Fact check: Will Australian universities 'slide into mediocrity' without reform?

Updated

The Government claims allowing Australian universities to charge students unregulated fees will keep them internationally competitive. It has issued dire warnings about what may befall the universities if the current funding system remains.

"The situation in Australia is such that we cannot have no reform to our universities or they will slide into mediocrity, be overtaken by our Asian competitors," Education Minister Christopher Pyne told Network Ten's The Bolt Report on August 24.

"Our international education market will dry up. Our university students will go overseas thinking that they have first-class degrees only to find they come eighth out of eight in every race."

ABC Fact Check examines how Australian universities are tracking against their international competitors.

The claim: Christopher Pyne says Australia cannot have no reform to its universities or they will slide into mediocrity and be overtaken by Asian competitors.

Christopher Pyne says Australia cannot have no reform to its universities or they will slide into mediocrity and be overtaken by Asian competitors. The verdict: On the available evidence, without Mr Pyne's reforms, it seems unlikely Australian universities will slide into mediocrity.

Ranking the world's universities

Despite its relatively small population, Australia has developed an international reputation for providing a high quality, innovative and highly internationalised university system, according to Simon Marginson, a professor of international higher education at The University of London.

Australia created 2.4 per cent of the world's published journal papers in 2010 and in 2012 it placed eighth in a ranking of national higher education systems, Professor Marginson wrote in a 2013 paper examining Australia's tertiary education policy.

There's little doubt world rankings of universities play a significant role in "shaping global movements of knowledge, people and money in higher education", he said.

Ranking tables are especially important for Australia, where international students bring $15 billion to the economy, making higher education the country's third largest export earner after iron ore and coal. The sector brings more money to the Australian economy than gas, gold, tourism, oil or wheat.

The Group of Eight, a group of Australia's large research universities, says Australia is the world's third most popular destination for international students, attracting nearly 7 per cent of international student population. Ranking tables help these students decide which university to attend.

Criticism of the ranking systems

A 2012 report from the Group of Eight says there are valid criticisms of ranking systems, including a lack of comparable data among world universities and failure of the data to capture important outputs of different universities in different fields.

It notes the ranking systems include only 3 per cent of the world's 17,000 higher education institutions.

"World university rankings do not relate well to the missions of universities whose principal mission is not research, or at least not internationally-referenced basic research," the report said.

While the world ranking systems value research universities, there are important roles for universities which focus on producing quality graduates for the Australian labour markets, it said.

Despite some problems with the ranking systems, Professor Marginson says there is no doubting their importance.

"League tables might be obnoxious or fallacious but if a university rises in one of the rankings it is all over the website," he said. "If it slips, the vice-chancellor may not be reappointed."

Three main ranking systems

The three main world university ranking systems are produced by:

London publisher Times Higher Education;

Shanghai Ranking Consultancy, affiliated with Shanghai Jiao Tong University;

and London higher education events and publishing company The QS Group.

Professor Richard James, director of the university of Melbourne's Centre for the Study of Higher Education, says Shanghai Ranking's system is widely viewed as the best.

Its methodology includes considering every university that has any Nobel laureates, Fields medallists, highly cited researchers, and papers published in select academic journals. It ranks more than 1,200 universities and includes more than 500 universities in its tables.

How Australia has fared

Fact Check has looked at the Shanghai Ranking data on the performance of Australian universities over the past decade.

In the most recent 2014 rankings, Australia had four universities in the top 100 and 19 in the top 500. This has remained relatively constant since 2011. Looking back to 2004, the rankings tables show Australia had just two universities in the top 100 and 14 in the top 500.

The 2012 Group of Eight report says Australia's apparent rise in the Shanghai rankings has been influenced by recently awarded Nobel laureates from The University of Western Australia (2005) and Australian National University (2011).

The report also says: "Australia's relative improvement in several of the world university rankings reflects the plateauing of inputs to US and UK universities, the lagged accounting for the emergent Asian universities, alongside some recent absolute lifts in funding inputs for Australian universities".

This table shows the top eight Australian universities and their world rankings, according to Shanghai Ranking, over the past 10 years:

2005 2007 2009 2011 2013 2014 The University of Melbourne 82 79 75 60 54 44 The Australian National University (ANU) 56 57 59 70 66 74 University of Queensland 101-152 102-150 101-150 86 85 85 University of Western Australia 153-202 102-151 101-150 102-150 91 88 University of Sydney 101-152 102-150 94 96 97 101-150 Monash University 203-300 203-304 201-302 151-200 101-150 101-150 University of New South Wales 153-202 151-202 152-200 151-200 101-150 101-150 University of Adelaide 203-300 151-202 201-302 201-300 201-300 151-200

While the Australian National University and the University of Sydney have slipped in the past couple of years, the University of Queensland and the University of Western Australia have both entered the top 100 list in recent years.

