Could Australian universities possibly be that much better than foreign universities?

On this year's ABC Radio National Boyer Lectures, the main barrow that featured speaker Professor Glynn Davis pushed is that Australian Universities should be greatly expanded to take in a vastly increased number of overseas students prepared to pay money for their education. He claimed that this is necessary, because Australians are unwilling to pay the taxes necessary to fully fund their Universities. This presumes that allowing hundreds of thousands of overseas students to buy education, and through that, Australian citizenship, comes at no cost to ordinary Australians. In fact, there is a cost which is far greater.

[Perhaps I should add that Australians continue to pay the same amount of taxes - in general 33% or so - but university fees have been added to this.]

Below is a comment I made yesterday to Radio National's Boyer Lectures page. It has yet to appear. A lot of other past comments were critical of Glynn Davis's talks as compere Peter Mares noted:

Professor Glyn Davis joins me in the studio ... to respond to some of the comments and criticisms from listeners

One critical comment includes a past comment made by myself about the fifth lecture. (See also How 'free market' education 'reforms' have undermined Australian democracy) Peter Mares, the compere of the series, referred indirectly to #WorkingConditions">another listener's comment, when he said:

One #WorkingConditions">listener in particular points to the massive casualisation of the workforce. Something like 40% of teachers in higher education are now casual staff on short-term contracts.

I posted the comment below, yesterday. It has still not been published on the page, but the publication of my earlier comment gives me hope that it will be.

The expansion of Universities to educate large numbers of foreign students is harmful to Australia

I found the only memorable and useful part of the program to be this “Post-lecture Discussion”.

The questioning by Peter Mares showed that the essential content of Davis's "vision" for our universities is no more than selling Australian 'education' to ever more vast numbers of citizens of other countries to allow native Australian taxpayers to avoid having to pay themselves for our tertiary education system. Davis repeatedly claimed, with no substantiation, that by doing so, our Governments were conforming to popular will.

In reality, native Australians have never been asked as to whether or not they would have preferred to maintain a decent education sector with their taxes. If they had, and, if it had been made clear to them the even greater cost they are now being made to bear as a result of the cutbacks to education and the alternative 'funding' method which Davis so enthusiastically embraces, I believe most would have chosen to maintain prior levels of government funding.

The cost that ordinary Australians are now being made to pay for the change to our tertiary education and related fields includes:

• The unaffordability of tertiary education to ordinary Australians through higher tuition fees, escalating costs of living, especially housing, and the reduction of wages and conditions in part-time work that many students were once able to turn to.

• The replacement with on-the-job training that most workers enjoyed with training in the workers' own time and expense at universities. Much of what students are now taught was once taught by government and private sector employers during working hours

University training is not only more iniquitous than the older way of training of many of our workers on the job, including through apprenticeships, but the evidence suggests to me that it is also inferior. One of many examples is that the quality of nurses graduated from university seems significantly lower than that of nurses trained in the old way, on the job and with subsidised housing. Nurses trained in the old way believe that they could have run rings around today's graduates after they finished their training. Even if the pay was modest then, nurses were still considerably better off than nurses attending tertiary education, incurring a debt with little or no income whilst attending University.

Davis's argument presumes that Australia is so much better endowed with knowledge and wisdom that we can teach so many people from other lands far better than they can teach themselves and so much better than they can teach us. (And if they can teach us as well as we can teach them, why aren't hundreds of thousands of native Australians flocking to overseas universities?) The sorry experience of transferring nursing education onto universities seems to suggest to me that Australia is not particularly gifted as a provider of tertiary education. It seems more likely to me that there is a far less lofty reason for the apparent appeal of Australian education to overseas customers, that reason being as a means by which relatively privileged from overseas can buy Australian citizenship.

#WorkingConditions" id="WorkingConditions">Appendix: Decline of working conditions

The following comment was referred to by Peter Mares above:

Free speech? Social justice? Collegiality? For who? Universities have shameful labour hiring practices that allow tenured academics to build their careers by exploiting a servant class of contract academics - hopefuls that don't dare speak out; who work long hours, often for less payment than guest workers digging for carrots. THIS is the dirty little secret to how universities 'make do'.