At Grattan, there are a couple of early career research jobs available. Research associates usually rotate through the different Grattan programs (higher ed, school ed, energy, cities and productivity).
At CIS, there is a more senior job for an economist.
The ‘demand driven’ funding policy starting next month combines deregulated places with regulated prices for student places. This is a potential problem. When the government no longer allocates places between institutions and disciplines the prices universities receive for each place are a key steering mechanism. If the price they receive is unattractive, they can not take Commonwealth-supported students.
The base funding review commissioned a study of costs, and it was able to shed some light on prices relative to costs, as they were in 2010. The figure below shows median, mean, maximum and minimum teaching and scholarship costs in a sample of eight universities.
The federal parliamentary review of campaign finance law reported last Friday (an Age report with a slightly misleading first paragraph is here.) In put in a submission on third parties. A less technical article on the draconinan NSW and Queensland third party laws – my nightmare scenario – is here.
My summary reaction: it could have been a lot worse. Though I disagree with much of what the majority report says, they have held back on most of the extreme NSW and QLD attacks on political freedom. My views were given a fair hearing – I appeared before the committee and my submission is frequently cited in the chapter on third parties.
Most of the material I disagree with on the lowering the donations disclosure threshold, bans on anonymous donations and bans on foreign donations (critiqued here) is just the same old stuff that Labor has repeatedly tried to legislate over the last few years, not a new reform agenda. (Unfortunately it will probably now pass with Green support).
They have actually accepted one of my recommendations, that the political expenditure laws applying to third parties no longer include ‘the public expression of views on an issue in an election by other means’. It would still include materials requiring the ‘written and authorised’ message and other party political material. This would remove the routine activity of think thanks, universities and the media from the law (which is ignored anyway, but the threat of prosecution would be lifted).Read More »
The most contentious aspect of the base funding review report, released today, is likely to be its proposal to change the basis of public subsidy for higher education.
At the moment, the public subsidy is not explicitly based on public benefits. Effectively, it’s just what’s left after student contributions are deducted from total per student funding by discipline. Total funding is loosely derived from a study of higher education expenditure 20 years ago, while student contributions are loosely based on differential HECS introduced in 1997. Differential HECS was in turn based roughly on average private earnings of graduates in particular disciplines. So law and medical students paid the most because lawyers and doctors earn a lot. Education and nursing students pay lower amounts, because teachers and nurses have modest salaries.
According to the base funding review, public subsidy should be based on the government paying for public benefits. They say the public benefits are equivalent to between 40% and 60% of total annual expenditure per student. These public benefits are defined as miscellaneous non-pecuniary benefits to society, plus the ‘direct fiscal dividend’ from the additional taxes graduates pay due to their increased earnings.
Leaving aside whether these numbers are robust (I doubt it, but assume they are for the sake of argument), what is the justification for using public benefit as the basis for public subsidy? The base funding review offers two possibilities.
One possibility is that without subsidy ‘private benefits might not be enough to motivate a student to pay full fees’. So the logic would be that through subsidies the private benefits are increased to a point where it is financially attractive for students to enrol in higher education, and then go on to the produce the claimed public benefits. Read More »
I’m looking for a an intern to work on the higher education program at the Grattan Institute in Melbourne. It isn’t paid, but you would get experience working in a think-tank and credit for your work in published reports.
It would suit a student on the their summer break. While we are flexible on hours, internships work best if the intern can spend a reasonable amount of time per week over at least a month. Any disciplinary background should be ok, but the work itself will include data collection and using a spreadsheet.
The intern would work closely with me, and with two Grattan research associates.
If you are interested, email me with a CV at andrew.norton@grattan.edu.au
DEEWR has finally released the 2011 applications data. This confirms my point last week that the government’s claim that the 2009 cut to student contributions had no influence on demand is unsupportable on the evidence (but still being supported by sector representatives in the media late last week). Since 2008 overall applications minus science were up 12.4%; science was up 42.5%. We can’t know for sure why science demand increased so much, but we certainly can’t rule out price effects.
