As ATEC works on cost and pricing for teaching, two researchers have already crunched the data for 189,811 unit-level records to identify what can drive expenditure across different types of present and possible providers.
Gwilym Croucher and Mark Rahimi (both Uni Melbourne) explain in their latest paper how cost formation, staff inputs, delivery mode and enrolment scale, ”do not neatly align” with the traditional Field of Education (FoE) approach. They warn of “poor outcomes where cost structures are assumed but lack an evidence base, as has been the case.”
Using FoE as a basis of funding started in the ’80s and was entrenched over the next decade by the Relative Funding Model. Croucher and Rahimi warn it “has persisted in Australia over multiple policy cycles even though it has been shown to misalign with the actual resource intensity of teaching especially in laboratory fieldwork and placement-heavy programmes.” And it does not account for universities’ “different structural circumstances.”
They address this with a model of eight provider-types, to profile structural costs.
Regionally-based delivery
- mixed-mode, smaller cohorts and complex teaching environments.
- predominantly domestic students across sub-bachelor, undergraduate and postgraduate levels
- strong in education and society-culture fields
Major metro, campus based, resource-intensive
- big in management-commerce, IT, engineering, architecture-building
- international postgrad dominant
Mixed campus and on-line for metro and regional
- *diverse local and international student mix
- no dominant FOE
Campus-based metro
- international UG and PG some domestic PG
- management-commerce, IT, engineering, architecture-building “remain prominent”
Campus-based major cities
- mix of domestic and international UGs and sub-bachelors
- even distribution across broad disciplines
Campus-based metro and regional
- “leveraging economies of scale”
- predominantly domestic UG
- broad subject mix but management-commerce and IT under-represented
Fully online delivery model in cloud campuses
- domestic UG, full-fee UG and PG
- teaching across broad fields
- “Fully on-line with strong centralisation”
- domestic UG and PG
- “disproportionately” health and education
The take-out:
Using Structural Cost Profiling (SCP) for their model “provides a useful way of identifying structured heterogeneity in teaching costs that is obscured by aggregate averages,” they write.
“Running SCP analysis on data from different universities over an extended time period should further refine the costing insights presented here.”