Australian universities’ use of student funding for projects that boost their global rankings raises questions over how they would spend deregulation windfall

This article is more than 5 years old

This article is more than 5 years old

Australian universities are diverting a significant amount of student funding into research that helps set global rankings – raising concerns over whether higher income from deregulated fees would be spent on trying to boost their standing rather than improving teaching.

Universities put one in every six dollars earned from “student sources” – made up of both fees charged to students and government funding – into research activities in 2012, according to new estimates presented to Senate committees.



The Australia Institute, a progressive thinktank, said the debate over the government’s proposal to deregulate university fees had been dominated by a focus on how high student contributions would rise.

But researcher Tom Swann said there had been “remarkably little attention to a more fundamental question” of how those fees would be spent.

Swann told a forum at the University of Canberra that research accounted for 41% of all university spending in 2012, up from 31% in 2002.

Swann said global university rankings were overwhelmingly based on research, raising questions about the implications of the government’s bill to deregulate fees.



“Vice chancellors and the government should explain to the parliament and the public how much of the new student debt will end up funding research,” he said.

In his analysis of the latest available data, “student sources” included government grants and fees for domestic undergraduates, international student fees, domestic full fee-paying students and other charges and scholarships.



“While direct research funding increased, there was much faster growth in research funded out of ‘general university funds’, including student revenue,” he said.



“The cross-subsidy amounted to 16% of all university spending in 2012, up from 9% in 2002.

“In 2012, across the sector, revenue clearly for, or from, students delivered more than $2.8bn towards research. That is, one in six student dollars went towards research.”

The university sector has long acknowledged that a portion of teaching funds is used to “cross subsidise” research, but the amount varies in each university and it is difficult to produce accurate estimates.

Swann’s calculations apply across the sector, because some figures are not available at an institution level. In a submission presented to two Senate committees, he said his cross-subsidy estimates were conservative.

“A minimum estimate takes non-research spending, as the maximum that universities could have spent on teaching, and subtracts the amount that universities derived from student income,” he wrote. “This is an underestimate for a number of reasons.”

The chief executive of Universities Australia, Belinda Robinson, said it was hard to be precise about the amounts going to research.



“When it comes to revenue to universities, the revenue is used for a whole bunch of different things,” she told the National Press Club on Wednesday.

“It’s used for infrastructure, building facilities, it’s used for research, it’s used for teaching, it’s used for a whole array of community service and so on, so it’s very difficult to be able to tease out what comes in and how that gets allocated.”

Robinson said it was important for people to “appreciate and understand the absolute critical nexus between research and teaching”.

“To somehow say that, ‘oh there’s research going on over here in a separate part of the university from where there’s teaching and therefore we have to be more precise about the allocation of the resources that comes into universities to reflect those two functions’ – I think it would be very detrimental to the very role of universities in pushing the boundaries of knowledge and in pushing the boundaries of knowledge using that knowledge to influence and to be integrated into the learning and teaching the universities do.”

The Senate’s education legislation committee and references committee are both due to present reports on their inquiries into the higher education bill on Tuesday.

The education minister, Christopher Pyne, said the Senate was likely to vote on the bill by the middle of the week.