Opinion
Cooktown in Cape York is a community of fewer than 3000 people, yet it has 64 students studying across 39 different tertiary institutions through their local University Study Hub. A future teacher might study through one university, a nursing student another and a business student a third, all while remaining in their community and receiving local, face-to-face support from the hub.
It’s an example of how Australia might start to meet its rather lofty ambition of lifting tertiary attainment to 80% of working-age people by 2050. But it also shows why the current higher education policy reforms risk moving in the opposite direction to what is already working in places like Cooktown.
The government wants dramatically more Australians at university but has also decided that some universities are proving a touch too popular. Under the new Managed Growth policy, enrolment growth will be capped at some institutions while more places are directed towards regional and outer-metropolitan universities through the new Australian Tertiary Education Commission.
There is, however, one problem with trying to engineer student choices from Canberra: we have tried and failed before. The widely condemned Job-Ready Graduates package dramatically changed the price of university degrees in an attempt to steer students towards fields considered to be in national demand. Some degrees got cheaper, others considerably more expensive, on the assumption that students would take the hint. They didn’t.
Price signals changed what students paid but did little to redirect demand. Students stubbornly continued choosing degrees based on their interests, ambitions and the careers they wanted to pursue. The government tried telling students what to study. It failed. Now it risks telling them where and implementing a policy that works against their own University Study Hubs program.
Instead of trying to manage demand by changing the price of degrees, the Managed Growth policies seek to manage the supply of university places by limiting how far universities can enrol Commonwealth-supported students above their allocation. The result could be fewer places at the institution offering the course, delivery model or support a student needs, and more places where government would prefer enrolment growth to occur.
Managed growth for universities could quite easily become managed choice for students.
If regional students are part of the answer to reaching 80% attainment, why narrow their choices just as Study Hubs and online delivery have finally opened more of the university system to them?
Additionally, the Needs-Based Funding reforms provide a funding bump to all under-represented cohorts except regional students, where the funding instead goes to regional universities directly to prop up regional campuses. It solves a regional university problem, not a regional student one.
Regional universities do vital work. They train teachers, nurses, and other professionals, employ local people and support regional economies. Australia needs them. But supporting regional universities and expanding opportunity for regional students are not the same thing. Living regionally does not mean the best institution for a student is necessarily a regional one. Regional Australia is vast. Smaller campuses cannot offer every course and most regional communities have no campus at all. We cannot build a university in every town, nor should every student be expected to rearrange their life around the location of one.
The government already has a program constructed around solving this challenge. There are now 70 University Study Hubs across regional and outer-suburban Australia. Regional University Study Hubs alone have supported more than 15,250 students, with 44% the first in their family to undertake tertiary education.
Cooktown is an example of why the model works. It doesn’t have one university offering degrees; it provides local support and lets students choose from the broader tertiary system. Cooktown doesn’t have 39 university campuses, nor does it need them. The model separates where someone lives from where and how they can study. It gives them options and freedom to choose, rather than funnelling students towards one institution or require them to move hundreds of kilometres to fit the geography of the university system.
For too long we have asked regional Australians to fit themselves around the architecture of universities instead of designing more options around the student. It would be peculiar to have finally found the university study hubs as a model that turns that logic around, only to start rebuilding the old constraints elsewhere in the tertiary system.
If Australia genuinely wants a much larger and more diverse tertiary student population, people need to be able to study in different places, through different modes and with genuine choice between institutions.
Job-Ready Graduates tried steering demand through price. Managed Growth now seeks to steer the supply of places. The mechanism has changed, but the bet the government is taking is the same: change the system and students will rearrange their ambitions accordingly. Recent history suggests they may not be quite so obliging.
If that leaves regional students with fewer choices than they had before, it will be a strange way to pursue the biggest expansion of tertiary participation in Australia’s history.
If we want more Australians to have a crack at university, especially in regional and remote communities like Cooktown, government should be opening as many doors as possible rather than deciding which one students ought to walk through.
Chris Ronan is the R.G Menzies Scholar at Harvard Kennedy School of Government and co-CEO of Study Hubs Australia