What’s a university to do?

r0b
14 years ago
Categories: education
Tags: funding, steven joyce, universities

Some people still think of universities as fusty old ivory towers disconnected from the real world. That hasn’t been true for decades (if it was ever true at all). Our current universities and tertiary institutions are business, they are structured and run to maximise their income in whatever funding framing the government of the day has in place.

Hence as the majority of current funding is based on “bums on seats” we see money wasted on advertising campaigns, and in some unfortunate cases we have seen low quality or sham courses just so more bums can be claimed. Good for education? No.

As some funding has shifted to the “Performance Based Research Fund” (PBRF) we see universities engaging in various tactics to maximise their scores, including getting rid of or reclassifying research inactive teachers, and “encouraging” their staff to spend more time on research and less on teaching. Good for education? No.

Now we have proposals for yet another funding framework, and it’s the worst yet:

Joyce wants university funding linked to jobs

Tertiary Education Minister Steven Joyce says part of the new model includes setting performance targets that focus on course and qualification completion.

Ultimately, he would like to take things a step further by linking employment outcomes to the performance-based model.

So what’s a university to do? Course and qualification completion is easy. That’s an open invitation to “grade inflation”. Government wants a 100% completion rate? Give it to them! Good for education? No.

The proposal to link funding to employment outcomes is “interesting” – let’s punish the universities for the vagaries of an economy over which they have no control! Comparing different institutions within the economy is back to league table thinking, with all the same logical problems. An institution with an elite intake does well even if its performance is mediocre, an institution with a less favoured intake is punished even if its teaching is magnificent. Good for education? No.

Here’s a radical alternative. Recognise that a university education should be something much richer and much more that a sausage factory trying to cram vast numbers of students into any possible entry level job. Funding based on peer reviewed assessment of both teaching quality and research quality equally, with a base rate depending on student numbers (and institutional advertising strictly capped at a very low spend). Done. But it will never happen of course. Instead we’ll get more nonsense from the anti-education government.