Opinion & Commentary
Give choice a chance: Market phobia sees universities clinging to the stable penury of government funding
Five years ago, like today, there were signs that commonwealth higher education policy might be changing. On that occasion, the review of higher education financing and policy, chaired by Roderick West, was sent out to tour the country and collect submissions.
Those submissions, still on the Department of Education, Science and Training's website, chronicle the nightmares universities experience at the prospect of university and student choice, rather than departmental edict, shaping the higher education world.
Charles Sturt University, for example, which recruits students from Sydney as well as around its regional campuses, said in its submission that even the student choice provided by allowing full fee-paying Australian undergraduates would have a big effect on its business degree. People would pay large sums rather than move from Sydney to Bathurst.
It didn't turn out that way. In fact the number of new students in Charles Sturt's business degree has boomed. I'm not sure why but presumably competitively low cut-off scores and fees have had something to do with it. I've also heard Charles Sturt advertising its courses on radio as far away as in Melbourne.
I mention this example only because Senator Kim Carr (HES, March 6) is again appealing to the sector's instinctive aversion to change, saying handing buying power to students would destabilise the system and encourage volatility and quick fixes.
In Carr's view, students' aims and aspirations must be sacrificed to stability. It is, regrettably, typical of a sectoral mind-set in which producer interests continually triumph over consumer interests.
Why does the course experience questionnaire continually show students think the universities are mediocre at teaching? Why is the qualification for being a university teacher a research degree?
The answer is that academics generally like research more than teaching and in the absence of competitive pressures through student choice, or rewards for good performance through top-up fees, there aren't strong incentives to do a better job by students.
This system ought to be destabilised. Stable numbers or income should be a reward for good performance, not a right given by Canberra. We need a quick fix on a system that allocates student places regardless of demand or performance.
Greater hope for fixing the system comes from the comments of Opposition education spokeswoman Jenny Macklin than Carr. She is quoted in the same issue of the HES as saying that all qualified students should be entitled to a place at university.
I agree, but how would this interact with Carr's desire to avoid volatility? As we saw with university applications this year, the numbers can jump around quite a lot. How will the department guess the right number of places and what happens if it creates the places at James Cook University but the demand is in Perth? The quota system makes sense only if there is a scarce good that has to be rationed.
One good that will continue to be rationed, at least by the commonwealth, is research training. Carr says the research training scheme, set up to allocate research student places, is a case of de facto vouchers.
The idea behind vouchers is to mimic the market by introducing student choice into a public subsidy system. This could have been done in the research training scheme. All students who wanted a commonwealth subsidy could have applied centrally and successful applicants taken places at universities of their choosing.
Unfortunately, this isn't what happened. Instead we have another bureaucratic scheme based on performance, as defined by the commonwealth, not students. As usual, student preferences are irrelevant.
We can only hope that after 2002's reviews, unlike after West's, the Government can break through the stultifying conservatism that insists on stability.
Oddly, the sector's market phobia is at odds with its experience. Universities have done well in the volatile overseas and postgraduate coursework student markets. Supporting their government-funded students is the problem. Why universities prefer the stable poverty of government plans to the market's uncertain affluence is a mystery.
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About the Author:
Andrew Norton is a Fellow at The Centre for Independent Studies.
