Where do new universities come from? Do existing universities seed new ones? Do universities replicate by division or are mergers more common? Do some struggle with middle-age spread? Do they ever die?
These questions are silly, but answering them helps explain where we are with higher education Australia.
We have roughly 40 universities. As in the UK, our universities were mostly founded as publicly funded institutions. This is different from the US, where there are many private universities, like Harvard, Yale, and Stanford, as well as great public universities, like Berkeley and UCLA. We do have some privates, which we call Table B providers, e.g. Bond, Torrens. Notre Dame Australia began as a private institution, but became a Table A public provider in 2020.
Some of our universities were created from nothing, others grew out of the existing institutions, and sometimes tertiary colleges were elevated to ‘university status’ (often after being bundled together).
Our universities were created in four waves.
Initially each State founded a public university: Sydney 1850, Melbourne 1853, Adelaide 1874, Tasmania 1890, Queensland 1909, and UWA 1911.
Then after WW2 there was a realisation we needed more. ANU was created in 1946 and UNSW 1949.
The third wave was complicated. From 1954 to 1988 16 universities were established. UNE 1954 started as an outpost of Sydney, Newcastle 1965 and Wollongong 1975 (and even Charles Sturt 1988) began with help from UNSW. Several technical colleges were elevated to ‘university status’, e.g. Curtin 1986, UTS 1988. Other universities were founded from scratch (sometimes incorporating pre-existing institutions): Monash 1958, La Trobe, Macquarie, and Flinders in the 60s, James Cook, Griffiths, Murdoch and Deakin in the 70s, Bond and Notre Dame in the 80s.
Then everything changed. In July 1988 the Education Minister John Dawkins released a paper that transformed the sector. Basically, it offered university status to tertiary colleges, provided they combined to achieve critical mass. A period of birth via fusion began. Each case was unique but during the late 80s and early 90s another 15 universities appeared: Western Sydney, QUT, Charles Sturt, Victoria, Canberra, South Australia, Edith Cowan, ACU, RMIT, Swinburne, CQU, USQ, Federation, Southern Cross, and Sunshine Coast.
And then things slowed down, with only 4 universities forming in the last 30 years: Charles Darwin University 2003, University of Divinity 2012, Avondale 2021 being created from various pre-existing colleges, and the international university Torrens materialising in 2014.
The slowdown in the creation of new universities is due to regulation and to culture. Firstly, the Coaldrake report and higher education standards require universities to be engaged in research in at least 50% of subjects they teach. How can new universities pay for this research? Secondly, a growing obsession with prestige challenges new universities, making it harder for them to attract students and generate the funds required to survive, let alone to do world standard research.
The fact that few new universities are being born, while the population of students keeps growing, means some universities in Australia have become big. You will see reports of universities with 85,000 students, whereas big universities in the US, like Berkeley, have only 45,000, and privates like Harvard have perhaps 7,000 undergrads and twice as many postgrads. The first thing to note is that no Australian university actually has 85,000 students. The way we count includes both semester 1 and semester 2 enrolments, so there are probably only around 50,000 students on campus at any one time. Many overseas universities only have one intake so count differently. Australian universities are big, but not obese.
Some people worry that some of our universities are too big, and others are too small. They suggest that capping would help distribute the students more evenly. It’s an idea, but it’s like saying that if Taylor Swift were prevented from filling the cricket ground, then there would be enough fans for all the struggling garage bands. Capping is unlikely to increase participation in education.
I would welcome the creation of new universities in localities with growing populations, or failing that, new campuses of existing universities. This strategy appears to have worked well for Griffiths, which has multiple thriving campuses.
The last question is – do universities ever die?
They can certainly suffer. In the early 2000’s both RMIT and Newcastle went through financial crises. Many universities are struggling in localities where costs increase and enrolments don’t. There is often talk of universities collapsing, but their stakeholders are so extensive, and the difficulty of teaching out enrolled students are so severe, that people tend to get together to sort out remedies to keep public universities alive. Mergers are occasionally touted as solutions, and they do occur, but usually for more positive reasons, as with the well thought-out merger of Adelaide and UniSA.
It is the case that smaller private institutions close every year globally, and in Australia, as market conditions shift. It is also the case that public institutions have to make unpopular decisions that can have severe impacts on individual staff and students, or departments, as revenues fluctuate. But provided we can work together to plan carefully I’m optimistic for the Australian sector. We need more education not less, so we just need to apply our critical thinking skills to making that happen.
Professor Merlin Crossley is Deputy Vice-Chancellor Academic Quality at UNSW
