The rising phoenix of competition: what future for Australia’s public universities? - Page 3
From Griffith REVIEW Edition 11: Getting Smart
© Copyright Griffith University & the author.
Written by Glyn Davis
AS COMPETITION BREAKS OUT, IT WILL BE DANGEROUS for all public universities to be stretched out in single file along the narrow road to the deep north. A capacity to meet the market, to respond to a very different context, will be imperative if the public sector in education is to prosper in a very different world.
The public sector cannot respond with the agility of private providers. Public universities find themselves held firm like Gulliver by endless taut lines of regulation. The Commonwealth, not the university, decides institutional size, scale, location and course profile. Regulation leaves little flexibility. Thus while Canberra restricts which public universities can offer prestigious medical training, Australia's two private universities have both announced medical schools. Commonwealth controls mean public universities cannot respond quickly as student demand shifts, cannot reconfigure undergraduate profiles in response to market signals, cannot abandon declining disciplines and embrace new ones, cannot close campuses or sell capital to move into new territory.
Hence the risk that diversity in Australian higher education will just mean creating a private sector in higher education, rather than encouraging difference within the public sector. Under current rules, public universities are unable to evolve, and may find themselves marginalised as thriving private providers seize the new opportunities. This is a now familiar story in Australia, an echo of policy development in child care and public schooling, in which federal government funding supports private competition to long-established public provision.
The issue for the public sector is how to respond. Certainly the current emphasis on uniformity is no longer a virtue. Offering 37 variants of the same product does not seem a viable strategy in a market. Once a significant private sector emerges, everything changes. Consistency is suddenly a handicap for the public sector (just ask the remaining government schools, which are busy developing local specialisations in response to the growth of private providers). How do comprehensive public institutions, limited by rules and processes imposed from Canberra, compete against private providers which brand themselves as specialist, small, student-focused and able to offer intensive two-year degrees at a lower cost than a public sector which must carry the overheads of unprofitable product lines and expensive research facilities?
There are at least two lines of defence open to public sector institutions. One is to emphasise the traditional virtues of a research-led university. A healthy market remains in the United States for such universities, and there will always be students in Australia who value the opportunity to interact with active scholars, to study in a setting with research facilities, to ruminate about new ideas over the summer or work as research assistants for eminent professors.
The second, and compatible, line of defence is to specialise, to embrace diversity within the public sector. Frustratingly, when diversity appears in public debate it is discussed only in narrow terms as a stark choice between research or teaching-only universities. Yet diversity can be realised across a range of categories – institutional size, mission, student mix, course offerings, mode and language of instruction, undergraduate and postgraduate, generalist and professional. Current regulation, for example, discourages the development of a Caltech in Australia, a university that makes its principal contribution in technology-related fields. We have no university of the performing arts, no university dedicated to agriculture, no liberal arts college, no industry-specific institution attending to aviation, to banking or software engineering. All of these might undertake research, yet still break out of the current national model of large and comprehensive public institutions.
A federal minister cannot legislate for diversity. Rather, policy settings must encourage choice by students and institutions. This sounds simple but requires a major change in thinking, with close attention to how Canberra regulates the system, the incentives provided to universities, and the options open to students.
Regulation is fundamental. Whatever the rhetoric, universities are not autonomous institutions but extensions of Commonwealth policy, shaped by the incentives Canberra expresses in its voluminous rules and reporting regimes. The options open to public universities are highly constrained. Hence the need for a fundamental mindshift. The Commonwealth needs to see higher education as an industry in which governments own some important assets, rather than as an extension of the federal public service. An industry approach implies a single and consistent regulatory framework for all participants, public and private. Government must remember its principal interest as a regulator – to ensure quality, and so protect one of Australia's top ten export industries.
A quality framework should make accreditation dependent upon meeting clear minimum standards, and allow an independent accreditation body to make the assessment. This autonomous body, modelled on contemporary financial regulatory organisations such as Australian Prudential Regulation Authority or Australian Securities and Investments Commission, would certify standards in any institution, public or private, offering higher education qualifications. The charter for accreditation could be decided by a joint meeting of Commonwealth, State and Territory education ministers, so addressing the constitutional divide which sees universities created and accredited at state level but regulated from Canberra. The membership of the accreditation body might likewise represent the interests of different levels of government.
