Comment by Interim Vice-Chancellor, Professor Simon Evans
The Australian Universities Accord process now underway offers a rare opportunity to rethink Australia’s higher education system.
Anyone who has spoken to colleagues in other universities will know that Australia’s Higher Education (HE) system is grappling with a host of issues that cannot be satisfactorily resolved within the existing policy settings. The core of today’s HE policy environment was developed for different times. Amendments grafted on to meet new challenges have made the system so complex that it gets in the way of the very objectives it seeks to serve.
The Accord seeks to put the HE system on a fresh footing that will enable Australian universities to build for the next 20 to 30 years. It will likely introduce change on a scale undertaken by the Dawkins reforms of the 1980s, which reshaped the system and introduced HECS, and the Bradley Review in 2008 which set ambitious targets for participation by students from under-represented cohorts and paved the way for the demand-driven funding system.
UNE is currently formulating its response to the Accord. The University is therefore looking at the nature and purpose of Australia’s HE system from the perspective of a regional university, and asking what policy would help this university play its part in supporting the national interest.
UNE’s Accord response will broadly address three themes: the need for HE policy to support a diverse system of public higher education institutions; better recognition of the modern university student, not just the traditional school-leaver market; and the need for a simplified, more holistic research quality and funding system. UNE’s Accord response is being coordinated by the Office of Strategy Management who welcome input at strategy.management@une.edu by the end of next week.
We are all too familiar with the difficulties and constraints of the current system, and answers to many of those problems are not immediately clear. But if, as UNE will argue, true diversity in Higher Education is recognised and supported, then an Accord can deliver a higher education system that meets Australia’s national interest for the next generation