Month: October 2020

How will performance funding work under Job-ready Graduates? (I don’t know, but here are some possibilities)

Andrew Norton1 Comment

How performance funding will work under Job-ready Graduates remains unclear, to me at least. Some recently published FAQs on Job-ready Graduates, which are a cut-and-paste from a previous statement, indicate that performance funding will continue:

From 2021, the PBF scheme will be adjusted to make approximately $80 million amount of growth funding per year contingent on performance requirements. Performance funding will grow each year to a total equivalent to 7.5 per cent of funding for domestic, non‑medical bachelor places to incentivise university performance. This measure is in line with the PBF model implemented in 2020. [emphasis added]

Is performance funding a condition of other announced CGS increases?

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The complexities of new student places (again)

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Tuesday’s Budget announced two lots of funding for new student places, for short courses and for ‘national priority’ courses. But in the complex Job-ready Graduates funding system it is hard to work out what will really happen. As with other policies that are intended to create new places, it is not clear that there is a financial incentive to increase enrolments.

The difficulties of introducing new money into a transitioning system

Between them, the two new allocations total about $550 million over the next four years, with the short course money lasting for two years.

The question is how this relates to the Job-ready Graduates transition fund. This fund is designed to leave universities with the same Commonwealth student-related funding for the next three years as if JRG had never happened.

The draft Commonwealth Grant Scheme Guidelines released at the end of last month set out how the transition fund will work. The Guidelines have several unclear and seemingly contradictory elements, which I discuss in a footnote.* But this is the basic formula for transition funding:

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Can universities just close loss-making courses?

Andrew Norton1 Comment

As international student fee revenues fall universities are closing loss-making subjects and courses. Musicology at Monash. Maths and gender studies at Macquarie. Arts and social science subjects at Sydney. Neuropsychology at La Trobe.

Generally, universities have significant autonomy over what they teach. Changes in courses and subjects occur every year, in good as well as bad economic times.

But the funding agreements universities sign with the government impose some controls over course closures.

For courses leading to occupations deemed to be experiencing a skills shortage, and subjects teaching ‘nationally strategic’ languages, universities have to get government approval prior to closure.

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