Australian funding rules put university capability at the mercy of undergraduate enrolments, and risk denuding the country of the expertise it needs to guarantee its future, the Australian Academy of Science has warned.

A study by the academy published on 4 September has found that the country is running out of specialists in the eight scientific fields that are expected to be in most demand a decade from now. Undergraduate, vocational and senior school enrolments are declining or free-falling in the relevant subjects, exacerbating concerns about current workforce numbers.

Journal publications ¨C a traditional Australian strength and a ¡°proxy for expertise and knowledge¡±, according to the academy ¨C are decreasing in some of these critical sciences, while R&D expenditure is falling in most.

The eight areas are artificial intelligence, biotechnology, epidemiology and agricultural, climate, data, geological and materials sciences. Geoscience is in particular trouble, with alarming shortages in both the existing workforce and the student pipeline.

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¡°Geoscience is not just about mining,¡± said Hayley Teasdale, the academy¡¯s head of science policy and advice. ¡°[It] is of utmost importance for critical minerals, which are important for decarbonisation and transitioning to new industries. It¡¯s also important for things like groundwater management, monitoring earthquakes and bushfires, satellite location services and finding resources that are used for transport and energy.¡±

Domestic undergraduate enrolments in earth sciences are lower than at the beginning of the century and well below their 2010s peak. Fees and subsidies for earth science subjects were both cut in the 2020 Job-ready Graduates reforms, reducing funding per student by 15 per cent. Since then, earth science departments have been pruned or closed at half a dozen or more universities.

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Academy council member Ian Chubb said university funding in geology and other disciplines relied on undergraduate enrolments in each field. ¡°A reasonable question¡­is whether the country can so heavily depend on its undergraduate enrolment patterns for its skill profile,¡± said Chubb, a former chief scientist and vice-chancellor of the Australian National University.

¡°If not, what would be an alternative mechanism? If you regard¡­universities essentially as repositories of expertise so that we can operate effectively as a sovereign nation in a lot of these areas, then we need to take steps now.¡±

Chubb nominated the government¡¯s A$15 billion (?7.3 billion) National Reconstruction Fund as a potential source of support for the teaching of strategically important disciplines with low enrolments, such as earth sciences.

In work led by Teasdale, the academy has pioneered a method for measuring a country¡¯s science capability against national objectives for the future. The team distilled the ambitions expressed in Australia¡¯s 2023 Intergenerational Report into three ¡°challenges¡± ¨C technological transformation, demographic change and the environment ¨C and used these to identify the eight sciences ¡°growing most in demand¡±.

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The team crunched data on multiple phenomena ¨C such as enrolments, completions, graduations, patents, research publications and funding ¨C to compile dashboards of current capability in each of the eight sciences, including bell graphs of current and projected workforce demographics.

¡°This is novel forecasting analysis that had not been done before,¡± Teasdale said. ¡°We¡¯re really looking to raise the bar for the type of evidence that policymakers seek to inform their decision-making. This can be repeated for other sectors and we hope that it will be.¡±

The project was hampered by data gaps and discipline descriptors that were difficult to match to the most crucial specialty areas. The team found it was impossible to tell whether the country had an adequate current workforce in artificial intelligence, climate science or epidemiology.

But it identified a ¡°certain gap¡± in postgraduate completions in epidemiology, geoscience and materials science, and in both undergraduate and postgraduate completions in climate science.

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The project found that more than half of new postgraduate enrolments in the natural and physical sciences came from international students, up from about one-fifth in the early 2000s.

john.ross@timeshighereducation.com