University upheaval: 'If people feel safe, we’ll see the students come back'
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Version 0 of 1. Australia’s tertiary sector is both one of the greatest victims of the coronavirus contraction and vital to the road out While workplaces and schools around the country battled to take business and education online in response to Covid-19, Jack Begbie was “in awe” at how quickly University of Technology Sydney was able to make the switch. “They paused university for a week and then, when we started the next week, everything was online – all using Zoom and different programs,” the fifth-year communications student says. But moving course content online is only the beginning for universities, which expect to lose up to 21,000 jobs and will have to remodel their offerings to provide new short courses and continue to attract international students. The university sector is both one of the greatest victims of the coronavirus economic contraction and vital to the road out, in terms of research capability, retraining opportunities and $23bn in export income. Andrew Vann, the vice-chancellor of Charles Sturt University, says the crisis will “accelerate trends” towards distance and online education which have been building for decades. “Three-quarters of our students are already studying by distance already, so it is less of a transition for us than some of the metro unis,” he says. “I think a lot of people will say, ‘I probably could study online’ – it will give legitimacy to what was previously seen by some as a measure of last resort.” Luke Sheehy, the executive director of the Australian Technology Network of universities, agrees, arguing that coronavirus is just the latest in a long line of disruptions that have required more innovation, including technology change and the automation of work. “If universities do go online with high quality, including high student contact, with highly interactive courses – you’ll see a change in the way people behave,” Sheehy says. “It is a growth area anyway, but I’d expect from this crisis we might see stimulation of interest in that will be ongoing.” Begbie started communications five years ago and quickly found full-time work in his industry of choice. Since then he has been “slowly chipping away” at the rest of his degree part-time. He describes the challenge of “trying to work out which subjects are available after hours, or at lunchtime, or early in the morning” to squeeze study in around work, biking from his job in the city to UTS’s Ultimo campus. “It worked to an extent but it could always be a bit easier,” he says. “It feels like having options to learn online is something I’ve been waiting for for a few years for … I wish we didn’t have to have a global pandemic for a little change like this to happen.” But Begbie acknowledges that 100% online learning “won’t be the perfect solution for everyone”. “I know a few people at UTS have struggled with the transition. You go from a very collaborative program, where everyone sees everyone, and you get constant feedback in class and from the teacher – to working from home where all that structure and support is much harder to come by.” Eamonn McGrath-Lester, a final-year speech pathology student at La Trobe University, made a similar switch to 100% online learning, which he does from the home office in his shed in Preston, Melbourne. McGrath-Lester is even doing his clinal placement online, in which clients, student clinicians and the supervisor all log in through Zoom. Others were not so lucky, losing placements and facing delayed graduation as a result. “There are about 70 speech pathology students in my year – a lot of them are at hospitals, and while public hospitals stayed open and kept their students on, a lot of placements were cancelled outright, particularly at private hospitals and clinics,” McGrath-Lester says. The other trend set to accelerate is short courses, or so-called micro-credentials. The federal government has offered a funding guarantee, which fell well short of the sector’s demands, and enacted a series of changes to exclude universities from the jobkeeper wage subsidy. The education minister, Dan Tehan, has spruiked price cuts in 20,000 short courses in nursing, teaching, health, IT and sciences as way forward for the sector. The University of South Australia is first out of the blocks with a program designed before coronavirus: a six-month professional certificate in aged care, which can expand into a diploma with a further six months of study. Prof Esther May, the dean of academic and clinical education in the health sciences division, says the course is structured around what the aged care industry requires of a “well-rounded worker”, with no elective subjects. Aged care was chosen due to the high workforce demand, with job openings expected to double and a retiring workforce creating opportunities for “rejuvenation”. While it’s too early to profile students entering the course, May praises students from a retail and hospitality background who “tend to be a very good match for aged care and disability because of their ability to communicate and work with customers”. The most politically sensitive change to the tertiary education sector post-pandemic will be the student mix between domestic and international students, given that Liberal conservatives have cited universities’ alleged over-reliance on Chinese international students as a reason to deny them further taxpayer support. Sheehy says international students are about 35% of the student body at the network’s east coast universities, with universities planning “meticulously” with a market-diversification strategy, and some, including UTS, adopting a soft cap. But few in the sector were prepared for a global pandemic, which has caused international student enrolments to plummet, irrespective of their country of origin. Some international students were able to make it to Australia before restrictions. “Our applications are up for second semester,” the vice-chancellor of Sydney University, Michael Spence, told Guardian Australia in April. The university relies heavily on students from China. “After the travel bans were imposed, many students made an effort to come and spend the