Month: November 2023

The 16 universities signing up to subsidise the nuclear submarine program

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Sixteen universities have, according to a media release today, been allocated places in 38 STEM-related courses intended to support the AUKUS nuclear submarine program. The government says it is investing $128 million over four years. In reality, however, universities will need to divert resources from other activities to support nuclear submarine training.

The 75% costing methodology

Universities will need to self-finance some AUKUS places due to what the program guidelines call ‘the standard 75 per cent costing methodology’. In the program’s second year its funding for the first year’s continuing students will be 75 per cent of their commencing year allocation, and so on in subsequent years until no money is left.

Some reduced funding to take account of student attrition is reasonable, but 25 per cent is not. Over the 2005 to 2020 period the proportion of domestic commencing bachelor students leaving their university after first year peaked at 18.4 per cent. Nearly half the nuclear submarine places went to Group of Eight universities, which have lower attrition rates than the national average.

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The growing threats to academic decision making

Andrew Norton2 Comments

Update 18/12/2023: The enacted student support guidelines remove the interference in academic judgment discussed in this post. The changes are highlighted in the relevant parts of the text.

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The current government, and the Accord review that it commissioned, have – with the exception of ministerial approval of ARC grants – taken an interventionist approach to higher education policy.

My commentary has focused on micromanaged allocations of student places (eg here and here). While these policies are misguided, the allocation of funding is within the historical scope of the Commonwealth’s higher education powers. However there is also a pattern of actual or proposed interference in matters previously left to academic or university judgment. This is unusual in a country where university autonomy over academic matters has mostly been respected.

Curriculum matters

Next year a new loan scheme will begin for business start-up programs, STARTUP-HELP. Unusually, its legal guidelines include detail about required course content. Normally universities are self-accrediting within standards enforced by TEQSA, an organisation deliberately designed to be at arms length from government.

The content requirements (below) don’t seem unreasonable in themselves, and were perhaps necessary to identify what exactly STARTUP- HELP was supposed to cover. The bigger practical problem here is that this loan scheme is unnecessary. But the precedent of the government directly regulating course content is not one I like being set.

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The dangers of single point of failure higher education systems

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When the entire Optus network went down last week – knocking out mobiles, landlines and internet connections – my new paper Job-ready Graduates 2.0: The Universities Accord and centralised control of universities and courses was in the late stages of production. If the Optus incident had happened earlier I might have included more on the risks of the Accord interim report’s proposed Tertiary Education Commission as a single point of failure.

A Tertiary Education Commission’s role in allocating student places

My new report builds on my earlier explainer of the Accord interim report’s proposals for distributing student places, focusing on how this would affect the relationship between higher education and skills needs.

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