How ‘public’ should public universities be?

Andrew Norton2 Comments

There has been debate about the University of Melbourne’s response to a sex-segregated Islamic event held on campus. But it was an unusual debate, in which the radical feminist Sheila Jeffreys and Opposition Leader Tony Abbott were on much the same side.

U of M VC Glyn Davis pointed this morning to the tensions between gender equality and freedom of association raised by this case.

Some commenters on my Facebook page argued that as a ‘public’ university made a difference to how we should weigh up the conflicting considerations – that even if we should tolerate sex segregation in society generally, it should not happen at the ‘public’ University of Melbourne:

This is, however, a publicly funded university and I assume it’s more then likely that the venue was provided at lower/no cost then a private space; effectively meaning the event was subsidised by the taxpayer. For the sake of reputation of the institution, as well as applying best principles, events that entail gender segregation should be clearly not allowed on campus.

The likes of Glyn Davis must remember that they are public servants.

Most universities in Australia are more akin to government departments than private enterprises, they are established by legislation that allows for extensive control over the way they conduct themselves.

‘Public university’ is not a legal concept. The University of Melbourne’s legislation rather pointedly refers to it as ‘public spirited’ rather than public. University staff are not employed under public service legislation, and the governmnent of the day has no say in academic or professional staff appointments.

In practice, the term ‘public university is used to describe the universities listed in Table A of the Higher Education Support Act 2003. But it is not a term that appears in the legislation.

Table A universities do have greater access to public funds than private higher education providers. Most (though not all – Australian Catholic University is the exception) are subject to some public sector requirements in their own state, perhaps most significantly administrative law obligations such as freedom of information.

But I would generally defend the ‘public spirited’ rather than ‘public’ formulation in the U of M Act. There are good small-c constitutional reasons for thinking that universities should be substantially autonomous of government, places of independent thought and speech. Governments have historically tended to accept that view. Though state governments appoint university or council senate members, they only appoint a minority. State governments especially have taken a laissez-faire approach to academic matters.

To me, public funding should be seen as transaction. Governments are entitled to get what they pay for (such as a number of student places), but this should not give them broader rights over the institution. That some taxpayer money might have been used in building the lecture theatre where the Islamic event was held does not give government any on-going veto power over how the theatre should be used.

None of this means that universities should be immune from criticism. But to me the fact that the U of M was set up by a Victorian government statute, or that it receives Commonwealth funding, does not add anything to the case for preventing sex-segregated events on campus.

Should unis voluntarily cap student numbers?

Andrew Norton7 Comments

From my perspective, the demand-driven funding system is Labor’s main higher education achievement (it’s described at pages 56-58 of this report). Over time, I expect it will drive a more efficient allocation of student places and through creating competition improve teaching and student services. Already we can see that a student’s chances of getting an offer in their first-preference field of study has improved in most disciplines:

offer rates
Source: DIISRTE. The figure shows offers in each field of study as a % of all first-preference applications for that field of study.

But uncapping the number of Commonwealth-supported students is costing a lot of money, a factor in recent higher education cuts. An article in yesterday’s AFR reveals that the universities want a de facto re-introduction of caps – not through changing the higher education funding legislation but through universities agreeing to constrain student numbers.

This would be a backwards step. The fear of losing students to competitors is a key driver of responsiveness to students, and a cartel-like restriction on places would be nearly as bad as the old regulated control.

Should higher education courses be tax deductible?

Andrew Norton3 Comments

The universities are calling for tuition fees to be exempt from the $2,000 maximum tax deduction for self-education.

The low tax deduction plus the more easily-defensible closing off of the voluntary HELP repayment bonus could have major effects on some students.

For a presentation I was doing at Swinburne today I prepared an example using a Swinburne Graduate Certificate of Engineering, a course marketed as professional development and therefore likely to have sufficient link to the student’s current employment to be deductible.

I assumed that the student was currently earning $75,000 a year, giving them a tax rate of 32.5% plus the 1.5% Medicare levy. I assumed they would take out a FEE-HELP loan and then repay it to claim the 5% bonus for voluntary repayments. As figure 1 shows, the two measures substantially reduce the effective cost of the course to the student.

Figure 1: Effective cost of course under current arrangements
swin 1

As figure 2 shows, with just a $2,000 tax deduction and abolition of the repayment bonus the effective cost of the course to the student increases by more than 50%, from $6,600 to $10,100.

Figure 2: Effective cost of course under proposed arrangements
swin 2

There are interesting conceptual issues here. The tax system is already biased against human capital investment, as students cannot claim a tax deduction for their investment in their future salaried earning power, though they could if they bought a range of physical assets to produce trading profits.