two weeks in a third country and then come to Australia,” he said. But next year and beyond are far less certain and will depend on whether there are second and third waves of the virus that significantly affect Asia – the main markets for students – and what happens in countries that are the main competitors in education: the UK and US. It’s hard to imagine that international travel will return to normal this year but universities hope for arrangements that will make it possible for international students to resume travel, with periods of quarantine. The sector is negotiating greater visa flexibility with the federal home affairs department, so universities can begin teaching international students online for semester two of 2020 and semester one of 2021 while disruption continues, with a guarantee they can come to Australia to complete study face-to-face. The Labor MP Julian Hill, co-chair of the Parliamentary Friends of International Education, accuses Scott Morrison of “actively harming” the sector through “tone deaf” comments that visa holders, who are not eligible for jobseeker or jobkeeper payments, could instead go home. Hill has consulted with the international education sector, which wants greater certainty including for the department to process and issue visas in advance, with a defined date for students to come to Australia. The National Tertiary Education Union president, Alison Barnes, says there has been “inadequate support from the federal government” for international students, leaving state governments to try to fill the gaps but most measures have been “too little, too late”. Ian Jacobs, the vice-chancellor of the University of New South Wales, warns that Australia may have damaged a key export market. The decision to exclude temporary visa holders from jobkeeper led to real hardship for students who depended on part-time jobs, often in hospitality. “Our future students will be watching this,” Jacobs says. The Universities Australia chief executive, Catriona Jackson, says it’s “impossible to accurately forecast” what the student mix will be because the decision rests with health authorities about when to reopen borders. Jackson and Spence both praise the Chinese government for waiving its requirement that students studying at foreign universities can’t do more than a certain percentage online. “That’s a way of making sure foreign universities don’t just beam themselves into China and you have a whole lot of people having a fake foreign university experience,” Spence says. “They have waived that requirement for those who have had to start online due to Covid-19.” Meanwhile, universities are being forced to make cutbacks, with major projects and capital spending deferred, and casual budgets slashed across the board. Jacobs warns that universities could face a downward spiral, where the immediate crisis causes them to cut spending, making them less attractive to students of the future and adding to their financial woes. The higher education reforms of the Dawkins era more than 20 years ago sparked a wave of mergers. Universities absorbed colleges of higher eduction and broadened their offerings into vocational courses. But since then the trend has been for universities to expand their own course offerings rather than look at finding synergies with other organisations. Financial pressures may cause a rethink. There will also be a squeeze on research dollars. Spence says the basic problem facing universities is that high-quality research – the very thing that has propelled some of the Group of Eight universities into the top 100 – is increasingly expensive. Although funding has grown since Labor uncapped places in 2009, the government contribution on a per capita basis has declined, prompting universities to make up the gap from the fees that international students pay. Well-heeled universities have used that cream to set up institutes and research centres that take their place on the global stage, and in turn add to their lustre as desirable institutions. Either the federal government will either have to fund universities more heavily from taxpayer funds or make some hard decisions about how to allocate research dollars, Spence warns. Jackson says there are “a number of outstanding issues under negotiation” with the government, including visa changes and funding for short courses. Barnes says we “are now seeing the human cost of over 50% of university employees being in insecure employment”. “The casualised model of employment gives university employers the flexibility to hire and fire at will, but at the extremely high cost of casual workers’ careers and lives.” Jackson concedes that universities are making cutbacks but says they are responding to ensure they are “as equipped as possible to assist with the recovery” by improving financial sustainability. The loss of revenue “will be very hard for universities to absorb, and it will be difficult to play as full a role as we’d like to play in national recovery”, she says, emphasising it is not just a loss to the institutions but research and the national interest at stake. But while the sector is making big changes, everyone agrees that campus life is not gone for good. Short courses and online education might suit those in the workforce, but Vann notes that “many things can’t be done remotely, such as the hands-on skills for nurses, vets and dentists”. “We’re going to have to do a lot physical catchup when social distancing backs off,” he says. Just as the federal government is pushing for schools to reopen, Vann suggests it will be pushing a similar message soon with university campuses. The universities never completely shut – there are still people in student accommodation and libraries open in campuses across the country. “If people feel safe, we’ll see the students come back,” Vann says. “But we’ll need to be careful, you can’t turn this on and off.” Jackson says it has been “extraordinary” that students have adapted to learning in lounge rooms, bedrooms and garages but she doesn’t think “there’s any prospect” university will remain 100% online. “As soon as it is safe to be back on campus, international and domestic students will be keen to get back on campus, back to tutorials and face-to-face learning.” |