Higher education is entering “a new bureaucratic era” warns pre-eminent policy analyst Andrew Norton (Monash U), taking us back a century to the Federation-era hybrid of free and regulated markets.
Professor Norton spoke at Future Campus’s conference last week, focusing on the central role of the imminent Australian Tertiary Education Commission (ATEC).
The basis of the system will be whatever a minister instructs ATEC, which allocates places in the basis of “compacts” with each university. Growth will be managed with a 5% ceiling based on equivalent full-time student load, with a 97.5% floor, based on the previous year.
But Norton warns, there will be “limited scope to over-enrol when demand moves.” And this could be an issue for equity numbers – he quotes (an un-named VC) telling him, “we have felt that we should over-enrol based on demand due to the university’s mission to serve students from disadvantaged backgrounds.”
Except demand driven funding is selectively back – it is already in-place for Indigenous bachelor students and will be extended to medicine. Plus, it will “effectively” apply to places for students from (to be defined) under-represented, disadvantaged and equity backgrounds. And there will be needs-based loadings for them, as well as regional campuses in general.
The problem Norton points to is what happens if ATEC gets the calculation wrong in allocating a university’s equity and etc places – do students have to find another place to study, does the institution ask the commission for more money?
Counting on cash from ATEC will also be complicated by its role in national skills planning.
“Will it prescriptively allocate places to courses?,” Norton asks. “Will this be a more effective version of Job Ready Graduates?”
This all will compound into what he calls, “stranded resources.”
“The more conditions added to a Commonwealth Supported Place, the lower the chance it can be used in a specific university, for a course or by a specific sort of student,” Professor Norton said.
And then there is the challenge for universities to work out their international enrolments; ATEC will regulate them from ’27.
Norton also points to a second set of regulations, driven by perceptions of universities and regulator TEQSA failing to address issues including underpayment of casual and overpayment of senior staff, as well as insufficient support for students, including in cases of sexual misconduct. He cites 13 areas where universities are newly or more rigorously regulated.
Overall, he warns, “ATEC’s goal of system stability goal may help some struggling unis, but more student places will be unused, fewer students will enrol in their first preference course or university” and the regulator will make “many invisible, trade-offs.”