some notable policy failures and the collapse of social licence have all coalesced into an imperfect storm. The storm is having significant impact in terms of job cuts and a hollowing out of many smaller, lower-status institutions, while many of Australia’s HE behemoths have been able to weather the storm largely unscathed.
Because sector representation has been built on a creaking consensus model, the very real pain felt by institutions that have been pulled apart by well-meaning but poorly researched and applied regulation appears to be overwhelmed by the voices of the far larger, far better resourced sandstones who have continued to make hay even when the sun does not shine.
The University of Sydney, Melbourne, UNSW and Monash each raked in more than $1 billion in international student fees last year, while many other smaller universities dove deep into the red, penalised for focusing on recruiting from nations the Federal Government deemed high risk and/or struggling to maintain demand amidst growing anti-international rhetoric.
The Accord, which proposes the enrolment of one million additional students over the next 25 years without identifying new funding models to achieve that goal, and the framework of tertiary education providing access with diversity of entry levels and campus locations is rapidly crumbling without a funding model to support the bottom half of earners in the system. With international education still worth $48 billion on latest figures, there remains plenty of money in the sector as a whole to finance reform, once the Government looks beyond the rich kids cheer squad and realises it is inadvertently strangling the very institutions which are essential to achieve the Accord’s goals, let alone retain a balanced and diverse system accessible across the country.
The decline of HASS is a microcosm of this crisis, in some respects. The failure of custodians of humanities disciplines to persuade Australians about the critical importance of their craft, (even at a time when every second LinkedIn AI spruiker says that the machines will take much, but never take our creativity), is an issue. Arts degrees are still very popular, but the demand trend is pointing down. This doesn’t mean students are wrong or stupid. Or that JRG can be solely to blame (languages and the classics were in decline long before). Nor does it mean these disciplines are worthless. It is simply that there is a disconnect between what we offer and what the community wants. How to bridge that chasm is the question, but too often the response is that marketing got it wrong, corporatisation is killing us, or maybe we just all watch too many reels.
The idea of changing what we offer, how we offer it, how we speak, produce research insights, welcome people through the door, etc is far less popular than accepting that a bright future is ahead through adapting the way we work to meet community half way.
The basic math cant be ignored. If student fees can’t pay for jobs, then things have to change. But there are solutions beyond cutting jobs – finding new ways to engage and present courses. My colleagues and I did this with two major IT discipline departments, which were threatened with closure if they continued to shed students; but which thrived within 12 months, after we worked with them to revise the way their wares were presented so they were both interesting and intelligible to target audiences. This can’t be done with every department or every course, but there are opportunities to reinvent the curriculum, modes of delivery and/or student experience and that can often catalyse changes in enrolment trend.
Being brave enough to listen to community and then win enough power internally to be able to radically adapt is a big step though – and not easy. Sometimes, it’s simply not possible.
Accepting resistance and mediocre marketing in the hope that the great unwashed will see sense and start buying a course that they have increasingly turned their backs on over the past couple of decades is easier. And sometimes, with centralised power bases and weakened bargaining positions due to declining revenue, the institution shuts off avenues to constructive solutions.
We can of course, disagree on the precise nature of the way forward, but there are plenty of emerging indicators to suggest a strong future ahead for HASS, as well as for the whole tertiary sector, when curriculum renewal is based around community demand rather than historic precedent.
For growth in domestic and sooner or later international enrolments (in the institutions which are still missing out) and for new models of delivery that will help tertiary education escape current models of thinking and operation which are hurtling towards obsolescence.
New narratives are required about the sector to reclaim agency, so that the opacity and beige irrelevance of the current consensus-speak used to advocate for HE in Australia doesn’t mask the differentiated models, policies and strategies required.
Internally, new conversations are required now. Of course they are required externally as well, but change is clearly first required within.
That’s why we bother running an independent conference, HE FEST, full of questions for every presenter, full of constructive discussions about change required to lock in a sustainable future. The same old chatter doesn’t serve anyone beyond the chatterers.
Meanwhile, there’s a book to write. I have nothing on the page, beyond a couple of headlines. Must be time for a coffee.
Tim Winkler is Director of Twig Marketing and publisher of Future Campus.