Bye-bye, boomer professors
THE looming shortage of academic staff will mean falling standards, even larger classes, heavy reliance on part-time and imported lecturers and a loss of courses, experts say.
While academic leaders have welcomed the Rudd Government's doubling of postgraduate awards and funding for 1000 mid-career researchers as a good start, universities still face a monumental task in replacing the imminent retirement of academic baby boomers. According to University of Adelaide professorial research fellow Graeme Hugo, the percentage of the academic workforce aged over 50 increased from 26 per cent in 1991 to nearly 40 per cent in 2006.
Hugo concludes that during 15 years to 2006, there was an increase of more than 80 per cent in the academic workforce aged over 50.
During the past decade there has been an unprecedented effort by universities to offer redundancy packages to older academic staff in a push to increase student-staff ratios and reduce the number of higher level academic staff to reduce their wages bills, Hugo says. Compounding the problem, he says, is a "lost generation" of potential academics, people in their 20s and 30s who are needed for academic renewal but who have been lost to the system for all sorts of reasons.
The academic talent squeeze occurs as the Australian Bureau of Statistics projects two coming waves in the number of university-age Australians.
The ABS projects 15 to 17-year-olds increasing to almost 860,000 during the next few years, declining to 825,000 about 2018 before increasing back to almost 850,000 by 2025. And if they conform to present patterns, they will pour into universities where there are already about 20.3 students for each academic, a ratio that is 30 per cent higher than in the early 1990s.
It has been an ignored trend to date, but, as Macquarie Graduate School of Management dean Roy Green tells the HES, "institutions appear to be keeping afloat with all the outward trappings of normality, but beneath the surface a national crisis is looming if Hugo's assessment is correct". Green - like other academics HES has spoken to - says the budget signals the Government understands the challenge, but the question will be about allocating resources to address it.
"Higher education's role has been reduced by the policies operating over the last decade; we have been dumbing down the nation," he says.
Green says the crunch will come "when we don't have enough academics to teach all the students required for the knowledge-based economy". There will be larger class sizes, greater reliance on online teaching and more private providers that may not have the same commitment as universities to research-based teaching filling gaps, Green says.
According to Green, Australia needs not just an education revolution but, in the short term, "an education rescue plan, with an emphasis on preparing the next generation of university teachers and researchers".
According to Hugo, the oldest baby boomers will pass 65 in 2011, so the exodus of academic retirees will gather momentum during the second and third decades of the century. But Melbourne Business School economics professor Joshua Gans says "the crunch time will be far sooner", especially in the sciences, since time taken to do PhD and postdoctoral work - which often requires working overseas - has extended the time to produce an academic by up to 10 to 12 years. Australia is already facing a shortfall of 19,000 scientists, engineers and technical professionals, the Association of Professional Engineers, Scientists and Managers Australia reports.
Gans predicts mass restructuring and courses evaporating from lower-ranked universities as their higher-ranked counterparts poach their staff to counter their own shortfalls.
James Cook University associate dean of business, law and creative arts Brendan O'Connell tells the HES the start of the crisis is upon us. "Universities are already having severe difficulties attracting appropriately skilled staff," he says.
O'Connell says Australian universities increasingly are relying on imported academics at senior levels, who in some cases lack the communication skills necessary to provide a first-class learning environment and a lack of familiarity with Western approaches to teaching. "This is a pure quality issue, since if people don't have the skills, quality will decline," he says.
National Tertiary Education Union research officer Paul Kniest says a consequence of decades of funding cuts, is that universities find it increasingly difficult to offer young research-dedicated academics structured career paths. "Because of a shift to competitive grant funding, universities are only prepared to employ research staff on fixed-term contracts that match their competitive grants," Kniest says.
Universities need sufficient funding to recruit, train and mentor the next generation of academics, he says.
Hugo tells the HES that in Canada, Britain and other Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development countries the academic talent shortage is being felt.
"A recent Victorian report entitled Talent Wars reflected the tightening of that market," Hugo says.
Australian Universities Quality Agency executive director David Woodhouse says AUQA has been warning universities about staff renewal for three years, but it is a difficult issue and he is not confident they are "particularly well prepared". However, Woodhouse is sanguine about the issue, saying many of today's 60-year-olds are more like a 50-year-old of 20 years ago in health and robustness.
Still, universities need to consider a range of strategies, including tapping the professionally employed workforce, with fractional appointments, he says.
O'Connell says academic career paths aren't structured to attract and retain staff and a new qualification is needed to feed working professionals directly into masters degrees and PhDs.
According to Gans, the problem is that universities don't get to set and keep their own fees. Further fee deregulation is necessary so universities can compete with the private sector, which offers more lucrative wages, especially in fields such as law and business.
"Also, we are producing graduates based on where there are academics to teach them rather than on where they are needed in the economy," Gans says.
Hugo says universities face a substantial challenge in attracting high-quality staff to replace those lost.
However, the fact they are likely to lose between one-fifth and one-third of their staff during the next decade means there are also opportunities for restructuring and changing the balance between courses, subjects and teaching and research programs without resorting to large numbers of redundancies, he says.