Opinion & Commentary
Pass the Bucks
The idea that Australia’s universities are dumbing down is gaining currency. The latest argument is the widely reported claim by the Australia Institute that fee-paying students are passing when they ought to fail. Commercial values are trumping academic values.
So far the Australia Institute hasn’t issued a report, and so lacks the numbers and names needed to convince. It also lacks even an immediately plausible motive.
This is because the commercial reasons for passing failed fee-paying students are illusory. While passing students means they can continue paying fees, degrees from universities known to credential the incompetent lose their value, making it much harder to attract fee-payers in the future. On purely commercial grounds it pays to fail.
The practice, if indeed common, is much worse for the universities involved than being just commercially foolish. Universities and academics are primarily concerned about academic reputation, not profit. Surpluses are used to enhance institutions, not to pay dividends. Passing failed students undermines vital academic reputations.
'The commercial reasons for passing failed fee-paying students are illusory'
If the practices reported in the Australia Institute survey are rife, an extraordinary situation has developed within the universities. Their financial position must be so desperate that they are prepared to risk long-term fee income and reputational status to keep themselves from going under in the near future.
Whether or not the Australia Institute’s claims prove to be right, we have far more widespread dumbing down problems. At absolute worst all types of fee-paying students make up only around 20% of the university population, but other shortcomings affect nearly every student.
Australia’s university student:staff ratios are now at very high levels, around 19 to 1. This compares to 7 or 8 to 1 at the top American universities, and 12 or 13 to 1 at the better British institutions. This ratio makes it difficult for academics to give students much individual attention, a problem that shows up in student surveys. A recent survey of first year students reported that only 38% said academics were usually available to discuss their work, only 25% thought they received useful feedback, and only 21% believed academics were interested in their progress.
Maybe this hands-off approach worked when the typical student was more academically-inclined, but at the very time that mass enrolment made intensive teaching necessary to ensure students keep learning the time academics have to spend with each student is on the decline.
Then we have the much talked about ‘brain drain’. From the point of view of undergraduates, the main problem is not the loss of high profile academics overseas. Many of them would not have done much undergraduate teaching anyway.
What affects undergraduates is competition for staff from the domestic professions, which can outbid universities for the best people. It is surely not entirely a coincidence that fields of study with high-paying job opportunities outside the university tend to be rated badly by students for the quality of their teaching.
'What affects undergraduates is competition for staff from the domestic professions'
Inadequate federal government funding is blamed for these problems. While the total amount of federal funding has been much the same for some years, this cannot be said for student numbers, which continue to grow. The inevitable result is less income per student, at a time when costs continue to rise.
If universities were able to charge fees themselves, with HECS-type income-contingent loans for students unable to pay up-front, none of these problems would have occurred on anything like the scale we see today. Fee income from nearly all students, rather than a small minority, could be used to maintain teaching standards.
Of course students do not like paying more. But unlike increases in HECS, which are effectively money for nothing, increased fees can benefit students through improved teaching. American studies have found that on average for each $1,000 increase in expenditure on tuition average earnings for male students go up 2%, equivalent to a large sum over a working life.
In Australia we don’t have the data needed to estimate increased earnings, but it certainly seems very plausible that spending to employ more and better teachers pays off for students.
The higher education lobbies say that the government should pay the extra money. The reality though is that governments are very unreliable. Taxes are unpopular and there are near-endless other demands for public expenditure. This is the reason that per student funding has declined almost every year since the early 1980s.
The only people with an incentive to finance higher education properly are students. Giving universities the option of charging undergraduates is the only way to end the cutting of standards we’ve seen over many years.
The solution, then, is not less commercialisation but more. Let universities make a commercial assessment about the cost of properly educating their students, and lift the regulatory burdens that may cause some universities to risk their long-term reputations by graduating substandard students rather than suffering a short-term financial crisis.
About the Author:
Andrew Norton is a Research Fellow and Director of the Liberalising Learning research programme at The Centre for Independent Studies. He served as a higher education adviser to the Federal Minister for Education, Dr David Kemp, from 1997-99.
