With no fund to support changes to university missions and no capacity to issue fines, ATEC’s financial levers to reshape the higher education system are surprisingly few, according to the nation’s leading HE policy analyst, Andrew Norton.
Professor Norton has analysed legislation empowering ATEC and notes that there are no formal fines that ATEC could levy to force institutions to change their operational approach.
“By the standards of recent higher education regulation the ATEC compliance regime seems relatively weak. This may reflect a trade-off between maximising administrative discretion and creating clear laws to which fines could be attached,” Professor Norton writes in his blog.
“The only automatic penalty universities face under the new system is for enrolling more students than the bureaucrats think they should have.”
The Australian Tertiary Education Commission (ATEC) is in the process of negotiating mission-based compacts with universities – agreements that provide Commonwealth funding relating to an agreed number of enrolments in return for meeting prescribed performance standards.
With no fund to enable universities to alter their operations, changes required by ATEC must be self-funded by universities.
Professor Norton noted that other regulatory changes introduced by the government had made extensive use of fines as a tool to force universities to comply, and the lack of fines, “likely reflects the character of compacts as administrative decisions or quasi-agreements rather than formal laws, such as acts or legislative instruments.”