Debate based on flawed dichotomy | The Australian
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http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,23092696-25192...
Printed January 23, 2008 01:44am AEDT
Debate based on flawed dichotomy Alan Bowen-James | January 23, 2008 THE most intriguing aspect of the ongoing debate over the place of Australian private higher education is the debate itself. Americans and Japanese can't understand what the fuss is about; they live in a mixed educational ecology in which the private sector plays a leading role at every level. Indeed, the local K-12 wars over government funding for private schools petered out decades ago, largely because a robust private sector renders the cash-strapped public system viable, not to mention the issue of choice in a market economy. However, the tenor of the debate regarding private higher education has changed in recent times, with many universities - the Group of Eight in particular - and the ALP seeking reconciliation rather than confrontation. This is largely a reflection of the gradual de-politicisation of the discourse, itself a product in part of the progressively blurred distinction between public and private. With a growing percentage of the private space being occupied by university commercial spin-offs and alliances, and truly private businesses - that is, those born of non-public capital - increasingly being embraced by government regulation, the dichotomy no longer serves a useful purpose. Had we a unitary, truly national system of registration and accreditation that differentiated between institutions by functional rather than proprietorial criteria, we could be far more creative and effective in the management of national educational resources, and the ways in which we characterise them. But this is not the case, so the old epithets have to suffice. In the schools sector, private and public coexist symbiotically. The former serves burgeoning community demand for a particular educational experience and reduces pressure on public resources. Every taxpayer who opts to pay private school fees also elects to subsidise children in the public sector. Of course there is cross-subsidisation, but no one doubts who is carrying the burden, which is why there is now bipartisan support for the right to choose. The same can be true of higher education. Private higher education needs to be regarded by the public sector not as a competitor, but as a strategic partner in rationalising resource allocation and positioning Australia as a global education services provider. The debate over whether private higher education should be proscribed, neutered or nurtured is essentially a by-product of an accident of birth, a history of reform and the crypto-privatisation of the public sector. The accident of birth, of course, is the particular flavour of our European settlement. Had the pilgrims lost their way and landed in Botany Bay rather than on Plymouth Rock, private higher education would set the standard in Australia, complemented by federal interventions to create a viable public sector. It is correctly argued that the public sector is the protector of academic standards, especially given that the non-theological private sector has never had the autonomy or opportunity to prove itself in this respect. But no one can argue that, given a fair chance, the private sector is incapable of meeting best practice standards, or that the public sector is consistently faithful to its quality mandate. The outstanding reforms that shaped the present debate are the Dawkins revolution of the late 1980s - the most radical intervention in the history of Australian higher education and one that distorted just about every imaginable supply and demand metric - and the Nelson remedies of recent times, in particular the 2003 Higher Education Support Act and the creation of FEE-HELP. In comparison, HECS was less a reform than a structural adjustment, albeit an important and equitable one. The dismantling of the colleges of advanced education wrought by the Dawkins revolution and their reinvention as universities (or parts thereof) stripped a purpose-specific teaching and research structure of its clarity and fiscal coherence. Among many other things, Australia lost a highly functional, professional teaching system that nestled comfortably between the TAFE and research-intensive strata of post-K-12 education. While we gained some excellent institutions, this barely compensated for the negative impact on the overall quality of research and teaching. Instead of the transparent functional hierarchy of CAEs and universities, the public sector realigned around clusters of common interest as networks of universities seeking to capture niches in a disrupted ecology characterised by the dead hand of antiquated industrial relations practices and a morass of funding formulas. The crypto-privatisation of public institutions - that is to say, the privatisation by stealth of the university system - was an inevitable consequence of the resource pressures exacerbated by the Dawkins revolution and the aggressive internationalisation of the customer and funding mix. The dilemma in public education has been how to finance and support excessive supply. Even more perplexing than money was (and remains) academic staff. China can produce a new university every two weeks, with superb infrastructure. But ask any senior Chinese administrator and they will tell you that the fundamental growth-limiting problem is finding excellent academic staff and retaining them. Australian administrators will tell you the same.
