Are Federal government funding policies forcing our universities to act like fly-by-night car salesmen?
Over the past fortnight the media have carried reports about an Australia Institute survey of nearly 1,000 academics, which found that some universities are giving full fee-paying students the kid gloves treatment. Stories of academics being pressured to "dumb down" courses, reduce entry requirements, and pass incompetent students suggest that universities have jettisoned their standards for the extra cash that the full fee-payers bring.
Although the survey has yet to be published, opposition parties eagerly seized on the issue to attack the Howard Government's funding cuts and its support for the commercialisation of tertiary education. Labor and Democrats politicians intend to refer the claims to the Senate's planned higher education inquiry, so we can expect further sensational accounts of government-induced misdeeds in the universities as this election year rolls on.
Allegations that universities are lowering standards for full fee-paying students are not new. Nor are they confined to Australia. Similar complaints have been made about universities in Britain and America, including claims that students who can barely speak English are being admitted to Ph.D. programs, where they pay graduates to "help" them write the assignments and theses that win them their degrees.
And six months ago a national business magazine published a lengthy article called "degrees for sale", which warned that some Australian universities were putting short-term funding requirements ahead of their long-term interests in maintaining academic excellence. While the article focused mainly on post-graduate coursework degrees in economics and business, there was nothing to suggest that the problem was confined to these fields.
Nevertheless, I think that a little scepticism about the motives behind the current outcry is warranted. For the problem of shoddy degrees did not begin under the present government, which at least has taken some initial steps to address the situation, through the introduction last year of the Australian Universities Quality Agency and the voluntary Graduate Skills Assessment test. The latter will allow student performance in four crucial general skills to be compared across different universities and courses.
I spent many years teaching in a number of universities, covering the period when tertiary education was free, as well as when students were required to pay tuition fees. I encountered a disturbingly wide range of views and practices regarding the maintenance of appropriate standards, to the extent that work which would be failed by one person might be awarded an honours grade by another.
But the overall culture and structure of incentives tended to favour a lenient approach in which standards were gradually, though inexorably, driven down. Indeed, gloom about what universities were allowing some students to get away with played an important part in my decision to leave academia.
In some cases, ideological reasons led colleagues to pass almost everyone, as they were committed to the phoney egalitarianism that is so prevalent in university social science and humanities departments. And as well as being "dumbed down", their courses were also being "politicised sideways", invariably to the left.
These "progressive" colleagues did not accept that ultimately their actions would do most damage to students from underprivileged backgrounds, for as academic qualifications became devalued, considerations such as family and old school networks would come to the fore.
In other cases, opportunism was the main motive. Trendy courses with lax standards tended to attract larger numbers of students than those with demanding requirements, and more students usually meant increased staff and resources -- or at least made staff reductions less likely.
At one university, when I complained that the assessment in a major course was becoming a joke, the professor said he didn't care about ordinary undergraduates. They were just necessary to maintain the numbers and keep the university administration happy. The only students he was concerned about were those doing honours, who might go on to do post-graduate work and become anthropologists themselves -- and who, though he wouldn't admit it, would sit admiringly at his feet.
And some of my colleagues simply did not have the fortitude to resist the combination of threats, excuses and blandishments that we would encounter from students disappointed with their grades. (A Papua New Guinean student once warned me, in vain, that he would use sorcery against me if I did not give him an "A").
This situation appears to have got much worse in the years since I left academia. Writing in a southern newspaper a few days ago, Associate Professor Alison Elliott, from the University of Western Sydney, identified a number of ways in which students manage to get failing grades overturned, including one which I never experienced -- visits from students' lawyers.
I suspect that many academics are vulnerable to demands from disgruntled students because of a sense of insecurity and guilt about their own abilities as teachers. Few possess appropriate teaching qualifications, and in any case, the reward structure in universities strongly favours those who develop a reputation for research, rather than for teaching. Certainly, there are always some academics who take their pedagogical duties very seriously, but this is usually in spite of the incentives, rather than because of them.
So, while I have little doubt that some full fee-paying students are obtaining qualifications they do not deserve, the quality control problem is much more complex and deeply-rooted. Even if governments were to pump billions into tertiary education and make all courses free again, universities would still be conferring some degrees that are not worth the paper they are printed on.
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