Greater public investment vital for universities in crisis

CAPA applauds the recommendation of the Senate Committee report, Universities in Crisis, that public investment in higher education be increased significantly over a ten year period.

"The crisis facing Australia's universities can only be resolved by a substantial and sustained increase in public investment in higher education", said CAPA President, John Byron.

"In contrast to the current government, the Senate Committee has recognised the intrinsic public benefit of a well-educated population and has advocated a commensurate increase in public investment" he stated.

Australia's higher education system has been eroded by reductions to universities' operating grants from 1996 and the limits imposed on funding for salary increases negotiated under Enterprise Bargaining Agreements, all in the context of expanding student numbers.

"This government has undermined the higher education sector to the extant that universities are increasingly reliant on volatile and problematic private sources of income to meet basic operating costs", said Mr Byron.

Universities have also increased fees for students in an attempt to compensate for insufficient public investment. The effect of this has been to create a system where only the wealthy have been able to afford the fees for the majority of postgraduate coursework degrees, and alarming declines in enrolments in vital fields of study have been experienced as a result.

"Without an increase in the public investment in higher education, the quality of university infrastructure will continue to erode, and the members of our population who have the most to gain from higher education will remain excluded" said Mr Byron.

"The clear experience of the higher education sector is that the market is not an adequate manager of present and future education needs. The market is a weather pattern: an aggregate of competing interests each of which is pursuing ends quite at variance to the overall needs of the nation.

"The Coalition's abandonment of this precious pass-key to a prosperous future to the vagaries of a deregulated market environment is facile and irresponsible," said Mr Byron.

"This report establishes beyond doubt - now that all the evidence is in - that we urgently need to rethink our commitment to a well-managed and productive education system before it is too late."

"Unfortunately the government's dissenting minority report confirms the sector's experience that the Coalition is willing to fiddle while Rome burns in service of a bankrupt ideology," he continued.

"This denial, in the face of overwhelming testimony, of any serious problems in the education sector - the engine-room of Australia's future social, economic and environmental prosperity - is the clearest indication yet that the Coalition is not fit to govern," he concluded.