While Future Campus dives deep into the future of higher education in Australia at our Symposium today, across town the nation's Chancellors and Vice-Chancellors will be gathering behind closed doors for a convivial natter.
Last year it was social licence, but this year, where do we start? So much to talk about, so little time. If you were setting the agenda to try to retain the attention and hopefully the assent of the majority of the room to make change (every big meeting needs a good communique at the end), then there is an embarrassment of riches in topics to consider.
Racism? Antisemitism? Spiralling regulation? Life with or without an ATEC? JRG fees? Research funding? The lack of any replacement for ERA despite the last national research measurement effort being in 2018? Industrial issues? Governance?
This year's meeting is interesting not just because of the range of issues that the sector is grappling with, but also the massive disparity in staffing, funding and fortune of universities across Australia. Common ground is very hard to find when headlines trumpet that the sector is drowning in cash, and yet the majority of the sector surplus is held in the leather-bound treasure chests of a relatively small number of institutions, while many others have balance sheets that are predominantly of a red hue.
As the Government’s figures show, sector fortunes are wildly varied.
The top five earners in 2024, the University of Sydney, University of Queensland, University of Melbourne, ECU and University of Western Australia banked $1.566 billion of the $2.12b surplus collected by the entire sector in 2024. Meanwhile the bottom 16 HE providers were in the red, and the bottom five (UTS, La Trobe, Charles Sturt U, Uni of SA and UNE) banked aggregate losses of just over $265 million, on balance sheets that are a fraction of the size of the nation’s wealthy institutions.
Regional universities are disproportionately represented in the bottom half of the sector wealth table and as fixed costs such as regulatory compliance grow, the capability of universities on the wrong side of history (ie not inner urban or old) to absorb them with tight or negative margins is far more limited.
The sector has been differentiated by policy, but in a way that has left many regional and /or younger universities weakened.
The differentiation that the Accord envisaged, of universities deliberately moving to focal areas of strength, will be difficult to achieve in existing policy settings – creating a sector fractured by relative capacity to adapt to and cope with regulation.
The sluggish response to sector diversity and slow progression in recognising the diverse needs of the sector in policy settings has left any hope of sector-wide consensus on many leading issues almost impossible. The ability to afford change when sitting on a $545 million surplus out of a $3 billion+ budget at the University of Sydney is completely different to the picture at Charles Sturt U, for example, with a budget around one fifth the size and a 2024 loss of $46m.
While today's meeting will be worthy, the rising power of voices of smaller groups of like-minded universities will be obvious in the coming year, with smaller networks and alliances able to campaign vigorously in areas where they have been left behind by policy and/or circumstance. Getting passengers to put down the caviar menu at the pointy end of the plane to focus their energies on advocating for greater leg room for passengers back in economy would not be easy. Nor would gaining consensus in the diverse aggregation of HE institutions that we like to talk about as a single sector.
National meetings of leaders will remain important in disseminating information and socialising ideas, but the bigger changes will be almost impossible to achieve in a system where institutions are operating at at least three different speeds.