By Salvatore Babones
It’s back to school this week for most of Australia’s 1.5 million university students—and back to Canberra for Australia’s top 1000 education bureaucrats.
Universities Australia is holding its annual Solutions Summit this week in Canberra. The jamboree kicks off today with a session on “Putting First Nations at the heart of higher education”.
The education bureaucrats really do want to put First Nations (the Canadian term that has replaced “Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples”) at the heart of our universities. Indeed, most universities have deputy or “pro” vice chancellors who focus solely on First Nations inclusion.
But few universities offer residential bursaries that might actually help students from remote communities actually afford an education in a capital city. Those that do offer money tend to give partial scholarships, not a full ride. The result is that First Nations (at least it’s shorter) funding goes mainly to urban middle-class students, not to the most needy.
Another result is that although many First Nations students are enticed to begin university study, few finish. Roughly 50% of all First Nations drop out. For remote students, the rates are even higher.
Of course, residential bursaries would be expensive. If First Nations students attended at the same rate as other Australians, providing a $20,000 annual bursary to every one of them would cost around $1 billion a year.
That happens to be about the amount that universities currently pay education agents to bring in international students. That’s right: most international students don’t just apply like everyone else. They are “acquired” through commission-based agents.
International students now make up more than one-third of enrolments at Australian universities. Politicians on both sides of politics have talked about imposing caps, but that horse has bolted. The focus now should be on limiting abuses.
At a minimum, international students should be here to study (not to work), and should be able to communicate in English.
We don’t have data on international student employment, but we do know that around 20% of international students who come to Australia on university visas immediately drop out. But they don’t leave. They go into the labour market, switching their visas over to low-cost cooking and hospitality schools.
This is known as “course-hopping”, and there’s an easy way to stop it: just make all prospective students apply from offshore. But that would cut down the lucrative flow of perpetual students who work in Australia for a decade or more on a succession of student visas.
There’s also an easy solution to the epidemic of international students who don’t speak English. International students have to pass an English language test—or they can study English in Australia instead.
The trick is: if you pass the English course, you don’t have to take the English test. An obvious reform is to require all international students to prove their English ability by passing the test.
Why isn’t that on the table? Because few students would pay for an English course if they might pass the course but still fail the test.
And then there’s AI. Of course, AI is on the agenda at the UA Solutions Summit. It’s on everyone’s agenda.
What’s not on the agenda is putting an end to AI cheating. It’s easy to solve the AI problem: just return to in-class assessments, where students actually have to show up and do their own pencil-and-paper work. The problem here is that four-letter word: “work”.
It’s a lot of work to grade individual, hand-written tests. It’s much easier to assign papers—after all, they can be graded by AI. And if your old-fashioned university makes you grade the papers yourself, you can assign group projects. Five people per group means one-fifth the grading.
University administrators also prefer papers and group work, because they don’t have to be invigilated. Invigilation means reserving rooms and hiring monitors. It also means hiring a host of disability facilitators.
Roughly one in eight university students claims a disability. That can mean extra time on tests, rest breaks, a private room, access to snacks, or any of a panoply of medically-certified accommodations.
But on papers, the disability adjustment is almost always “two extra weeks”. For group projects, the alternative is usually a substitute individual assignment. Strangely, most students with disabilities turn down this opportunity, choosing to complete the group project instead.
The result of our AI-powered, work-from-home university culture is that “peer engagement” gives by far the lowest scores of all the metrics tracked in the government’s annual Student Experience Survey. And that’s among students who were engaged enough to answer the survey.
For the bureaucrats attending the Solutions Summit this week, the big challenges facing Australian universities are financial, managerial, and regulatory. For those of us teaching in the classroom, the big challenges are empty lecture theatres, AI cheating, and an ever-increasing administrative burden.
For the students, one challenge looms above all others: employability. The government’s annual Employer Satisfaction Survey tracks five dimensions of new graduate preparation. The dimension on which our graduates perform worst is … “employability”.
This is not a reflection on our students. It is a reflection on our universities. If our students are addicted to AI, our universities are addicted to First Nations virtue signaling, international student fee revenue, and low-effort assessment practices.
All of these can be fixed. But it would require a genuine change in priorities on the part of our senior education bureaucrats to fix them.
Salvatore Babones is an associate professor at the University of Sydney and the author of Australia’s Universities: Can They Reform?