For undergraduates, arguably the public subsidy and the HELP loan scheme removes any bias against human capital investment. Most undergraduates cannot get easy access to other forms of capital. But in the largely full-fee postgraduate market many students would have alternative investments for the available cash.

There are complications in the argument. It is not always easy to distinguish ‘consumption’ and ‘investment’ higher education. It doesn’t seem quite right that with tax deductions the effective cost of course is much higher for someone on a 15% marginal tax rate than someone on a 45% tax rate. In a book I wrote a decade ago, I thought that maybe flat-rate subsidies were less distortionary than tax deductions.

I’m still not entirely sure how to deal with this issue. But we should watch enrolments in postgraduate courses very carefully.

Uni VCs should take some blame for consequences of latest cuts

Andrew Norton5 Comments

Well so much for the Universities Australia campaign for increased public funding of higher education, with another half-page ad in today’s Weekend Australian. The government has announced a new wave of higher education spending cuts.

As usual with these weekend announcements there is not much detail available, and not all the numbers make sense to me on current information. For universities, the main impact will come from ‘efficiency dividends’ of 2% in 2014 and 1.25% in 2015. This will be the first cut to nominal per undergraduate student funding since the Dawkins reforms 20 years ago. [Mookster makes the point below that after indexation there will not be a year-on-year reduction, though I am anticipating that there will be a reduction to Commonwealth contribution amounts in the Act.]

Reducing public funding to higher education is not in itself problematic. But arbitrary changes to the prices universities receive for reasons which have nothing to do with higher education (funding Gonski is the claimed reason in this case) are not easily justifiable. In a more market-based system, we could see whether students would rather put up with cuts or pay more to maintain current services.

This outcomes highlights the political failure of the Universities Australia process that led to their current policy document. By maintaining an exclusive focus on public funding rather than building a political case for more fee deregulation they were always taking a big risk. The idea that a $5 million university advertising campaign could alter the political calculation that there are more votes in schools and health was always pretty fanciful. And so it has again proved to be, even sooner than I thought.

The reality here is that there are vice-chancellors who would rather undermine the services they can provide than concede an ideological point about student charges. They should take some of the blame for the problems these cuts will cause.

Is the University of New England’s MOOC legal?

Andrew Norton2 Comments

Update 21 February: UNE VC Jim Barber advises me that UNE Open students will not be enrolling at UNE, and that DIISRTE is ok with UNE Open. I still think that current regulation is poorly designed for innovation in higher education, but it looks like this venture is OK to proceed.

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Original 20 February post:

Today the University of New England announced an innovative new way of delivering higher education. Inspired by the MOOCs, it plans to unbundle its higher education services.

…through a new platform called UNE Open, UNE will [] begin offering a range of postgraduate and undergraduate units through open courseware…..UNE Open will offer a range of fee-for-service products alongside the open courseware, including tutorial support, examinations and, ultimately, students may choose to have their learning recognized for credit into a UNE degree

Vice-Chancellor Jim Barber’s op-ed on his plans is here. I think this is an excellent initiative. But in offering its services this way, UNE is moving into uncertain legal territory.

Problem #1 is that under section 19-85 of the Higher Education Support Act 2003 universities are supposed to charge every student who enrols in a unit of study. They can offer ‘scholarships’ to bring the price back down, but that significantly complicates this ‘freemium’ model.

UNE can argue that the open courseware is not a unit of study, defined as a ‘subject or unit that a person may undertake with a higher education provider as part of a course of study’. Just studying the curriculum materials online could not lead to recognition as a unit in a course of study, but if students have the possibility of examination and academic credit then arguably it is a unit of study.

Perhaps UNE could create a legal workaround in which students don’t actually formally enrol, they just take the unit without enrolling. However, even this is skating on thin legal ice. At a course of study level, enrolled is defined to include ‘undertaking’ the course of study. Again, we hit the problem of the closer the ‘undertaking’ gets to academic credit the more it looks like an enrolment and something to which section 19-85 applies.

Problem #2 is that under section 36-55 of HESA 2003 there is a floor price of the highest student contribution amount for a Commonwealth-supported student unless the student could not have enrolled as an award (ie degree) student. I’m not sure how this provision is intended to be applied. People already enrolled in degrees at UNE for which the unit in question is relevant are covered I think, but it seems to cover a broader group: anyone who might have been admitted. So if your ATAR was very low you can get a discount, but if your ATAR was high you can’t? Sorting out who falls within section 36-55 and who does not would be complex, and undermine a simple open enrolment model.

