The rising phoenix of competition: what future for Australia’s public universities?
From Griffith REVIEW Edition 11: Getting Smart
© Copyright Griffith University & the author.
Written by Glyn Davis
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Glyn Davis' biography and other articles by this writer
In mid-winter, New Brunswick is a long, cold train ride from Penn Station in Manhattan. The New Jersey transit runs out of the city and through suburbs until the scenery seems an endless process of small depressed towns strung together along the line. Few students alight from the clean but empty train in January, leaving the streets of New Brunswick bleak and deserted. Yet for much of the year this is a lively place, one of three college towns hosting campuses of the State University of New Jersey. The coffee shops and pizza joints lining the freezing walk from the New Brunswick train station to the front gates of Queen's College are closed for the New Year break. They serve a campus chartered in 1766 but soon patriotically renamed after a hero of the American Revolution, Colonel Henry Rutgers.
The university now bearing his name spans New Jersey and reaches its 8.5 million residents. Rutgers is the result of successive amalgamations, a combination of former independent colleges dotted around New Jersey and a land-grant university from the nineteenth century. Most United States universities are single-campus and so do not face the academic and administrative coordination challenges common in Australia. Rutgers is unusual, operating from three regional centres. Like the typical Australian public university, Rutgers must find ways to speak with staff and students scattered across many sites. It does so through new teaching technologies, broadband connections that allow a law professor in Camden to address a class in Newark, a study group in New Brunswick to include students from across the Rutgers network.
As usual, the promise is better than the delivery. Rutgers has excellent equipment, but watching distant figures on a plasma screen with a slow refresh rate is hard work. Still, Rutgers sees itself at the forefront of a new delivery model for higher education. The campus may remain the focus of the university experience for Rutgers students, but computers and television monitors provide students with access to a richness of course material and teachers beyond the resources of any single site. The future becomes an enticing blend of personal attention from the professor supported by online content.
Or so the Rutgers leadership thought until Phoenix appeared. Calling itself a "university for working adults", the University of Phoenix offers a range of bachelor, masters and doctoral courses. Students can study online and attend local ‘learning centres' to interact with contract tutors. The emphasis is on courses leading to employment – business but not arts, health administration but not social work. The Phoenix web site promises that students can complete "100% of your education via the Internet, including all administration, registration, and book buying".
When Phoenix started in 1976 it appeared just one among the many marginal US colleges, offering courses from a small campus but also available by correspondence. It was not perceived as a threat by Rutgers or other established tertiary providers. It remains largely unknown in Australia, despite the challenge it poses to traditional public institutions. Yet after just three decades Phoenix is America's largest accredited private university, claiming 17,200 qualified instructors (some perhaps moonlighting from other universities) and 128 learning centres and internet delivery worldwide. Media reports put the student body as high as 295,000.
When I visited New Brunswick in January 2003, Rutgers Vice President (Continuous Education and Community Outreach) Ray Caprio recalled his first inkling of change a year or two earlier. He had heard of Phoenix but was unconcerned. How could an internet provider, without research facilities or serious professors, compete against Rutgers with its 51,000 students, 2,500 faculty and 7,000 general staff, working out of 857 different buildings on campuses across New Jersey? Rutgers would always be the more desirable destination, with its attractive mix of campus life and interactive video teaching facilities.
If academics dismissed the pretensions of Phoenix, general staff seemed more impressed. Many wanted to upgrade qualifications for career advancement but could not face the high fees and lengthy courses of established universities such as Rutgers. Several passed over their own university to enrol in the Phoenix MBA program, attracted by its moderate prices and accelerated timetable. Intrigued, Caprio sponsored a staff member to undertake two courses at Phoenix, and used the opportunity to assess the quality of course material provided by the virtual provider.
"Though all our academic prejudices make us want to discount Phoenix," he reported, "actually the stuff was pretty good. Phoenix will stick to popular paying courses like the MBA and nursing. They'll never teach philosophy but they will be a force."
Phoenix has achieved prominence and profitability in a landscape otherwise littered with ‘e-learning' failures. It has refined a business model that minimises investment in the expensive infrastructure usually associated with older university, those spires, cloisters, gargoyles and cumbersome overheads such as tenured staff and libraries. Instead Phoenix reaches out to Americans who want career opportunities through college education at an affordable price, and who want to study without leaving home. Rutgers has spent vast sums on information technology to knit together three campuses in one small state, only to see a private competitor use the same equipment to span the entire American continent and soon, perhaps, the world. As Caprio looked out his office window at desolate New Jersey in January, he could see a competitor not tied to a single place, bound neither by railways lines nor state boundaries.
