Australia¡¯s ¡°managed growth¡± system risks leaving universities unable to accommodate an influx of ¡°equity¡± students if demand for higher education recovers, a Sydney forum has heard.

Policy analyst Mark Warburton said lower-tier universities, which will have the most restrictive ¡°hard caps¡± under the forthcoming system for financing university places, would experience the sharpest increases in demand when changed economic circumstances ¨C a recession, for instance ¨C rekindled interest in higher study.

He told the , at the University of Technology Sydney, that resurgent demand would come mainly from the socio-economically disadvantaged people whom the government was particularly keen to lure into higher education. ¡°If there¡¯s a reserve pot of places to backfill for equity students, how much is this pot? Where is it? I have absolutely no idea.

¡°I¡¯m¡­worried that, the way the dynamics work in the sector, the new system can¡¯t cope.¡±

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The managed system is partly designed to prevent stronger universities growing at others¡¯ expense ¨C a phenomenon dubbed ¡°the hunger games¡± by federal education minister Jason Clare. Warburton, honorary senior fellow at the University of Melbourne¡¯s Centre for the Study of Higher Education, said there was a ¡°disconnect¡± between the minister¡¯s aspirational statements and the Education Department¡¯s accounts of how the new system would work in practice.

¡°What¡¯s driving this is an idea that there can be central control of where students go. [The] Job-ready Graduates [reform package] was trying to¡­shift students away from the big, powerful metropolitan universities to other institutions to make them viable. Job-ready Graduates tried to do that with incentives. Now we¡¯re going to try and do that in a much tighter controlled model. I¡¯m highly sceptical that this is going to work.¡±

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Under the new approach, each university will be allocated a fixed number of student places instead of the more flexible dollar-based caps that apply now. But the system is also expected to accommodate unlimited numbers of ¡°equity¡± students ¨C people from disadvantaged groups ¨C who have satisfied academic entry requirements.

Monash University policy expert Andrew Norton said this would generate a new category of equity students who were eligible for places but had not been granted entry. ¡°Some convoluted process¡± would be applied to ¡°try to convert this eligibility into an actual place somewhere¡±.

Norton said this was unlikely to work, because would-be students often had their hearts set on particular universities. People denied their first preference courses often turned down alternatives, he said.

¡°What I¡¯m really concerned about¡­is that effectively, due to the stronger caps, the universities will lose their flexibility to adapt to demand in real time during the offers process. We¡¯ll end up with a [scenario] where the number of students enrolled is well below the theoretical capacity of the system.¡±

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Penny Szybiak, director of planning and performance at Charles Darwin University, said admissions staff would take a ¡°conservative¡± approach to avoid exceeding the stricter new quotas. ¡°It¡¯s hard enough to get within the plus and minus of our own internal targets, let alone a sort of a very hard cap. Inevitably, you¡¯ll end up falling just below [the cap] because you won¡¯t want to go over it.¡±

Szybiak warned that the Australian Tertiary Education Commission would struggle to find time for the ¡°meaningful discussions¡± needed to set mission-based compacts ¨C which will determine the caps at all 38 publicly funded universities ¨C in time to provide ¡°certainty¡± about funding before the new system commences in 2027.

Norton said this year¡¯s funding agreements had been signed about 10 days before they came into operation. ¡°If you want to be adaptive to demand, you¡­need to leave it to the last possible minute. But if you want universities to have some certainty around which they can plan, it needs to be months or even years earlier.¡±

john.ross@timeshighereducation.com