Category: Higher education finance

Funding incentives for students and universities in the Tehan reforms: some are aligned, others contradict each other

Andrew NortonLeave a comment

The higher education reforms Dan Tehan announced last month make the idea of ‘national priority’ courses, which are often but not always linked to employment prospects, a central feature.

This is a significant conceptual shift in the funding system. Historically, deliberately steering the system by course has been a marginal aspect of policy. It has occasionally been done by allocating new places to preferred fields, especially in the mid-to-late 2000s. In the same period, some changes to relative student contributions, particularly in the case of science, were designed to boost demand. But universities, influenced by student preferences, largely decided how student places were divided between courses.

In the Tehan proposal, universities will remain the main decision makers. The government will not directly allocate money to national priority fields. Instead, the government will send price signals to students across all fields of education, with low student contributions indicating national priorities, and high student contributions discouraging non-priority fields. Altered student preferences will, if the policy goes to plan, cause universities to shift student places to priority areas.

Student contribution effects

To date, most discussion has centred on what effect the new student contributions will have. My own position on this is mid-debate.

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Regional universities are especially disadvantaged by funding based on average costs

Andrew NortonLeave a comment

Dan Tehan is the most regionally-focused education minister I can remember, and quite probably ever. Multiple new or expanded programs for regional campuses and students are part of his higher education plan.

But a sector-wide central feature of his policy, the closer alignment of discipline-level funding rates with average costs, poses particular problems for regional universities.

As the Deloitte Access Economics analysis of teaching and scholarship costs found, regional universities have higher average costs than city universities. It says that:

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Can a block grant system work on lower per student funding rates?

Andrew NortonLeave a comment

In recent posts I examined how various average teaching costs compared to the proposed new student funding rates. Average costs provide a rough guide to the decisions facing universities. Fortunately, the cost data has average costs for each field in each university in the sample. This detail offers a more nuanced understanding of how the new funding rates will affect universities.

The published cost data is from 32 universities and covers 20 fields of education. Not every university offers courses in all fields. In total, 551 fields are examined for profits and losses.

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Correction post – true average costs, whether average costs are true, and that chart

Andrew NortonLeave a comment

In a post last week, I suggested that a chart on average teaching costs compared to funding rates in the Tehan reform discussion paper, which was causing concern and confusion, and was later amended by the Department of Education, might make things look worse than was the case.

This turned on what kind of ‘average’ we were looking at. There are multiple versions of average 2018 estimated costs by field of education floating around – an average of averages (all institution average costs by field added up/number of institutions), a median of averages (institutional average cost in the middle of the range for each field), and a true average (total costs for field/EFTSL in field). I thought the chart might use an average of averages, which would over-weight low-EFTSL, high-average cost institutions.

But, having realised that I had the true average numbers when I thought I did not (in a file with a name that did not reveal this aspect of its contents), I now think the Department’s chart is based on true average figures.

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Financial influences on job-seeking university applicants

Andrew NortonLeave a comment

In an earlier post, I argued that student interests drive course choices, but also that more than 80 per cent of first-year students hope for improved employment outcomes.

It follows from this that, within their cluster of interests, prospective students would plausibly choose courses with the best apparent employment and income outcomes.

This theory helps explain trends seen in applications data. While supply-side and timing problems mean we do not always have enough ‘job-ready graduates’, rarely do we lack ‘job-ready applicants’.

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The Tehan discipline funding rates are probably better than they look

Andrew Norton4 Comments

Update 3/7/2020: I now believe that, contrary to what this post suggests below, that at least the amended chart is based on ‘true average’ figures.

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On Twitter the new funding rates in the Tehan higher education reform package are being criticised for not covering costs in most fields. That’s a completely understandable concern, given that the government’s own discussion paper suggests that this will the case, by publishing the chart below.

Fortunately for universities, if this package makes it through the Senate, I think there is a mistake in the chart’s figures. I noticed this because I initially made the same mistake myself when analysing the underlying cost figures for this blog post last month. (Update 24/6: The latest version of the discussion paper has a lower overall average cost than the chart above.)

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What would the public-private funding split be if the Tehan reforms are implemented?

Andrew Norton1 Comment

What I think are transposed numbers on the public-private division of Commonwealth-supported student funding are entering mainstream media.

Unless the enrolment outcome is very different from what the government and its critics both expect, and there is a boom in humanities, business and law enrolments, then we will not cross over into a majority student funded system of Commonwealth supported places.

If enrolments had the same distribution between disciplines as in 2018, then the system would move from 42 per cent student funded to 48 per cent, as seen in the chart below.

Why did universities become reliant on international students? Part 5: The rise of research rankings

Andrew Norton4 Comments

In my series of posts on why universities became financially reliant on international students I have, to date, focused on domestic factors. Research funding policy changes are the most important. Universities needed new discretionary revenue to finance government-supported research projects, and to pay the salaries of staff with teaching and research roles.

But universities did not need a nearly 500 per cent real increase in international student fee revenue since 2000 to fill these budgetary gaps.

Suppose annual Commonwealth research spending was 50 per higher across the last few decades, all of it paid through block grants rather than generating additional costs via competitive grants. Up until the year 2000, as the chart below shows, a 50 per cent increase in public funding would have covered all research spending. But in 2018 Commonwealth funding 50 per cent higher than it was would still have left over 40 per cent of research spending unfunded (although there is about $1.9 billion in non-Commonwealth research income).

Profits on international students have been used to help finance a massive increase in university research expenditure this century.* Growth on this scale was something universities chose to do, not a change forced on them by government policy.

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Reality testing teaching and research cost results

Andrew NortonLeave a comment

My recent blog post on the cost of the teaching-research academic employment model prompted various Twitter comments on its analytical assumptions.

Friday’s post and the comments made on them also link back to other recent posts that try to understand how universities finance themselves. The posts have consistently acknowledged data issues, and that precise dollar figures cannot be attached to most of the conclusions. At best, we can get to a credible range.

The most important criticism is that my analysis assumes that the two main sources of university expenditure data, the Deloitte Access Economics study for teaching, and the ABS for research, can adequately distinguish between and separately cost scholarship and research.

According to the ABS, which uses international definitions, research is ‘creative and systematic work undertaken in order to increase the stock of knowledge – including knowledge of humankind, culture and society – and to devise new applications of available knowledge’. Scholarship, by contrast, I take as activity leading to or maintaining in-depth understanding of existing knowledge.

It is hard to have research without scholarship. How can academics claim to have increased knowledge if they are unaware of the current state of their topic or field? The literature reviews that appear in many ‘research’ articles in academic journals are scholarship.

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Why did universities become reliant on international students? Part 4: Trying to maintain a teaching-research academic workforce

Andrew Norton5 Comments

In my previous post in this series, I argued that international student fees help pay for under-funded government-sponsored research grants. But these research projects are not the only partially-funded research universities are trying to finance. They also have many teaching staff on contracts that include research time, but who do not attract equivalent research income.

For academics, the expected and preferred academic career is generally to have a teaching and research or research only role. For most academics, however, teaching is not their top priority. A survey about a decade ago found that, among teaching-research academics, nearly two-thirds leaned towards or were primarily interested in research.

This bias is reinforced by the academic recruitment process, which favours people with PhDs. In 1987 less than a quarter of academics in the Colleges of Advanced Education, which by then taught the majority of higher education students, had PhDs, and 69 per cent of university academics. In 2018, across the now unified system, nearly 74 per cent of academics have a PhD.

Not surprisingly, most people who do PhDs are interested in research. In a 2010 survey, only six per cent of research students planning an academic career nominated a ‘mainly teaching’ role as their ideal job.

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