23/01/2008 4:24 PM
Debate based on flawed dichotomy | The Australian
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http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,23092696-25192...
Perhaps the greatest irony in the public-private debate is the commonplace inversion of the problem. Those who would hamstring private education by legislation and funding mechanisms argue that it encroaches on the public domain. But precisely the opposite has been occurring during the past decade in particular. Public institutions are behaving more like stereotypical commercial organisations, focusing primarily on profitability, marketability and customer recruitment. Because of their right of self-accreditation, universities have unfettered ability to craft products to suit their market. Private institutions, on the other hand, are looking more and more like public ones, particularly since the advent of HESA. For a private institution to access FEE-HELP, it has to pass rigorous examination by the public sector at two levels, state and territory for initial registration, and federal for the holy grail of higher education provider status. To achieve the latter, private companies have to agree to be subject to a slew of regulations applicable to universities, from detailed financial reporting to quality audits. At every level, private institutions that achieve HEP status must jump through hoops fashioned according to public criteria. And even then, they are not self-accrediting, having to run the gauntlet of their public competitors for every course accreditation. Nor do they have access to HECS, research grants, capital allocations, the title of university and a host of other sectoral privileges. The introduction of FEE-HELP was, among other things, an equitable mechanism for supporting (that is, not disadvantaging) students who choose to study outside the public system. It was a compromise, given the possible political consequences of refashioning HECS into a sectorally agnostic universal loan scheme supplemented by merit-based scholarships. It was also a very good way of providing incentive for private institutions to aspire to loftier heights through submission to public scrutiny. In other words, FEE-HELP not only introduced some equity into the game, it also inspired the minor league to seek premier league status. Recent argument over the costs of HECS and FEE-HELP is in many ways misleading with respect to the greater issue at hand. No university student pays fees reflective of the true costs associated with the establishment and running of their alma mater. Few could afford to. Regardless of operational funding formulas, all university students are heavily subsidised, as they should be for the public good. HECS makes sense, and so does FEE-HELP. The only real difference between them is that the former is a directly subsidised income-contingent student loan with more strings attached (such as quotas) while the latter has no subsidy and an administration charge to boot (and therefore fewer strings), and is available to students only in selected private institutions. The role of the universities is to provide teaching and research at the highest level of intellectual development and discovery. Yet the commercial burden placed on academics for profitability and market share is deflecting effort and resources from their primary mission. There is no sense in universities endlessly and wastefully replicating courseware, systems and processes in order to compete within their oligopoly and against the perceived threat of private competition when precious resources could better be used for leading-edge research and scholarship. Crypto-privatisation affects every aspect of university life and demeans great institutions and scholars. However, the private education sector can play a positive and productive role in reversing this slide into mediocrity: through enlightened and mutually profitable partnerships in a mixed educational economy. Private institutions can pick up a large proportion of the base teaching load that is not research-intensive, filling the role previously so well served by the CAEs. In effect, the private sector can provide the new CAEs and the public institutions universities proper, focusing on their true metier. Indeed, universities should be given the opportunity to elect whether they wish to be pure teaching or research institutions, or a mix of their choosing. But in order for this to happen, there needs to be a single common income-contingent student loan scheme for all students in the manner of FEE-HELP, regardless of sector and devoid of course and institutional quotas: a genuinely universal education entitlement as a right of citizenship. And the criteria for self-accrediting status for private institutions tentatively laid out in the most recent iteration of the national protocols should be revisited and recast, not as a path to junior college status but as a common set of registration and accreditation protocols for all higher education providers, regardless of ownership. Not deregulation, but equitable reregulation. Alan Bowen-James is general manager of Cengage Education, formerly Thomson Education. He was previously a manager with the University of NSW and Deakin University, and has taught at a number of universities, including the University of Sydney and the University of Technology, Sydney. Copyright 2008 News Limited. All times AEDT (GMT +11).
23/01/2008 4:24 PM