Universities Australia Solutions Summit
We were excited to attend the Universities Australia Solutions Summit in Canberra with our partners from Etio. The conference offered great opportunities to engage with colleagues to discuss Australian universities’ many successes and the challenges they face.
We were especially keen to add the perspectives of those at the heart of Australian HE to our own thinking and to learn more about how, over more than two decades of spectacular growth, Australian institutions have managed their resources to run effectively and efficiently. That said, Australia’s universities are facing a critical juncture. In 2023, two-thirds of publicly funded universities were operating at a deficit, a result of challenging government policies and documented external pressures that have significantly strained university finances. Conversations with a number of colleagues through the conference echoed this predicament.
It is clear there is appetite within the sector to use data and evidence to better inform policy and funding conversations. This article explores the challenges and how we get there.
Current challenges, future mission
Many of Australian universities’ challenges will be familiar to colleagues in the UK and other countries.
There is a sense that the political consensus and – currently – the country as a whole do not have much appetite to pay the full costs of higher education for Australia’s population, or for research & development. This is in spite of the current government’s aspiration to increase participation in tertiary education to 80%, and the fact that GDP spent on R&D is around 40% below the OECD average.
As in the UK, many Australian universities long tolerated this lack of commitment as many were able to recruit large numbers of international students to cross-subsidise the funding gap while preserving their autonomy.
The “good times” of open international recruitment ended sharply when the government – in response to cost of living and housing pressures perceived (many say wrongly) to be exacerbated by high international student numbers – introduced caps on international student numbers without plugging the shortfall for core tuition and research, throwing many Australian universities into deficit.
Perhaps because the freewheeling times – when universities could largely do their own thing and high-margin growth could be used as a balm for financial challenges – lasted for so long, the government’s funding priorities now seem to lie elsewhere. Luke Sheehy’s (CEO, Universities Australia) address to the National Press Club of Australia encouraged the leaders of both major parties to consider a re-focus, and to support universities ‘getting match fit’, which has to be central to delivering the agendas of both major political parties. Indeed, the ambitious goal of educating a million more students each year by 2050 has considerable investment and resourcing implications.
Meanwhile, many in Australia including the government accept that the country needs to fundamentally reorient its economy towards a less extractive, more environmentally and economically sustainable model, while navigating a harsher and riskier geopolitical environment.
We all know what a critical role universities have in achieving that.
As we heard during the conference from the CEO of Universities Australia, Luke Sheehy, “the need to open the door to university for more Australians has never been greater…we need to educate a million more domestic students each year by 2050. That’s what our economy demands and it’s what our future prosperity depends upon…we must view this task as a critical national imperative, not simply an educational priority”
But in order to make this a national imperative, institutions need to understand how much money they are spending, what they are spending it on and what it is achieving.
Not being able to give clear answers to some fundamental questions such as the cost of educating a degree student or impacts of research against the resources put in makes policy conversations around the need for proper funding more difficult.
How our new approach to benchmarking can help
Performance benchmarking can support a number of the key priorities for the sector, primarily in stabilising sector finances, which can then, through supported investment decisions, help address immediate skills needs, support innovation through research and promote indigenous advancement.
The choices a university makes as it navigates change have consequences – on finances, satisfaction levels, people. Our aspiration is for universities to have access to nuanced, tailored and actionable insight as they make these hard choices. That access shouldn’t cost the earth, shouldn’t drain staff time or capacity, and it should allow for simulation of impact prior to defining a programme of change. Rigorous benchmarking which fits this criteria, when combined with targeted support, can swiftly take any institution beyond diagnostics and into real improvement by:
- offering sharp insight on how institutions stand against the critical resource and performance questions
- exploring what specific impact different change scenarios would have prior to making an implementation choice
- making actionable recommendations to enable clear-sighted decisions
- providing context-appropriate support to make the changes happen.
In this way, institutions can deliver measurable efficiencies to both take them out of the red and improve their outcomes.
It will also allow them to answer policy questions around unit of resource; see the range and diversity in their sector, including cases where differential resourcing or outputs may have a justified reason; and track similarities and differences with institutions in other countries to support conversations what “world-leading” truly looks like.
Etio + SUMS can help on this journey, and we are currently accepting registrations of interest for the 2025 Australian Universities Benchmarking & Insight Cohort – our first group of Australian universities set to benefit from this new approach.
Find out more here or contact David Becker for more information.
