Still giving yourself a hard time for not getting in to Snooty U? It wasn’t personal.
Ren-Hao Xu (UWA) and Monash HE Policy expert Andrew Norton talked to staff, first at five and then three universities to understand how they planned their student load – and then shared the results in a new paper.
The parameter setting decisions are easy – how many places the government will fund and the standards the institution will accept. But after that, it gets complicated and contested.
“Placements and academic requirements highlight how load planning is not only a technical exercise in allocating CSPs but also a negotiation of external regulatory constraints, internal academic standards, and institutional financial imperatives,” they write.
What is not surprising is their finding that; “larger universities favoured more hierarchical management structures, whereas smaller, flatter organisations allowed closer interaction between managerial and academic actors.”
But another is, that “our hypothesis that older institutions may retain strong faculties was not confirmed.”
And insofar as the sample speaks for the system,” final authority remained centralised, underscoring how managerial coordination often privileges control and external accountability over collegial decision-making. “
Xu and Norton also confirm what rank and file academics have always known, “outcomes in which enrolments are deliberately allowed to fall, possibly making easier the work lives of some teaching academics, were not contemplated by university leaders.”
This is a deeply-informed study of how universities select the students they want, or will settle for. FC is looking forward to the sequel, after ATEC starts sticking its Compacts bib in.