ATEC Commissioner Stephen Duckett says (on X), the “changes which we are working through are the most important and potentially transformative changes to the sector in decades.”
He should know. Dr Duckett is a health-economist who was working for the Interim ATEC on public funding of student places. As one of Barney Glover’s deputies he is a position to create transformative changes.
Dr Duckett designed and implemented Activity-Based Funding (ABF) for Victorian public hospitals in the ‘90s and advised on its introduction for Federal funding, in place now for nearly 20 years. And now he can adapt the model to universities
Instead of setting government funding in response to what universities pay for a service, say teaching plus on-costs, ABF uses national data to identify the median cost for a specific task and pays each university accordingly per student. Institutions that lose money on the deal cut costs and those that can do it for less keep the incentive.
Rather than add separate funding for separate tasks, say support for students in equity groups, those costs can be added to the ABF amount. “Pricing signals on universities could replace many, if not all, of the small programmes,” Dr Duckett explained in a response to one of the Accord’s working papers.
“This approach would give universities more freedom to manage their own institution and reduce the reporting burden as payments would be made based on existing student data collections.”
It is way more nuanced than the broad categories of the Job Ready Graduates model, which upset engineering academics from the start for failing to accommodate the different costs of lab-based subjects and broad theory classes.
But it also gives government the opportunity for funding to drive policy at individual institutions, with price signals applied individually for specific outcomes at each. If, he suggests, a university’s five-year compact set a 20 per cent equity target, the total number of funded places could be set at four times that. “This would certainly gain the attention of university administrations and get them to address the issue,” Dr Duckett suggested.