Opinion
Universities thought ATEC would be their friend, protecting them from politicians, helping them improve their teaching and research, ensuring the funding to be their best selves. Silly old them.
Jason Clare sold the third of the Bills establishing the Australian Tertiary Education Commission as being to expand HE participation, particularly by Australians from low SES backgrounds. No-one is arguing about the intent, but there are an abundance of warnings about the way ATEC will apportion places, appearing in a range of submissions to the Senate Committee inquiry into the legislation.
“The Bill’s sole mechanism for increasing enrolments in universities is more efficient use of existing funding” HE policy maven Andrew Norton says.
And not funding for everywhere. Veteran analyst Mark Warburton suggests similar, ‘the Government is hoping to offset reduced places in inner metropolitan areas by increasing student places in outer metropolitan and regional universities.”
And the way it will be done worries Mr Warburton, “The viability of our outer metropolitan and regional universities is an extremely important issue … (it) does not require the convoluted Managed Growth Funding arrangements, associated penalty provisions and ‘glidepath to fewer places’ in inner metropolitan universities to achieve this.”
Over-engineering is a major worry for HE experts. The other is where the power will be. The Bill, Universities Australia warns, “gives the Minister and the ATEC greater influence over the number of places universities can offer, the conditions attached to those places and, potentially, the allocation of international students. At the same time, it leaves many of the most important decisions to future ministerial discretion and guidelines rather than Parliament.”
However, the 2050 Alliance does not appear alarmed, calling for the Senate to pass the Bill, with two improvements; more focus on disadvantage in allocating growth places and targeting most-needed student support through each university’s mission-based compact, with ATEC.
There is a problem there. Compacts were important in the Universities Accord, with universities assuming they and their allies in ATEC would agree what needed to be done and then explain it slowly to the Minister. Certainly, the first Bill creating the new system covered compacts in ways that could mean whatever optimists assumed. But not this one.
Mr Warburton warns that with allocation of Commonwealth Supported Places and international student numbers not in compacts, they might become “an exercise in performative blather.”
And as Norton points out, “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.”
Unless, of course, ATEC-as-enforcer is expected to use the labyrinth of interacting rules and targets in the allocation of student places over time to meet changing government demands.
In recent papers, Andrew Norton has asked university leaders how they adapted to student places under the Job Ready Graduates funding model to suit their circumstances and strategies – and heard they worked out ways to suit their needs.
Which could happen again. As he puts it this week, “Within the government’s preferred funding model there is no complete solution to the misallocation problem. Only demand driven funding automatically adjusts funding to places.” Certainly, he adds, some things can be done but as they were complex under JRG, so they will be, just for different reasons, under the government’s “managed growth.”
Maybe ATEC officials will explain how it will all work to the Committee.