Interpac Business and Migration Solutions Melbourne Australia

(October 26, 2010)

Cash-strapped and understaffed -- but they were overlooked when Labor's stimulus billions went out.

THE university system is under severe stress on four fronts. Student-staff ratios are blowing out, export income is evaporating, access to research grants is at demoralisation levels and universities are struggling to replace an ageing academic workforce.

"The higher education sector is facing a perfect storm," director of the University of Melbourne's Centre for the Study of Higher Education Richard James says.

Public funding fell relatively during the Howard government, pressuring universities to provide for expansion with fee income, especially from foreign students. In 2009, the Rudd government committed $5.4 billion over four years to a reform package based on an inquiry into the sector by former vice-chancellor Denise Bradley. The aim is to lift degree numbers to cope with a shortfall of tens of thousands of professionals needed over the next decade.

But higher education consultant Vin Massaro says "the government's claimed commitment to the Bradley reforms and its education revolution is not being backed by adequate funding".

It appears the tertiary sector is a victim to the priority given to huge economic stimulus spending. Massaro says the $5.4bn Labor promised is technically correct, but it's not all additional funding, which amounts to an extra $1.6bn, or just one-third the amount Bradley had suggested. Future young professionals have been surging into the nation's 40 universities but the quality of their learning is under threat. Student-staff ratios are approaching 25:1 or higher in some universities and disciplines, as commentator Lynn Meek warned last week, compared with a maximum of about 18:1 a decade ago.

Despite significantly increasing program funding, the Gillard government has been unable to stem the nearly 30 per cent rise in ratios as it seeks a big expansion of student numbers to underpin its economic productivity agenda.

In the 13 years to 2008, Australia's university system expanded to accommodate an extra 188,000 domestic students in any year, bringing total numbers to 670,000 in full-time equivalence, or 772,000 actual students.

But for all these extra students, only another 2860 academics were added to the thinning ranks of 33,600 others, most of whom were born before the mid-1960s.

"There is no doubt Australia's staff-student ratio has increased and is too high . . . and is but one indicator of an underfunded sector," Deakin University professor of higher education Marcia Devlin says.

Meek, who directs the L. H. Martin Institute for Higher Education Leadership and Management at the University of Melbourne, says "no one can argue that quality and standards are not compromised" as ratios reach these levels.

Australian ratios attracted criticism from institution ranker Quacquarelli Symonds in September. Seventeen of the 25 Australian institutions that made QS's top 500 were downgraded from the previous year, with QS vice-president John Molony attributing Australia's poor showing to the rise in ratios.

This comes as Australia's $18bn export education market, which peak body Universities Australia says funds 25 per cent of domestic teaching, heads for collapse due to the rising Australian dollar, the global financial crisis and fears of being targeted by hate crime.

James tells Inquirer that "massive reductions" in international student revenue are bringing redundancies that could worsen student-staff ratios. "For mid-career and senior academics who are already overworked and stretched thin, this might be the final straw," he says.

A further deterioration in working conditions "might see some pulling up roots and heading overseas" or leaving the profession altogether, he says.

The government was told in May that Australia faces an "overwhelming impending structural shortage" of the academics and tutors needed to educate the next generation of professionals. This came from the vice-chancellors, who had received in March a report on a looming crunch from demographer Graeme Hugo of Adelaide University.

It made grim reading. A decline in PhD commencements in fields critical to Australia's economic sustainability and competitiveness is occurring at a time when the age profile of our academic workforce is older than the workforce as a whole, Hugo says.

In engineering, some deans consider "the increasing student-staff ratios are reaching levels that may threaten accreditation" of their courses. Nursing "is in a state of near-emergency in relation to the academic workforce". More than 60 per cent of education academics are over 50 and pharmacy educators are scarce, says Hugo's report to Universities Australia.

Medical schools have doubled student numbers but haven't been able to double the number of clinical academics, medical deans president Jim Angus says.

Poor morale is also an issue, Hugo adds, citing research released last year by the L. H. Martin Institute across 25 countries.

Australia has the third lowest level of satisfaction with academic work and the highest proportion of academics who have considered taking action towards changing their jobs, or 33 per cent.

With boomer academics having zero to 20 years to retirement and new academics needing a decade just to get to the first rung of their careers, Australia has a five-year window to address the crunch, it concludes.

The fall in staffing comes as access to research opportunities, a lure to enter university work, become scarce. Poor academic morale is being compounded as the success rates for winning key research grants, frequently used by academics to provide as base salary, hover just above 20 per cent.

This year the number of first-rate medical research grant applications rejected due to a lack of funding was the highest since 2000, reports the National Health and Medical Research Council.

Some anti-cancer researchers spent three months working on grant applications only to see the council's research management computer system become so overloaded in February with applications it crashed three times in 24 hours.

Research Minister Kim Carr has developed a plan to renew the research workforce -- yet to be funded -- but the government isn't known to have a wider strategy for the ageing academic workforce.

Meek says the Gillard government, and the Australian higher education sector, "is just starting to wake up to the fact that it faces a crisis" of renewal of the workforce.

"The social and economic contribution of the nation's universities will be severely compromised if we end up with a second-rate academic workforce," Meek says.

If this isn't enough to exercise the minds of university and workforce planners, veteran industry leaders in the overseas student sector, Paul Rodan of Central Queensland University and international director Jennie Lang of the University of NSW say they have not seen such tough conditions before. The Australian dollar has soared to a near 30-year high, potentially turning away, due to higher costs, thousands of overseas students that highly leveraged universities rely on to help fund domestic teaching.

Numbers are projected to fall 20 per cent or more next year, also due to the fallout from last year's attacks on overseas students and the Department of Immigration and Citizenship crackdown on student visas arising from rorts at some private colleges.

The federal and state governments' revised international student strategy, due in May, is yet to be released. State auditor-generals have long warned about the long-term dangers of universities' reliance on unpredictable foreign fee income. Now Monash University, for example, plans to axe 300 jobs to cope with a projected 10 per cent drop in overseas student income next year.

The confluence of events comes with signs universities have been sidelined by the government, which is instead focused on the other problem of how to get 360,000 underqualified young people into training.

Tertiary Education Minister Chris Evans tells Inquirer that despite a time of "significant fiscal constraint" to bring the budget back to surplus, Labor remains committed to the 10-year reform agenda stemming from the Bradley review. A planned increase in indexation funding also "would support improved student-staff ratios and greater student engagement", Evans says.

On extra places, Evans says funding had been allocated to support an additional 195,000 students over the past two budgets.

But Massaro is concerned that universities are being encouraged to over-enrol more students, but as only marginal funding rates come with the extra places, the result is teaching to larger classes.

Meek is pessimistic about the government finding the extra funds to address the sector's burning problems given Treasury's and the Finance Department's insistence to the government that new budget spending be offset by savings elsewhere.

Despite the government's talk of freeing the system, the options of increasing private funding through uncapping students' HECS contributions or a return to full fees for domestic students in future are not open for discussion, Massaro says.

"Surely these options must be canvassed fully given the lack of alternatives," he says.

(Source:theAustralian)