Hundreds of academics have launched a scathing attack on Australia’s universities, accusing the sector of “dumbing down the entire nation”, enrolling students with “incomprehensible” English, and putting lives and public safety at risk.
The criticisms were made by peak body Public Universities Australia (PUA) in a submission to a Senate inquiry into the quality of governance of Australia’s higher education providers. The results of the inquiry will be released on August 1.
According to the PUA, an organisation that includes more than 200 leading academics including professors of law, medicine and many of the country’s most eminent scholars, Australia’s tertiary sector is plagued by a raft of problems.
The most pressing is the persistent lack or rigor and overall intellectual decline. The report noted there has been an “ongoing slippage of academic standards” to a point where a degree from an Australian provider no longer denotes the knowledge or capabilities it once did.
Australian certifications “no longer demonstrate the level of knowledge and skills that they allegedly attest to” and “there is no longer any credible correlation between the appearance and the substance, the form and the content, of what used to be called a university education”, the authors stated.
This is largely due to the mass-enrolment of students who are unsuited for higher education.
The authors said that successive governments have “sought to encourage and facilitate as many students as possible completing … one or more post-secondary qualifications, irrespective of individual students’ ability … satisfactory or insufficient mastery of course content [and] whether or not every graduate ever has realistic lifelong employment prospects”.
The authors added that their observations were not a critique of individual students per se, but were “intended as a criticism of an incompetent and even a dangerous system”.
In large part this is due to the dependence the sector has developed on international students, with institutions like the University of Sydney now composed of 50% foreign enrolments.
As a result a substantial proportion of the country’s tertiary students lack basic skills, knowledge, and proficiency in the language of instruction, and the report notes: “International students particularly are admitted to Australian universities without having achieved or demonstrated adequate English competence or other minimum requirements.”
This has led to a situation in which Australia’s tertiary classes contain vast numbers of students whose English “is often highly defective and even incomprehensible”, which also holds true “even for many domestic students”.
The report states there has been a simultaneous explosion in cheating and the use of Artificial Intelligence (AI), with Australian universities are experiencing an “increased risk from Artificial Intelligence in a degraded academic environment”, and the authors warning of a “high incidence of plagiarism and use of AI”.
The report states that universities are handing out degrees that fail to demonstrate that the capabilities they are supposed to denote, and that this “is even more the case with degrees awarded to full fee paying international students”.
The chief cause of this has been the commercialisation and corporatisation of the sector, and the transformation of universities into almost purely economic entities, the report emphasised that most of the industry’s problems originated from the free-market reforms of Hawke-era Education Minister John Dawkins in the 1980s.
The Dawkins Reforms oriented higher education in Australia towards free-market principles by greatly expanding the number of people entering universities and reducing full federal funding.
This produced the current situation in which students are “clients” or “customers” more than they are learners, and where universities have become financially reliant on foreign students.
This is confirmed in phenomena such as “soft grading” in which “university managers pressure lecturers to pass students whom they would otherwise have failed and also override lecturers’ decisions and increase grades to ensure passes”, the report states.
This is done for commercial reasons and due to a desire to maintain high completion rates and strong institutional rankings, and the net result is that “universities now pass most students, irrespective of their ability or achievement”.
The overall effect is the “degradation in value” of an Australian tertiary education and a wider risk to public safety and health. As the authors write, this transformation of higher education has produced a “dangerous system” that “puts Australians’ lives at risk” and that is “affecting every area of society.”
The report not only blames corporatism and the venality and ineptitude of Australian university managers for the decline, it equally blames the sector’s regulatory body, the Tertiary Education Quality and Standards Agency or TEQSA.
According to the report, the TEQSA has utterly failed in its duty of regulating and safeguarding the status of our universities. None of the aforementioned failures have been “appropriately monitored by TEQSA”, with the agency failing to stop the collapse of standards, the authors noted.
The report said there has been a “complete failure of TEQSA to ensure the quality of academic qualifications”, and accused the agency of failing to ensure that each institute provided “a comprehensive and systematic education in every discipline area for which it is authorised to award any degree”.
The safeguarding and maintenance of academic standards is “in fact not done and has never been done since the corporate takeover of Australian universities”, according to the report.
The end result of the last few decades of neo-liberal reforms and the mass-import of foreign students is that the quality of Australia’s universities and the education they provide is worse than when the process began, and Australians are less educated than they once were, the authors concluded.
“No students, foreign or domestic, are now educated under ideal conditions at any university for any degree whatsoever,” the report stated.
“No medical graduate from any Australian university today is as well-educated and trained as they were pre-Dawkins, and … doctors’ competence is less
reliable as a result.
“No school teacher is as well qualified as we expect … [and] no Law graduate, no Engineering graduate, no Historian or anybody else is as well educated by our universities as they ought to be.
“This puts Australians’ lives at risk when we depend upon the quality of their education, and it is indicative of far larger national attitudinal problems and moral bankruptcy.”
Header image: The Old Arts Building, University of Melbourne (Polly clip – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, Link).
