Month: April 2021

New allocations of money and student places in the university funding agreements

Andrew Norton2 Comments

Update 7/7/21: Some of the data in this post has been updated here.

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Last month I wrote an overview and critique of the new university funding agreements. This post looks at new allocations of funding for student places, while a subsequent post will look at total funding allocations. Not all my numbers match previously announced total funding for the relevant program, so that is a caveat on both posts.

Under Job-ready Graduates universities are free of sub-bachelor and postgraduate student places being allocated by funding cluster, but the funding agreements show that universities have significant additional work to do in applying for and reporting on a range of small programs.

Numbers of universities getting different allocations

Job-ready Graduates introduced several new or substantially revised pots of money. Not all universities receive each of these. As the chart below shows, programs driven by criteria or formulas set out in legislative instruments (NPILF and transition funding) or the legislation itself (demand driven funding for Indigenous students from regional and remote areas) benefit the largest number of universities. Apart from the general grants for higher education courses (sub-bachelor through to masters coursework, except medicine), the ministerial/departmental discretion programs benefit fewer universities.

Short courses funding

According to the funding agreements, 27 of the 37 public universities have received once-off 2021 funding for undergraduate certificate and/or graduate certificate short courses. When a university’s funding agreement reported $0 for short courses I cross-checked against CourseSeeker with its ‘short course’ filter on and found three more universities. I am not sure whether this is because those universities adopted the ‘short course’ brand without a specific funding allocation, or because their funding agreements are yet to be updated, or because CourseSeeker is wrong. My adding up of the value of funding agreement short courses gets me to $213 million, out of the $252 million allocated for 2020-21 in the October 2020 Budget.
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How many jobs are there in higher education?

Andrew Norton2 Comments

COVID-19 has been bad for jobs in higher education. Last October, the NTEU estimated that since March 2020 more than 12,000 jobs had been lost. According to Universities Australia in February 2021 at least 17,300 jobs were lost in 2020. But how many jobs were there to begin with?

This is a surprisingly difficult question to answer. The official DESE staff statistics give us a headcount as at 31 March each year of people employed on an on-going or fixed term contract at public universities and Bond, Notre Dame, University of Divinity and Avondale University College. At the end of March 2020 these institutions had just over 130,000 employees.

But as the chart below shows, the full-time equivalent count is always higher than the on-going or fixed term headcount, because it includes casuals. On a FTE basis, about 18 per cent of all staff are casuals, including nearly a quarter of academic staff. But DESE does not collect headcount data on casuals.

Casuals

While DESE does not provide a casual headcount, two datasets that include higher education providers, produced by the Australian Charities and Not-for-profits Commission and the Workplace Gender Equality Agency, include casual figures.

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Academic freedom as a principle and a practice (a review of Open Minds: Academic Freedom and Freedom of Speech in Australia)

Andrew Norton4 Comments

Open Minds: Academic Freedom and Freedom of Speech in Australia is an accessible overview of the subjects in its sub-title. It covers rationales for academic freedom and freedom of speech, the current law, historical controversies, and emerging threats.

Its authors are two law academics, Carolyn Evans and Adrienne Stone, with Evans now a vice-chancellor. Jade Roberts, a legal researcher, assisted them.

As a general concept few people are against academic freedom. Nobody is calling for powerful figures – ministers, bureaucrats, or vice-chancellors for example – to direct the detail of what Australian academics research, teach or say. Yet the historical chapters of Open Minds report many cases through the decades raising issues of ‘academic freedom’. People regularly see exceptions to this otherwise widely-supported idea.

In judging disputed situations first principles can help. Yet these are also the subject of disagreement and grey areas. Academic freedom is not a clear and unchanging principle but instead a practice that has evolved over centuries, originally as institutional autonomy from church and state, with the current idea of academics personally having freedom developing from the late 19th century.

Only this year, after Open Minds was published, have the precise words ‘academic freedom’ with a definition been inserted into university funding legislation. Until then, as the Open Minds chapter on law explains, the language was of ‘free intellectual inquiry’, with universities and regulators left to decide what that meant. Even this terminology is recent, dating from 2011 in funding legislation and accreditation regulation, with ‘free inquiry’ used from 2000 in national legal definitions of a university. Australia has had universities since the 1850s.

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