Phoenix was no overnight success. Some reports suggests 25 years of cumulative losses before the University reached the scale necessary to make its online approach financially viable. Phoenix has been joined by a handful of other successful providers, including De Vry University and Kaplan University, each offering vocationally-focused qualifications at modest prices. At the more expensive end of the market, there have been numerous examples of failure in cyberspace education. Promising online tertiary initiatives from prestigious universities such as Columbia University in New York produced instead embarrassing losses. A joint public-private venture in Britain labelled UKeU opened in 2001 and closed three years later with losses over £62 million ($148 million). Getting e-education right has proved more difficult than most imagined, but those few pioneers which survived now lead a revolution in higher education.
Ray Caprio grasped earlier than most the transformation heralded by Phoenix. Though e-education still commands only a small overall portion of the market, here is a new teaching model for higher education, one that dispenses with a campus as the core of university life. The university becomes instead a virtual space connecting contracted teachers with paying customers. It is a business in which not academics but a professional management decide hiring, course content and delivery mode in response to market signals. From the sunny American south arises a new creature, a "for profit" approach to higher learning. For Rutgers in the frozen north this is a worrying vision. Public universities have seen the future, and maybe they're not in it.
THE CONCEPT OF AN INTERNET UNIVERSITY CAN SHOCK because it runs sharply against the grain of long tradition. Universities are places, not web sites, tutorial chat rooms and email instructors. Our sense of what it means to be a university is shaped by history, familiarity and too many reruns of Brideshead Revisited. In Australia, this ideal type is particularly narrow. Regulation allows only one model of a university, one set of acceptable characteristics. Phoenix is disturbing because it dispenses with every aspect of the standard Australian package – a campus, lectures, laboratories, indifferent catering and inadequate public transport. Above all, Phoenix does not assert that teaching and research are inextricably linked. On the contrary, this private institution shows no interest in research as an essential part of the university.
The Phoenix model is profoundly disturbing to public universities working within a long-established delivery model, able to present their embedded values as the very definition of quality tertiary education. It is likely international Phoenix-style operators will find common cause with an already burgeoning local private sector to present unprecedented competition for Australia's public universities. In rising to the challenge, public institutions must first confront their own assumptions about what constitutes a university, and then persuade Canberra to take seriously its rhetoric of diversity.
Yet for all the angst a Phoenix provokes, there is something familiar about the emphasis on teaching rather than research, on vocation as the principle purpose of ‘going to university'.
The first Australian universities, established in Sydney and Melbourne, reflected the conventional wisdom of the 1850s that teaching is the principal occupation for a scholar. In 1755 Dr Johnson's Dictionary had defined a university as "a school where all the arts and faculties are taught". A century later John Henry Newman's lectures of 1852, published as The Idea of a University, strongly opposed any place for research in a true university. As a rule, asserted Newman who "went up to Oxford" at sixteen, teachers are too busy to do research, and researchers too preoccupied to teach.
This focus on teaching appealed strongly to colonial governments. Professor John Woolley, a classics scholar, Oxford graduate, and the first Principal of the University of Sydney, used his inaugural address to define a university as a school for liberal and general knowledge and a collection of special colleges, devoted to the learned professions. He did not mention research. In 1878, Charles Pearson, a member of the Council of the University of Melbourne, asserted that the main function of a university professor was to "impart, not invent".
Other models were available to colonial governments. As early as 1809, Prussian scholar and administrator Wilhelm von Humboldt proposed a new university at Berlin that combined education and research, making fundamental inquiry part of the work of a university professor. The idea took considerable time to travel. Only in the late 1880s, with the appointment of professors in chemistry and biology, did the University of Melbourne acquire scholars directly involved in research. Although the German model inspired doctoral studies in the United States from the 1880s it had little impact in Britain and doctoral studies were not available in Australia until the 1940s. By then Humboldt's
idea that combining research and teaching in one place would enrich both student learning and discovery was becoming the orthodoxy.
In shifting from Newman to Humboldt, from teaching to teaching and research, Australian universities evolved from small, collegiate and teaching-only to large, comprehensive and research-oriented institutions. To early faculties of arts, science and divinity, Australian universities added the learned professions such as medicine, law and engineering during the 19th century. Faculties of agriculture, veterinary science, commerce and dentistry appeared early in the 20th century, and business, nursing and teaching faculties more recently. The journey was slow and the destination not always certain. Threaded through most Australian universities are competing educational philosophies, the accretion of internal choices and changes in government direction. The mission statement of any Australian university is likely to mix elements of Newman's focus on teaching and intellectual formation, Humboldt's focus on advancing knowledge, the elite technical training of the French grandes écoles, and the new language of community engagement.
