The Auditor-General of NSW has completed an annual review of the tertiary sector, and it makes for very unpleasant reading:
• Provisions for wage remediation across NSW universities increased by 66% to $183 million at 31 December 2023.
• Eight universities reported net deficits in 2023. Three of these improved upon their 2022 results. The remaining five reported higher deficits than those reported last year.
• Revenue from overseas students increased by 12.7% in 2023, as the number of overseas student enrolments increased by 12%.
• 40.5% of fees and charges revenue in 2023 came from overseas students from three countries (down from 41.5% in 2022).
• Revenue from domestic students increased by 2.4% in 2023.
• Combined expenses increased by $1.4 billion to $12.6 billion in 2023. Nearly half of this increase was attributed to higher employee related expenses.
To sum up:
The national president of the National Tertiary Education Union, Dr Alison Barnes, said wage theft was the “toxic twin” of insecure work in Australian universities.
“While the scale of theft in NSW is shocking, it is not surprising,” she said. “Unfortunately this reflects the warped priorities of university executives who refuse to properly value their most important asset, the people.
“Executives are addicted to secrecy and dodging accountability and it’s high time they came clean on dodgy practices which are holding our universities back.”
That is, our tertiary sector has morphed into a multi-billion dollar economic and social parasite that leads the nation only in corruption, bribery, the destruction of liberal values and grovelling to nasty foreign powers.
No serious nation can hope to prosper as it debauches its higher education in this manner. This is integral to the collapse in national productivity.
The Australian taxpayer still contributes more than half of university revenue, yet it is now getting nothing back but the worst of corporate gaming, greed, and graft.
Often, former public servants turned rent-seeking managers are to blame.
It is time for a Royal Commission into the collapse of Australian pedagogical standards.
