An overreliance on China and the emerging pandemic have forced reevaluation of university’s offerings, vice chancellor says

This article is more than 6 months old

This article is more than 6 months old

The University of Tasmania will slash hundreds of courses from its curriculum as part of a major overhaul driven in part by an “overreliance on China” and the impact of the coronavirus.

On Tuesday, the university’s vice chancellor Rufus Black told staff the university was “facing sustained headwinds” to being sustainable, and would cut the number of courses on offer from 514 to fewer than 120 by next year.

In an extraordinary missive Black said the university had been “working against powerful forces” in becoming sustainable over an extended period, but that the combination of an “overreliance on China as a market for international education and what is now emerging as a pandemic” had forced the university to reevaluate its course offering.

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“The impact of Covid-19 is still not certain,” Black said in the letter to staff.

“Thanks to the good work of our teams responding to the issue, the majority of our students in China and subject to travel restrictions have started study with us. But as we know the spread of the illness continues to shift. We have a long way to go in dealing with this issue and its consequences will last well beyond this year.”

The vice chancellor said other factors, including increased competition from universities both in Australia and the UK as well as a shrinking school-age population in Tasmania, had all contributed to “a very strong headwind”.

“In the face of it we are not making enough progress to be the right size to be sustainable even in the short term,” he wrote to staff.

“The year sees us start a long way behind our budget and with more financial challenges to come.”

In a press release on Tuesday, the university sought to characterise the cut as a “redesign of its course architecture” which would “remove much of the complexity” of its course offerings.

“We need a course structure which has our students at its centre, is distinctive, easy to navigate and is kinder to the people who administer and deliver it,” Black said in a statement.

The cut-back would mean job losses at the university, though it did not confirm how many positions would go.

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“As we have discussed previously, we know this will mean we need less people,” he said. “We will lean hard on natural turnover to achieve as much of that as possible.”

In the letter to staff, Black described the combination of an over-reliance on Chinese international students for income and the arrival of the coronavirus as a “known strategic risk”.

It was an oblique reference to what experts have long warned is the Australian tertiary sector’s out-sized reliance on Chinese students as an income generator in the face of cuts to higher education funding.

The coronavirus virus and the associated travel bans from China have brought that risk into stark focus.

International students contributed $34bn to the Australian economy last year, and universities are facing an estimated $1.2bn hit to fee revenue from an estimated 65,800 students at risk of cancelling their enrolment due to being stuck outside the country.