Making first degrees less vocational would make HSC results less important. Photo: Fairfax
There is a common perception that only the best and brightest should enjoy the privilege, and derive the benefits, of studying at university. This informs the idea (myth perhaps) that we live in a meritocratic society, where social mobility is available to those with talent who work hard. So the revelations this week that universities are ignoring their own published entry standards to offer places to low-ATAR applicants must sully the sense of achievement felt by other new students.
It may be the case that ATAR discounts (as UNSW's Ian Martin wrote) are long-standing and in the public domain; and that such scores are imperfect predictors of future academic achievement in any event. But as the university year is about to begin, the revelations that lower academic achievers have access to higher education must produce a crisis of legitimacy for universities.
What is missing in the debates about entry standards is recognition of the wider social and economic realities that frame the operation of universities. The decline in employment in recent history has led to an extension of the period of de facto compulsory education.
There may be no legal compulsion for young people to continue studying into adulthood but there is certainly an economic compulsion to do so. The alternative for most is the dole queue or treading water in retail or hospitality where the work is low-paid, precarious and insufficient.
So governments shepherd young people into post-school education, and the evisceration of TAFE means universities absorb more school leavers than in the past. They have embraced this situation with gusto, dramatically increasing offers after the government removed caps on funded places.
But neither the politicians nor those in the "business" of higher education like to tell the story in this way. In competing for students, university marketing has become increasingly hyped. Each university pitches its own version of the same story: the nirvana of campus life, the utopia of learning and the platinum-edged credentials that are handed out to graduates.
This lavish publicity belies the reality of contemporary higher education. The increasing presence of less academically inclined students should imply the need for more resources. Yet Australia spends less per capita on higher education than almost all OECD countries. Student/staff ratios are among the highest in the Western world and subject choice within degrees has diminished as universities seek the economic benefits of teaching students in larger and larger groups. In many institutions face-to-face teaching hours have been cut to reduce costs.
Casual staff now teach more than half of all university tutorials, and most are not available to students outside class times. This reduces the amount universities have to spend on teaching and helps to sandbag the working conditions of full-time staff against the real decline in state funding. It also helps cover the ballooning administrative costs. Only three universities in Australia have more academics than bureaucrats, and in some the former make up barely one third of staff.
So there is clearly a need for more resources at the chalk-face, more full-time academics, and more people trained to remedy students' literacy-skill problems. But perhaps we also need to come clean about the first degree. The truth is that the proportion of graduates working in fields for which they are trained is rapidly diminishing, as even solid professions like law, teaching and architecture become oversupplied. The cafes, restaurants and shopping malls of Australia are teeming with graduates working in McJobs who feel that the education system has short-changed them.
Perhaps we should be frank with young people: treat them as citizen-scholars rather than potential customers. Perhaps we need to hose down the marketing departments' inflated promises and, as a society face up to the fact that a first degree is, or should be, a generalist qualification, one which precedes but is completely separate from the postgraduate professional/vocational degree.
While some commentators wish to recover the university of the 20th century by reintroducing caps on places, this ignores the clear social need for mass education from years 13 to 15. Such need could in part be met by re-invigorating the TAFE sector, but all public universities should be properly funded to meet the considerable challenge of increased numbers, made up of a wider social cohort, and not be sold short as they currently are.
If there is a case for capping funded places, it should be in relation to specialised vocational postgraduate courses, in areas where there are few jobs. To pitchfork people into grossly oversupplied labour markets is an ethical betrayal, especially if they are made to pay exorbitant fees to take such courses (which in a genuinely meritocratic public system they should not be paying). But it would take resolute political action to stop this practice because universities are unlikely to decide to do so unilaterally.
The first step in redefining the university should be to narrow the range of degrees available to school leavers – to make first degrees less vocational. This would dampen expensive competition between universities and make HSC results less important.
As a society it is more important that we educate students properly in all universities rather than wasting resources persuading the public of the virtues of one over another. Then the money saved on the marketing budget could be redirected to what we call our "core business" of teaching and learning.
George Morgan is a senior lecturer in the School of Humanities and Communication Arts at Western Sydney University.
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