A story in today’s Age raises the possibility of different higher education spending cuts from those announced in May. Instead of cutting subsidies to per student tuition funding and the HELP loan scheme, the government could target research funding.

The article suggests that the government might use this as a bargaining chip in Senate negotiations around the Pyne reform package, knowing that it would trigger the vice-chancellor panic (“doomsday scenario”) reported today. But we should also keep in mind that that there are really three separate components to the package. The first was to contain total higher education funding at around current levels, despite forecast considerable increases in student numbers. That was coming out of the broader Budget strategy, and would have happened regardless of whether there were any structural reforms. The second is the implementation of key recommendations of the demand driven review I did with David Kemp. The third is fee deregulation. Dropping these structural reforms would save money, but the government is likely to still want some savings.

The key to reducing research funding is that about $1.8 billion of it is driven through the ‘other grants’ provision of the Higher Education Support Act 2003 (HESA). The legislation sets out a maximum amount that can be spent. But there is no minimum amount and no specific legislated entitlement, as there is for student funding. The actual spending is determined by the minister through the Other Grants Guidelines. I think this could be used to cut spending (contrary to what the Age article says, only a small amount of research funding is affected by the appropriations bills – most of it comes from HESA).

From 2017, there will be opportunities to control spending through the funding agreements the Commonwealth signs with universities. These could be used to reduce the number of centrally distributed Commonwealth supported places (sub-bachelor, postgraduate, and medicine, though sub-bachelor may be deregulated) and control total spending on places within the demand driven system by institution. Universities can’t be offered less money than they received the year before, but with on-going growth in student numbers expected that could still deliver significant savings (the legal details are in chapter 7 of my Keep the caps off report).

Funding agreements have to be published, but they don’t need Senate approval and so are a viable way of curbing spending growth.

Both these ways of reducing spending are sub-optimal. But if this article is based on real backgrounding from the government, that is the point. It is designed to pressure the Senate into making more sensible changes.