Decades of declining public funding for universities and the increasing corporatisation of the sector has further eroded working conditions for staff and the quality of education for students, according to a new report.
Of the 1,002 respondents in the report by the Australia Institute’s Centre for Future Work, 83% said they were concerned universities’ focus on profit was undermining education standards.
“The long-term underfunding of universities inevitably undermines the quality of instruction, the quality of university jobs and the quality of a university degree,” said Jim Stanford, one of the report’s authors and the director of the Centre for Future Work. “Our polling results show Australians know it.”
The report said federal funding for universities from 1995 to 2021 – excluding government-funded Help loans which are later repaid by students – has declined by $6.5bn, which equates to 46.5% of current higher education funding.
Tuition fees account for 51% of total funding for universities compared with the OECD average of 23.3%, and the average Help debt has doubled since 2008, from about $13,000 to almost $25,000 in 2022.
The report found 76% of respondents were concerned about students’ debt burden, while 67% said it cost too much to attend university.
The report said public funding had not kept pace with rising enrolment rates, which had driven universities towards private sources of revenue. Since 1995, the report said, university revenue from private sources had doubled, reaching an all-time high of 43% in 2019.
This reliance on private sources of funding had increasingly corporatised the governance model of universities, the report said, fuelling a focus on profitability at the expense of quality education and secure work for staff.
While total employment across universities grew by 2.3% from 1999 to 2019, the report said casual employment grew at 4.5%, and now accounted for 40% of jobs at public universities.
“Universities do everything they can to cut back on expenses,” Stanford said. “From casualising the workforce to larger class sizes, to cutbacks in resources and supplementary materials.
“Imagine learning about cutting-edge science or health from people who are hired on a month-to-month basis. This isn’t going to equip graduates with the comprehensive and thorough education they need.”
However, Prof Andrew Norton, a higher education policy expert at ANU, said a better explanation for the increasing casualisation of the workforce was the change in the way universities were funded in 2001, which saw funding for teaching and research separated.
He said student surveys had shown an increase in satisfaction since the 1990s, but academics have reported the change in funding has meant less time for mentoring students.
The National Tertiary Education Union national president, Dr Alison Barnes, said the research painted a stark picture of what the government needed to address in the Universities Accord, which will review Australia’s high education system.
“Now we have concrete evidence of what staff have been saying for years,” she said. “Funding cuts, insecure work and governance problems are fuelling massive problems across our cherished universities.”