Within the public university sector, government can encourage difference by broadening the incentives available. At present the overwhelming bulk of discretionary funding available through competitive bidding is in research and research training. The dollars to reward other sector goals remain, by comparison, very small – while $986 million was distributed for research in 2004, just $114 million was available for teaching excellence and only $27 million for equity performance and community engagement.
We need larger funds for teaching and equity. As with research funding, these should be performance-based and peer-assessed. Instead of all competing for a single measure of success and additional funding – research grants – universities could make strategic choices about their profile. A community focus, an emphasis on small classes and individual student attention, would become possible. Universities could rethink their essential mission, knowing funds are available across the spectrum of possibilities. Thus, an institution might choose, as does Evergreen State College in the United States, to emphasise liberal arts training with a public outreach program, or elect to support a program similar to the Undergraduates Ambassadors Scheme in the United Kingdom, in which university students spend time in schools, offering support and individual tuition, particularly in science and mathematics.
Finally, diversity can be encouraged by providing students with greater choice about where they might study. At present places in particular courses are allocated to universities and funded at rates determined by the Commonwealth minister. If, for example, demand for media and communication studies at a public university suddenly increases, then entry scores for the Bachelor of Arts course rise but there is no increase in the number of places available to HECS students. This is a rigid system in which government controls the price, supply and location of public places. A better approach would be to allow the flexibility of a market. Universities should have more control over their own profile and over the price they can charge. If the Commonwealth is concerned about under-supply in a particular discipline, it should offer scholarships to influence the attractiveness of particular courses rather than regulate price and demand.
Diversity in short is not a single dimension, but a range of potential attributes. Public universities can be encouraged to specialise through better designed regulation, more imaginative funding schemes and greater student choice to shape the system. Faced with a radical change of environment, the public sector needs different institutional types to compete against international and private providers. We need public universities scattered across the range of possible spaces, offering choice and competition. We need many different public universities, not just variations on a single theme.
MANY INDUSTRIES IN AUSTRALIA HAVE FACED THE DIFFICULT transition from a protected local market. As a sector becomes more international, with services traded in both directions, and as overseas players move into Australia, the old regulatory framework proves untenable.
In other industries facing globalisation, governments have gradually abandoned close controls, adopting instead a ‘hands-off' regulatory framework that stresses fair competition, clear minimum service standards, and transparency of scrutiny. Unprofitable public providers have been allowed to go out of business. The local industry that emerges from exposure to international competition looks very different from the days of isolation and uniformity.
Governments have yet to allow such a transition in higher education. The experience of other sectors suggests that over time the Australian higher education sector will look less like a tightly planned, funded and regulated system and more like a state-sponsored participant in a loosely-regulated international market. Eventually even the notion of a self-contained Australian higher education system may give way. For the moment, though, public universities remain closely controlled by government. Ministerial control has tightened over significant operational areas, such as the ability to close small courses or unviable campuses. The Commonwealth decides and allocates public university places available to Australian students. Canberra has proved reluctant to consider alternative modes of regulation. Public higher education is losing its monopoly in Australia, but inflexible policy settings give it nowhere to go.
Within higher education, calls for more diversity are often dismissed as attempts to impose status hierarchies. To question the interests of those advocating change is always wise, but policy proposals ultimately stand or fall on their logic. It is the burden of my argument that the Dawkins model of populating the public sector only with large, comprehensive, multi-campus, research-led institutions is no longer viable in the face of a competitive market.
Yet our thinking is still shaped by the Dawkins paradigm. The sector should instead think about alternatives. When Murdoch and Curtin universities contemplated merging to become another large, comprehensive research university, it was because they judged themselves too divergent from the norm. The Minister welcomed this move and offered support for such conformity, only to see the plan abandoned by the players. Yet unless the sector begins to think about alternatives public universities risk the fate of the public school system, pushed into residual service provision for students with no other option.
That said, there remains a strong future for most public universities. Some will retain their present form, since neither Phoenix nor its imitators will seek to replicate the tradition niche of the research-intensive public university. Others will find new identities, thereby creating the diversity at the heart of a sustainable public sector.
Sitting at Rutgers in New Jersey, Ray Caprio viewed the rise of Phoenix as a reminder the future of public universities cannot be taken for granted. The apparent solidity of a 900 year tradition is no guarantee of viability. There are other ways to think about higher education, other models capable of delivering quality learning. The challenge is not to mistake institutional form for the substance, an ideal single model for the very many different kinds of universities possible. The Australian government must let go, so that public universities can realise their many different futures. ♦