On-line off-target: the unexpected consequences of Labor's e-university

A characteristic scene in the late communist societies of eastern Europe was long queues of people trying to buy necessities. This is what happens when the state artificially keeps production below demand. You have to wait and take what you can.

Couldn’t happen here? In fact it does, each year as students apply for university. The number of government-financed university places is set below actual demand, and distributed by quota among the various universities. If you want to go to university you have to take what they eventually offer you.

The inevitable consequence is fewer students enrolling in their preferred courses, which in turn contributes to high drop-out rates. Just as seriously, the quota protection against competition allows universities to get away with treating undergraduates poorly. The annual Course Experience Questionnaire, sent to all completing students, consistently shows most students rating their teachers as poor to mediocre.

At first glance, the ALP’s proposed University of Australia Online (UAO), with 100,000 extra undergraduate student places offered at half-HECS, is solidly in the tradition of Australian university central planning.

Yet again, Canberra is to decide how many students there will be and where they should enroll, with no sign attention was paid to actual student preferences.

As I will explain later, the UAO may have some positive if unintended consequences for students at campus-based universities. Sadly, it may also have some negative if unintended consequences for precisely the kind of people the ALP wants to help – students from low-to-middle-income families.

To understand the problem, we need to ask why we have university campuses in the first place. After all, the technology to transfer information without person-to-person contact isn’t something that’s turned up in the last ten years. It’s been around for centuries – books.

We don’t just send young people a reading list for a variety of educational and socialising reasons.

American studies of college students consistently find that, as with other activities, thinking improves through practice. Discussion with teachers and peers improves cognitive ability. The desire to learn from bright peers is one reason students struggle to get into universities with high entry standards. Even if on-line learning is better than traditional distance education, because some electronic interaction is possible, it is unlikely to match the dynamics of a good classroom.

Campus-based education should also be a social experience that develops students’ social skills. Attributes employer surveys cite as important in graduates, such as interpersonal skills, leadership qualities, communication, teamwork, enthusiasm and initiative are much easier to develop face-to-face. Involvement in a campus club may more clearly demonstrate development of these attributes than an academic record. With three of the top four perceived deficiencies in graduate applicants being attributes from this list – communication, interpersonal skills, and motivation – these are not trivial matters in preparing students for the workforce.

Social contacts are necessary parts of the networks used to find professional jobs. In the Australian labour market about 15% of professional and administrative jobs are found through friends, relatives and company contacts, and between a quarter and a third of jobs were found through employers approaching prospective employees. Going to a campus-based university is one way to break into these networks.

Students from low-to-middle-income families are more likely to need all these campus-taught skills than other students. They are less likely to come from home and school environments that stimulate their thinking, perhaps a little more likely to need their social skills honed, and less likely to have access via parents and friends to information about professional jobs.

The UAO’s danger is that it will disproportionately enroll students from low-and-middle-income families. The dynamics of the current system lead almost inevitably to this result. Setting a quota for campus universities below demand forces up the Year 12 scores required for entry, disadvantaging those without the home and school background conducive to high marks, principally lower-income people. The UAO will take the overflow.

The ALP’s decision to price the UAO at half the normal HECS charge will make it attractive even to those with other options. If students believe a degree is a degree wherever it comes from (something we’ve been encouraged to think), or that the universities they might otherwise attend are not high prestige anyway, why pay extra? To save a few thousand dollars they might make decisions that are not, in fact, in their own long-term interest.

While these students are disadvantaged, those remaining in the campus-based universities may benefit. Completely by accident, the ALP may increase the role of markets in higher education, and help trigger quality improvements in the campus experience.

As I suggested earlier, one reason universities can get away with unsatisfactory teaching is that setting the total number of places below actual demand almost guarantees universities of enough students. It is like a giant game of musical chairs. When the music stops hopeful students must grab a chair, any chair, to ensure that they do not miss out.

If, however, the government significantly increases the number of student places, through the 100,000 UAO places plus extras for other universities, supply and demand will be more evenly matched. The universities will not so easily be able to fill all their places.

How realistic is this hope? Predicting total demand is difficult, as it is driven by a mix of demographic, social and economic trends. The number of enrolments did go up by more than 100,000 over the last decade. However the enrolment boom in the late 1980s and early 1990s was partly driven by the early 1970s mini-baby boom. Indeed, more babies were born in 1971 than in any year before or since. The births of the early to mid-1980s that will be the main demographic influence on university demand over the coming years are lower in number – generally 30,000-40,000 a year below their early 1970s peak.

Nor is it likely that mature-age students will fill the demographic gap. Their numbers are down on the past, perhaps reflecting the higher up-front costs of education, but also the fact that earlier booms in student numbers reduced the pool of people without university qualifications. Despite hype about ‘lifelong learning’ this is unlikely to translate into great increases in mature-age people doing undergraduate degree courses. Updating of skills currently and for the foreseeable future will overwhelmingly consist of on-the-job training and short courses.

This leaves only many more young people completing Year 12 and wanting to go to university as the force creating significant unmet demand. This is certainly possible, but universities would be unwise to assume it is probable.

To preserve their student numbers in an expanded market universities will have to work harder than in the past to preserve their student numbers. The ALP’s information sheet on the UAO reports that on-campus students of the University of Southern Queensland, a leader in on-line education, are demanding equal access to the privileges of on-line students. I doubt USQ’s on-campus students will be the only such people realising their campus experience is not good enough.

One way for universities to maintain numbers is not necessarily to attract new students but to keep the students they have already. At many universities 20% or more of students leave without completing their courses.

Some students will always, for various reasons, drop out. However there are things universities could do to make staying more attractive. Intensifying the modest trend toward improving teaching quality is one possibility. Another is finding ways to make the campus experience more sociable. A quarter of first-years tell researchers they are only loosely connected to campus life. This group should particularly concern the campus universities. If students are getting little from the campus experience, why should they pay twice as much for it?

That the UAO might eventually have some good, if indirect, consequences does not take away from the fact that it is a bad idea, or rather it is an instance of a bigger bad idea: centralised control of higher education.

By all means establish the UAO for those people who can’t make it to campus. On-line education is better than no education. But there is not a shred of evidence that seemingly taken-out-of-the-air numbers like 100,000 places over ten years for the UAO represent a better assessment of students’ educational needs than students’ own choices in light of their circumstances as they evolve over the decade. All it is likely to do is push students into their second, third or lower course preference, just like the current system, with all the predictable effects on motivation and satisfaction.