Under the Bradley proposal, student contributions would be untouched but universities would face less control over what courses they offer.

Though there are reasons to put place and fee deregulation together, in higher education they have been separate issues.

Increased fees is not a sign of policy failure; in areas like childcare and higher education where there is historic under-investment it would be very surprising if they did not increase to finance the level of service demanded.

Each of your Sydney examples (MQ, UTS) offer programs that aren’t available at ‘prestige’ institutions and other programs that have been, at certain times, more difficult to get into than equivalent courses at USyd or UNSW. Furthermore, ‘prestige’ hides a multitude of sins, and sometimes those idiots in the middle classes can recognise as much and will make an informed decision.

I wasn’t aware that uni fees were capped, being an ordinary working stiff who reads about rises in Uni fees in the paper, so I assumed the insitutions had the power to increase them. How does that work? I oppose any kind of voucher system after experiencing vouchers-in-all-but-name with the child care system. Government gives parents money to “follow the child” (well, with a bit of a delay), providers raise their fees to allow for what the market can bear. Lather, rinse, repeat. Vouchers are a recipe for providers setting fees at a level way above the voucher amount.

I’m just saying that it isn’t the case that low prestige equals higher accessibility, especially in the cities (far from it). Most of the average/low prestige universities in the big cities are set up for middle class/rich kids that don’t get into the prestige universities (Macquarie, Swinburne and UTS being good examples — I was always impressed by the number of BMWs and flash cars in the MQ car park when I worked there many years ago — cars which most of the lower level staff couldn’t even think of affording). Even most of the country/small city universities are not exactly high on equity either, and no doubt will become even less so with further reform as they migrate to the bigger cities (like Deakin and that Queensland university that gets all the bad press did), and close down their smaller regional/outer suburban campuses as UWS, VUT, and La Trobe are doing. Thus the idea that having low prestige universities increases access to poor (versus academically poor) groups is incorrect — they’re basically providing a service to middle-class kids who haven’t done very well at school, quite unlike the general rhetoric.

Yet these campuses provide teachers, nurses, social workers and business graduates for the region as well as making higher ed possible for smart kids whose families are poor because of the drought.

Rather amusingly, I work at one of those fairly average universities with low accessibility, and strangely enough, our VC constantly talks about equity and helping low income groups, as does the VC from Maquarie, another university that doesn’t cater to that group at all. Perhaps it’s on their minds.

No doubt there’s a direct connection between low prestige and high accessibility that perhaps implies a practical conflict between some of the recommendations.

The logic of this report, which keeps revenue growth low, is that student growth if it occurs will be outside the traditional universities and in providers that keep costs down by teaching all year round, with a corresponding need for year round staff. But no time for them to do research.

Which I’m sure will be essentially identical to now for most courses, since most courses either don’t expand because it costs too much (e.g., most clinical courses), or they simply try and get as many students as possible because there are economies of scale. For example, without knowing, I’ll bet that Arts at QUT takes in as many people as possible above a certain floor, as do most Arts departments in Australia. Given funding follows students already, it’s hard to see how vouchers will change this. It seems to me that this will only occur if some university with a relatively reasonable standing (e.g., Monash) decides to seriously lower its entry standard (which seems somewhat likely for low enrollment subjects, such as many areas of science). This would pretty much kill off the bottom university, as I imagine you would see a little chain reaction as everyone underneath dropped their standards to make up for the loss (and stay alive), with the bottom one being killed off (which would be La Trobe and VUT in Victoria, since they are already going broke). This is obviously more likely to happen in places like Victoria and NSW where there are enough universities that could be affected, vs. Queensland where there is basically only one competitor in the good (UQ) and average (QUT) categories.

“will be a perverse incentive for university managerialists.”

It’s not clear to me they need incentives or reasons for doing things. Hopefully in a few years some will wake up and realize they actually need a workforce.

But the fundamental point is that the price signals have to be correct. As they are wrong, and Bradley does not propose fixing them, a voucher system is potentially dangerous if universities behave in an economically rational way. For loss-making disciplines, the incentive is to start cutting Australian students regardless of demand and trying to recruit international students instead. The most important feature of vouchers may be the freedom to take fewer, not more, students.

Though 2008 was the first year in which it was safe to expand student numbers, the fact that universities reduced rather than increased offers is a warning sign. Ditto low applications by universities for new places in recent years.

The other factor with the “education revolution” is that there were some very strong hints given by Stephen Smith, Gillard and Rudd himself to people in the university sector that had the decision not been made to undercut Howard at the policy launch and call for a hault to the spendathon that the missing “chapter” was going to be buckets of money for universities. There’s been a strong expectation that will be forthcoming – I think all that’s given people pause is the state of the budget now. But I’m sure there’ll be a fair bit outlayed. The real test is whether the government will use Bradley to resist turning the thing into a dogs breakfast which tries to satisfy all the self-interested demands of the various groups of universities. Hopefully not – and again, the signals were that the whole point of Bradley was to shift the terms of the debate away from where they’d been stuck for a number of years.

Back to education though – another constraint for Rudd is his advocacy of an “Education Revolution” – I think we’d all agree that what we have seen so far doesn’t add up to that – so there will be some pressure for him to deliver policies over the next few years that measure up to the rhetoric.