Problem #3 is that HESA does not support the unbundling of charges into separate components. Section 19-100 reads

A higher education provider must not charge a person a fee for a course of study that exceeds the sum of the person’s tuition fees for all of the units of study undertaken with the provider by the person as part of the course.

I think this makes it difficult to offer cheap, stripped down versions of units and then charge more later for examinations or academic credit.

A literal reading of section 19-90 suggests that UNE could have multiple different fees charged at enrolment depending on level of service. But that wasn’t the intention of the legislation – as I recall it, the purpose of this provision was to allow different cohorts of students to be charged different fees for the same bundle of services (for example, students who enrolled in a course at different times could be charged different amounts). And it undermines a key flexibility of the stated UNE model: that students can decide as they go what level of service they want.

I hope my reading of HESA is wrong, or that UNE can drive its open courses through the loopholes. But Australia’s system of higher education funding and regulation was designed to support an homogenised higher education service. It is poorly equipped to deal with innovative higher education business models. That the system is an obstacle to premium higher education services has long been well understood. But with UNE’s proposal, we are starting to see how it is also an obstacle to discount higher education.

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More detail here.

Uni scholarship donations not so praiseworthy

Andrew Norton6 Comments

I saw the PM on the news tonight praising Graham Tuckwell’s $50 million donation to the ANU to fund undergraduate scholarships. No doubt there are worse ways for a rich man to spend $50 million, but there are also much better ways.

Like many scholarship schemes, the Tuckwell scholarship will go to people who already have plenty of potential that is unlikely to go to waste. They will go to university anyway, find mentors anyway (one of the claimed benefits of the scheme), and make something of their lives. They are not the people who need help.

Instead, these scholarships are used for essentially wasteful positional competition between universities. The ANU will use the Tuckwell’s scholarships and the associated publicity to try to take top students away from Sydney, Melbourne and other universities that buy talented students .

If I had $50 million to spend on higher education I would put it into MOOCs. I don’t know if they will really turn out to be the next big thing in higher education. But Coursera, for example, on a capital base of US$22 million has already attracted 2.5 million enrolments. It includes many people from developing countries with little prospect otherwise of higher education. It can make so much more difference than adding to the advantages of people who have so many already.

Business groups again outspend left-wing third parties

Andrew Norton1 Comment

The annual AEC third party political expenditure returns were released this morning. Annual reporting was introduced by the Howard government with the pretty express purpose of harassing left-wing third parties such as green groups and GetUp!. However it catches industry groups as well, and as the table below for the third successive year they have outspent left-wing groups.

The law does not require disclosure of which issues were pursued, but the main industry players for 2011-12 were industry groups involved in the carbon tax ($9.3 million) and and pokies regulation ($4.3 million). (Updated noon 1/2 to correct misclassified expenditure).

Political expenditure disclosure laws are very complex, including a requirement for disclosure of spending exceeding $11,900 a year on ‘the public expression of views on an issue in an election’. So third parties operating during 2011-12 were required to forecast which issues would be issues in the 2013 election, which we now know will be on 14 September. As it is very hard to predict what will be an issue that far out (quite possibly, not pokies in the end) there is a basic rule of law problem with this provision.

Under the current system, these complexities are largely restricted to major players which spend $11,900 plus a year. But in bill before the parliament, which the government this week announced it would try to pass by 30 June, the threshold for disclosure would drop to $1,000 in any six month period. This will catch many small political groups run by volunteers, few of whom will have any idea that their trivial political activity could land them in serious legal trouble.

Government rejects higher ed funding review’s main recommendations

Andrew Norton5 Comments

To nobody’s surprise, the federal government has rejected the 2011 base funding review panel’s main recommendations (media release here).

The biggest policy change suggested by the BFR panel was that every student should pay 40% of the Commonwealth-supported funding rate, with taxpayers paying the other 60%. With students currently paying between 28% and 83% of their course’s funding rates (details at p. 52 of Mapping Australian higher education), that would have meant some students paying less (eg law, business) and many others paying more (eg medicine, nursing, engineering, science, education).

Logically and empirically, 40/60 was always dubious. It was based on the idea that government should pay the anticipated future value of higher education’s public benefits. Graduate Winners argued against that idea, proposing a framework in which the public aims to profit from its higher education investment.

The flat 40/60 was based on the idea that public benefits were similar between disciplines. As one of the main public benefits was increased tax revenue, that assumption is clearly false (data also in Graduate Winners, but easily inferred from the BFR background paper on private financial returns). And even if this was true, it logically leads to a flat rate subsidy and not a proportion of total funding rates, which have nothing to do with subsequent benefits.Read More »