The idea that the Job Ready Graduates funding model forced universities to bend to government policy ignores how individual institutions adapted ukases to suit themselves.
For HASS lobbies, the Job Ready Graduates funding model was all about them – a Conservative government dismissal of their disciplines by price discriminating against their courses.
Ren-Hao Xu (Uni WA) and Andrew Norton (Monash U) do much more, analysing how universities responded, adapting to JRG to protect their finances and advance their missions, as revealed by interviews with senior staff at five anonymous universities.
Their analysis provides a message that will be heard by the Australian Tertiary Education Commission (ATEC) – university managements will do what they are told but only in ways and when it suits them.
Xu and Norton identify the core problem in JRG the assumption that universities would follow the money.
“An apparent JRG design flaw, that high student contributions would drive universities to offer more student places in disciplines the government wanted to discourage, has, in practice, been mitigated by institutional logics of internal redistribution, collegial governance, and demand responsiveness. In other words, the intended economic rationality is reinterpreted within organisational missions,” the authors wrote.
Thus, in humanities they report one university did not go after effectively uncapped places because they did not have the demand. Another stuck with engineering despite the lower CSP contribution, because of student interest and it was the “right thing to do.” Overall, Xu and Norton report system-wide engineering places in 2024 were up 10% on pre-JRG 2020, while total CSP were down 2.5%.
A take-out is: “universities did not merely implement JRG in a uniform way but enacted it through localised negotiations between policy expectations and their own material, external contexts, and institutional missions. In this process, they also navigated the political effects produced by specific policy instruments, such as the maximum basic grant amount, while exercising strategic agency in fulfilling social response.”
The paper adds to the authors’ previous interview-based study of how universities allocate student load (FC, HERE) which previously demonstrated how institutions make the system work for them.
“Placements and academic requirements highlight how load planning is not only a technical exercise in allocating CSPs but also a negotiation of external regulatory constraints, internal academic standards, and institutional financial imperatives,” they wrote.