Aust universities sit on a 'precipice'

By Dan Harrison. University leader Fred Hilmer has declared Australian universities are on a precipice, underfunded and smothered by regulation, and heading for decline without urgent and dramatic policy change.
Addressing the National Press Club yesterday, Professor Hilmer, the vice-chancellor of the University of NSW, said universities should be free to set their own fees for Australian bachelor degrees. Currently, universities are free to set their prices for international students and for Australian students in postgraduate courses, but fee levels for local students in undergraduate courses are set by the Commonwealth.
Professor Hilmer - the chairman of the Group of Eight consortium of top research universities which includes the ANU - also flagged a more assertive approach to lobbying by the university sector, which he suggested had been too acquiescent in the face of bad policy.
''I think we've got to play in the public policy field a lot more aggressively than we have been,'' he said.
''We're getting close to a time when we've got to do pretty much what the mining industry did. Just say no, take out ads, and be absolutely vocal.''
''I don't think we use the strength of our reputations sufficiently, and I think we're going to have to, because we've got to get this environment changed.''
Professor Hilmer delivered a withering critique of the Gillard government's higher education policies, which he described as ''a mix of rose-coloured aspirations, oppressive regulation and Scrooge-like funding.''
He said about 20 of Australia's universities ranked in the global top 400, yet were treated ''as if they were fly-by-night ventures rather than respected colleagues of the best universities worldwide,'' forced to submit to a ''dysfunctional, smothering array of regulation.''
He said it had taken four months for the Gillard government's universities regulator to approve a new course UNSW wished to offer.
Previously, he said, such approvals took one week.
He said while Australian institutions ranked highly in international standings, these were based on past performance. ''If we look forward, the picture for Australian universities is not nearly as bright,'' he said. ''I think we are sitting on a precipice.''
He said allowing universities to set their own fees for bachelor degrees for Australian students would allow universities to lower staff-student ratios at little or no cost to the Commonwealth budget.
He said if UNSW was allowed to charge half of the students in courses such as law, business, engineering and medicine just 25 per cent more, this would raise $30 million a year which would allow the uni to employ 250 new staff. These degrees carried ''high private benefit'' to the students who completed them, and the HECS system would ameliorate the effects of higher fees on poorer students, he said.
A spokesman for the Tertiary Education Minister, Chris Evans, said the principles which guided the work of its universities regulator had been designed in close consultation with universities and with their strong support.