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Vice-chancellors say Australian Tertiary Education Commission plan should be rewritten
Universities Australia has said that the government’s proposal for a national tertiary education commission is so flawed that it needs to be rewritten.
In a response to the proposal on 26 July, the group, which represents all Australian vice-chancellors, said it wanted to see “a revised proposal” and an exposure draft for any related legislation.
The plan to house the Australian Tertiary Education Commission within the Department of Education should be scrapped in favour of an “independent authority” model, the group said.
Its submission asked for a staged implementation and emphasised the need for the commission to have “sufficient resources to perform its functions”.
Its first task should be to address funding issues, including a financial analysis of the sector, the vice-chancellors said.
Knowledge production
A public consultation paper on the planned commission was released in June and submissions closed on 26 July. The government aims to establish the commission by 1 July 2025 as a key part of its response to the sweeping Universities Accord review of the higher education system.
The Australian Academy of the Humanities’ submission said that the tertiary sector was “lacking” national leadership and that the commission should focus on strategy, not administration, “which belongs in the Department of Education”.
“The current draft is strong on administration but it overlooks the importance of higher education for national capability—that is, for an appropriate knowledge and research base for the nation,” it said.
To develop sovereign intellectual capability, the commission should work with Australia’s five learned academies to guide “the production and transfer of knowledge”.
The academy said that commission members should have relevant knowledge and the commission should go beyond talking to “university executives”, consulting educators and researchers as well.
The Australasian Council of Deans of Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities, which ran its own sector forums on the matter, said its members “have raised concerns that the commission will contribute to the increasing regulatory and administrative cost of higher education and will limit academic influence over the core functions of the university”.
The Group of Eight, representing Australia’s largest research universities, emphasised the need for “independent, transparent, consultative and long-term policy advice provided to government”.
It noted that the Universities Accord report was written before the government moved to introduce what it called “ill-conceived and economically destructive international student [number] caps”.
Membership issues
The deans’ submission said that a proposed rule that commission members should “demonstrate their independence from the tertiary sector” could become problematic.
“Having sectoral experience should not be viewed as being at odds with the national interest. Instead, it is vital that those leading the commission have in-depth knowledge of the higher education sector to enable them to undertake their role effectively.”
The deans proposed an 18-month exclusion period for higher education workers.
Universities Australia said the consultation paper “overemphasised the need to guard against ‘narrow sectoral views’ of people recently employed in the sector”.
“There will be a limited number of experts from outside of the sector who would be available to the commission,” it warned.
Several submissions said that the commission should work to collect better data on the sector in order to develop “evidence-based policy”.