Opinion
What does a regional university contribute to its community? Until recently, the answers came as anecdotes: the nurse who trained down the road, the teacher who never had to leave town.
Those stories matter. A community that can't train its own nurses, teachers, carers and tradespeople must compete with every other region. When young people have no alternative but to leave home for study, their region risks losing them for good. When they can study locally, most stay.
But anecdotes don’t carry as much weight in a funding debate as evidence.
New independent analysis by SED Advisory values Federation University's contribution to the Victorian economy at $51.4 billion in present-value terms over the next 25 years – an average of $2.06 billion a year.
Even that figure understates the University's true value. It can’t fully capture stronger communities, better health outcomes, greater social mobility or the opportunities created when people are able to study close to home.
The most visible contribution is the university itself. Our campuses in Ballarat, Gippsland and Berwick generate $836 million in economic activity a year and support more than 8,000 full-time-equivalent jobs. Replicating that through new projects would take a regional capital program of roughly $2.5 billion to $4.5 billion every year.
Operations, though, are the smaller part of the story. Each year Federation produces about 3,700 higher education graduates and 1,277 TAFE graduates, with most going on to build their careers in regional communities.
In health and education, Federation is the primary source of supply across its regional catchments where there are no credible alternative workforce pipelines.
The benefits of this talent pipeline compound over time.
Graduates mentor the next generation, lifting productivity and drawing in employers who need their skills. The analysis values that human capital at $35.7 billion over 25 years, with the annual benefit reaching $7.07 billion by year 25.
Every region we serve shares in it. In Ballarat, our contribution over 25 years is valued at $29.8 billion. That averages about $1.19 billion a year, equivalent to around 15% of the regional economy. Ballarat Technology Park tenants such as IBM and Accenture rely on around 110 Federation graduates a year to renew their workforces.
In Gippsland, our health and education graduates serve communities that cannot recruit replacements from Melbourne. For the Latrobe Valley region offshore wind adds some urgency. There is up to $418 million a year and more than 700 jobs at stake by 2032. The window to train a local operations and maintenance workforce closes around 2027.
In Melbourne's south-east, our Berwick campus brings higher education to a catchment of about 950,000 people that has long been underserved, in one of Victoria's fastest-growing corridors. Its graduates, weighted to health and education, add $3.94 billion in human capital.
Federation's model is made for this.
We are regional Victoria's only dual-sector university, offering TAFE and degrees within one institution.
Around 40% of our students are enrolled at Federation TAFE, and close to a third of our university students have come through a TAFE pathway.
Together, those pathways are helping more regional Victorians gain the qualifications and careers our communities need.
We are also building Australia's first co-operative university. Every course, TAFE and degree alike, is being designed and delivered with industry, so students learn in real workplaces as a structured, assessed part of their study.
It means students graduate with a qualification – and just as importantly with direct experience and confidence, ready to contribute from day one.
The opportunity to grow that contribution is significant.
But it requires governments to judge regional universities as they judge significant public assets: by what they return over decades, not what they cost this year.
In the end, this is not really a story about one university. It is a question of whether regional Australia grows its own talent with the investment the future requires. Can our regional communities attract and retain more people to study, work and be part of building and sustaining regional communities, or do we keep competing to import talent from the city?
The evidence shows what is possible. The challenge now is to realise it.
Professor Duncan Bentley is Vice-Chancellor and president of Federation University Australia.