Opinion & Commentary
Why education free-for-all doesn't have the numbers
Reaction to last week’s Senate report, ‘Universities in Crisis’, shows how tenacious hope can be despite many years of disappointment.
Representatives of the public education lobby groups – principally the Australian Vice-Chancellors’ Committee and the National Tertiary Education Union – seized on its recommendation for more public funding.
Ian Chubb, President of the AVCC, praised the report’s ALP and Democrat authors for clearly discerning the ‘unimpeachable need for significantly increased public investment’.
NTEU official Ted Murphy welcomed the report and said that universities could not meet community needs because of ‘funding cuts’.
The trouble with calling for more public funding is that the AVCC and the staff unions have pursued this strategy for decades, without lasting success. The universities are still in ‘crisis’.
While the report, for obvious political reasons, focuses on what has happened under the Howard government, data on the AVCC’s website shows that funding constraint is a bipartisan policy.
This data provides Commonwealth funding per student, in constant dollars, from 1983 to 2000. Over that time annual per student funding has dropped by more than $2100. That’s certainly a ‘cut’. But over $1400 of this cut had already occurred before John Howard became Prime Minister.
After such continuous failure to maintain funding levels it is surely time for the universities, and those who claim to support them, to think carefully about why governments from both parties consistently give them less than what they want.
If you listen to some left-wing academics, it is because of ‘neoliberal’ economic policies.
You don’t, however, need ideology to explain what is going on here. Australian politics is much more based on the ‘numbers’ than it is on abstract political ideas.
First, there are the Budget numbers. Both major parties are committed to fiscal responsibility. They know that uncontrolled taxing, spending and borrowing undermines the prosperity that voters want and expect. All Commonwealth expenditure must be constrained.
Second, there are the poll numbers on taxing and spending. While the figures fluctuate, there is always at least a large minority preferring tax cuts to extra spending. Increasing taxes to pay for higher education risks upsetting these voters.
Even among those wanting extra public spending, higher education is often not top of their list. In the most recent poll to ask directly about higher education spending, conducted during the Howard government’s second term, 51% were in favour of keeping university spending the same or less, and most who did favour more preferred less than the 20% increase the Vice-Chancellors recently demanded.
Third, there are the numbers that probably drive spending preferences – how many people use various programmes competing for Commonwealth funding.
Despite the strong growth in higher education numbers, there are still only relatively few people involved.
Staying within education, students and staff in schools outnumber students and staff in universities by about five to one. Social security recipients outnumber university students and staff by around seven to one.
If I was an election conscious politician, I know where my funding priorities would lie.
That’s today, but what about the future? The future, unfortunately for the lobby groups, will be more of the same.
Even with more growth in higher education, these basic relativities will not change fundamentally. More people will always go to school than to university, and they will spend longer there. Inadequate superannuation ensures huge numbers dependent on social security, even if other social and economic problems lessen.
These sets of numbers are much more convincing to democratic governments than anything the AVCC or the NTEU can offer them.
The only prudent thing supporters of universities can do is look for funding sources not linked to trade-offs they can’t hope to win. And they should look at the only source with a genuine interest in funding universities properly – the students themselves.
The most obvious thing to do is to let universities charge a premium of their own, to be repaid by students via the tax system, as with HECS now.
The report mentions, but does not endorse, several proposals along these lines.
We already have legislation passed to set up a scheme like this that applies to postgraduate students, and importantly one that was supported by both major parties.
Simply extending it to undergraduates would do more than anything else to end universities’ financial difficulties.
Unfortunately, by giving some political credence to the public funding model, the report fosters the delusion that there is an easy, publicly funded, way out, that eventually Canberra will provide.
Sadly for them it won’t, and every year the AVCC, the NTEU, and their supporters delay creating political momentum for reform needlessly extends the period of Australia’s university staff and students suffering sub-standard conditions.
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About the Author:
Andrew Norton is a Research Fellow at The Centre for Independent Studies and a former adviser to Dr David Kemp.