Professor James tells Fact Check that if Australian universities do not deregulate they will end up slipping in the rankings because competition is rising at the top end.

In 2013, the Times Higher Education system placed five Australian universities in the top 100 and 19 in the top 400, while the QS ranking placed seven in the top 100 and 26 in the top 500.

'Overtaken by our Asian competitors'?

In his claim, Mr Pyne says without deregulation, Australian universities will "be overtaken by our Asian competitors".

More specifically, Mr Pyne has told Parliament "universities in China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Singapore are rising strongly through the ranks".

While there are still no Chinese universities in the Shanghai Ranking top 100, there has been significant growth in the numbers of Chinese universities in the top 500.

Singapore has no university in the top 100 and its rankings in the top 500 (two universities) have remained constant over the past decade.

Hong Kong has five universities in the top 500 with two moving into the top 200 in the past couple of years.

In 2013-14, the Times Higher Education system placed one Chinese university in the top 100 and 10 in the top 400, while the QS ranking for 2014-15 placed three in the top 100 and 18 in the top 500.

The Group of Eight's report says many Asian universities are receiving "substantial increases" in government investment in higher education and university research.

"The rate of growth in academic publications output from Asia is far outstripping that of Australia and the quality of Asia's research outputs is rapidly improving," it said.

Calls for reform

Mr Pyne says "the situation in Australia is such that we cannot have no reform".

Some leading advocates for higher education have been calling for reform after cuts to higher education by successive governments.

Universities Australia chief executive Belinda Robinson says: "Either the status quo of ongoing inadequate investment, or further cuts without deregulation, will condemn Australia's great university system to inevitable decline..."

"We don't invest as much of our GDP in universities as many countries, so we haven't been riding on the sheep's back, we've been riding on the international student's back," Professor James said.

A review by the University of Melbourne in 2011 found international students pay about 40 per cent more than domestic students and effectively subsidised their domestic counterparts.

"We have built an extreme reliance. It would be unlikely we would find a similar system anywhere in the world that would require exposure to and reliance on international students to directly underpin basic quality," the report's author, Michael Beaton-Wells, told The Australian newspaper.

Professor James argues that if international student numbers were to fall, as they did from 2010 to 2013, the entire sector would go into decline.

However Andrew Norton, higher education program director at the Grattan Institute, says: "I don't believe that there are short-term quality issues likely to drive down demand from international students, although of course we should not be complacent about this," he said.

Would deregulation improve Australia's global competitiveness?

Recent modelling by NATSEM, an economic and social policy research centre at the University of Canberra, predicts university fees may dramatically increase if the Higher Education and Research Reform Amendment Bill 2014, which passed the House of Representatives on September 4, also passes the Senate.

Mr Pyne's explanatory memorandum for the bill says the reforms will "ensure that Australia is not left behind at a time of rising performance by universities around the world".

However Mr Norton says the rankings are principally based on research performance and "research policy itself is only facing small reforms as part of the Pyne package, none of which should have any material effect on global rankings".

Mr Norton says "there is a widespread suspicion that if fees are deregulated, much of the money will go to fund research". He says if that is the case "then fee deregulation could help improve the relative position of Australian universities".

"However, it is not clear that it is sensible for students to pay for research. At this point no university has announced what fees it would charge or what it would do with the money from those fees, so this point is still speculative," he said.

Group of Eight chair Professor Ian Young argues deregulation will enable Australian universities to be brilliant. He says deregulation will enable universities to differentiate, like in the US, where students can chose from small liberal arts colleges to Ivy league colleges.

But Professor John Quiggin from the University of Queensland says the mooted reforms have not found favour with academics and students. He says big questions remain about following an American system which he says has failed.

In the end, "the main issue around fee deregulation is whether it can improve the student experience", Mr Norton says.

The verdict

There is strong evidence showing Chinese universities are moving rapidly up the world university rankings, however there are still no Chinese universities in the top 100.

During the last decade Australian universities have also moved up the world university rankings.

It's unclear how much universities would charge after the Government's proposed deregulation, and whether universities would spend money on measures that would make them more internationally competitive.

On the available evidence, without Mr Pyne's reforms, it seems unlikely Australian universities will slide into mediocrity.

Mr Pyne's claim is far-fetched.

Sources

Topics: university-and-further-education, education, liberals, federal-government, australia

First posted