I’ve also been interested in tracking the scores of applicants admitted based on their year 12 results. Combining the latest with earlier application reports, we can see that the strongest growth in acceptances is for applicants on scores 50.05-70, up from 14.4% in 2004 to 23.6% in 2011. However, that group’s share of all applications is unchanged on 24%. What’s changed is their chances of receiving an offer and accepting.
The 2011 report shows that among home state applicants in the 50.05-60 group application rates as a % of school leavers with results in that range are increasing. It will be interesting to see if this continues. Except for Open Universities Australia (which largely operates in a full-fee market) most higher education advertising is directed at people how have already decided to go to university, but not which university to attend (or perhaps course to take). This is logical given the system prevailing in recent decades, with the number of available places held below demand.
With the new uncapped system for public universities from next year, I wonder if marketing will change – that to fill empty capacity universities will start marketing to people who had not seriously considered going on to higher education. If that occurs and is successful, we will see higher application rates among weaker school leavers.
According to The Australian this morning,
THE Gillard government is under fresh pressure to counter the decline of maths at universities and at schools after scrapping an incentive plan that will see student HECS fees in maths and science almost double.
I don’t know what is happening at schools, but at universities there was a 13% increase in maths enrolments by commencing students between 2008 and 2010. However, this was a lower increase than other science subjects and the overall increase in all non-science subjects.
While there have been shortages of maths teachers at schools, there has never been any real shortage of maths graduates as such. Maths graduates have generally ‘underperformed’ relative to other graduates when seeking work. And in practice they pursue a wide range of careers:
(2006 census, male graduates whose main field of study in their highest degree was classified as ‘mathematical sciences’.)
In the Mid-Year Economic and Fiscal Outlook statement, the government announced that it would cut part of its ‘performance’ funding for higher education institutions.
The idea was that universities, through ‘compacts’ with the federal government, would sign up to various performance goals relative to a benchmark. If they met their goals, they would get part of the available performance funding.
The student experience and quality of learning performance performance measures will no longer be funded (the MYEFO does not say whether the targets will be abandoned; other parts of the compacts seem to expect unis to do what the Commonwealth wants without funding). Participation and social inclusion performance funding will be retained.
I’m not a fan of these ‘performance’ funds. I’ve called on universities to ignore them. Aside from the difficulty in devising robust indicators that don’t encourage gaming or downplay other important goals, higher education policymaking is too unstable for the performance programs to be credible.
The indicators end up changing almost every year – this abolition is just part of a pattern – so there is little point in universities putting in place long-term programs to achieve their targets. Effectively, the performance funds are little better than lotteries. The universities that happen to be good at whatever indicator is favoured in a particular year will get rewarded, rather than the performance fund causing the good performance.
The universities will be sorry to lose the cash ($105 million in 2013-14). But they won’t be sorry if they also lose the associated bureaucracy of trying to get their share of it.
One of the policy decisions in today’s Mid-Year Economic and Fiscal Outlook is to rescind Labor’s cut in the student contribution amounts for science, maths and statistics subjects.
While students starting before 2013 will be grandfathered, those starting in 2013 will according to the government’s estimates pay $3,662 a year more, or about $11,000 over a three year degree.
I opposed the cut to student contributions at the time, among other reasons because I doubted that it would increase demand. The MYEFO repeats this argument, citing the Bradley review of higher education policy.
The Bradley review, however, reported shortly before the cut to student contributions came into effect. The student applications data since suggests that my prediction, along with Bradley’s prediction, was wrong.
In the two years after the cut took place, demand for science courses increased 32% in a market that was up 12% overall. Though the slow-moving DEEWR bureaucracy hasn’t yet published the 2011 applications data, media reports earlier in the year from the tertiary admissions centres suggests that science demand was up again.
Given that science graduates were having above-average difficulty finding work on course completion even before the demand surge converted to more graduates, cooling demand is not a problem if that is what occurs.
Though we can never tell for sure simply based on applications, a drop in demand following a price increase would help increase our confidence that relative prices were a science demand driver.
Andrew Norton 