From 1850 these overlays accrued in universities that were fostered and supported at state level. While the relatively small scale of the sector worked against significant diversity along American lines, different patterns of tertiary education emerged. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, colonial and then state governments created traditional universities– today's sandstones. As demand for university education grew after the second world war, a number of new technically-inclined universities were created, such as UNSW and, later, Monash, along with a national research university in Canberra. The Martin report of 1964 emphasised the need for further expansion of places, promoting a new wave of suburban institutions embracing a more multidisciplinary approach to knowledge – Macquarie and La Trobe first in 1964, then over the next decade Newcastle, Flinders, Griffith, Wollongong and Murdoch. These existed alongside older technical colleges and a newer crop of colleges of advanced education, many also dating from the 1960s.
The shift to national consistency began when the Whitlam government assumed national control of universities from 1974. Commonwealth supervision offered the prospect of better funding and more equitable access, but also established the conditions for centralised control. While Canberra at first devolved operational questions to an independent expert commission, over time federal education ministers exercised their authority to direct higher education (principally in response to endless demands from states for more places and from local politicians who insisted on a campus in their electorate). An unintended effect of the Commonwealth imposing uniform operational requirements was to smooth away regional differences, along with differences between universities, institutes and colleges.
In 1988 Minister John Dawkins decided to remake the system. Dawkins dissolved the divisions between types of institutions to make nearly every higher education institution a university. He did so in the name of equity – expanding opportunities for students to attend local universities, allowing former institutes of technology and colleges of advanced education to offer higher degrees, do research, and access broader pools of funding. The trade-off was size – 63 higher education providers would become just 36 universities. Dawkins achieved this by imposing minimum size conditions that required smaller, specialised teaching colleges to become parts of larger institutions. Research became the mission of all universities, even those with little experience or infrastructure. Per student funding was equalised in the name of a ‘national unified system'. A single model of the university had triumphed. Henceforth, by ministerial fiat, all Australian universities would be essentially the same.
The Dawkins model has exercised a powerful effect on the Australian imagination, shaping the thinking of both sides of politics about higher education. It was further entrenched in 2000, when state and federal Ministers agreed on a common protocol for accrediting universities. By requiring a "sustained culture of scholarship", including the "creation of new knowledge through research" the protocols rule out teaching-only universities along the lines of America, where half of all bachelor students enrol in institutions that do not award doctoral degrees. This was also the case in Australia before Dawkins. In 1987, 54 percent of tertiary students were enrolled at colleges of advanced education.
These new rules made research the defining characteristic not just for public universities, but for any private university as well. The Dawkins model has structured how knowledge is created, packaged and conveyed within all Australian higher education institutions. It has reinforced research as the measure of competition and prestige. The Humboldt tradition of research as the defining characteristic of a university is not just triumphant; it is the only accepted approach in Australia.
For those who share Humboldt's belief in research-led teaching, this uniformity is a virtue. It ensures consistent standards and makes student choice remarkably simple – every Australian public university operates in broadly similar ways, with largely indistinguishable goals and degrees. It is therefore no surprise so few Australian undergraduates leave their home state or territory to study elsewhere.
Academics support the Humboldt approach, since research is what draws many to the scholarly life. More intriguing is the willingness of the broader public to accept the model, given that it is also the most expensive and least flexible way to run a university. For an undergraduate student the advantages of research-led institutions are uncertain. Since time is scarce, research and students compete for academic attention. While great teaching may be informed by research, it can also lead to other less desirable outcomes, such as a temptation to teach around research interests. After all, the basic credential for an academic position, the doctorate, is a research rather than a teaching qualification.
More fundamentally, in a research-focused culture large parts of the calendar year must be set aside for research and for the time-consuming process of drafting articles, writing grant applications, reviewing the applications of others, reporting on research outcomes, appearing before ethics committees, supervising doctoral students and research assistants and doing research of merit and value. Teaching institutions without research requirements could teach the standard three-year undergraduate degree in less time, so allowing faster access to employment. The pedagogic argument – that students need the summer to digest their studies – is challenged by growing student interest in summer semesters and online opportunities.
Since students and their parents vastly outnumber academics on election day, it says much for the persuasive power of the Humboldt model that a research-led approach to Australian higher education retains its sway. The narrow Australian convention of a university has shaped public expectations to a remarkable degree. If that model is now under challenge, this reflects external circumstances rather than a local loss of faith. The world is shifting in ways that undermine Australian insistence on a single model of the university.