Education futures

April 1999

"Ironically, the greatest danger we now face stems from unwarranted complacence about the future. The rapid pace of globalisation is changing and intensifying the competitive challenge. The technological capabilities of many advanced economies are steadily improving while a new wave of emerging economies is producing fast followers in some key areas and potential leaders in a few. The reality of the global economy is that companies have many choices about where to invest - and capital, technology and talent are available globally."
This wake-up call comes from the United States in the foreword to Going Global, an analysis of that country's innovative capacity prepared by the Council on Competitiveness, a nonpartisan forum of 161 corporate chief executives, university presidents and labor leaders. Australia barely rates a mention either as a niche competitor or as an investment opportunity, unlike India, Israel, Ireland, Singapore or South Korea.

Most would name IT and biomedical research as the two hottest areas of innovation. Here are two ratings from Going Global. In the period 1982 - 89 of IT patents registered in the US, 37 were from Australia, 53 from Israel, 1 from Singapore, 12 from Taiwan and 4 from South Korea. In the period 1992 - 96 these numbers were very different; 80 from Australia, then 258, 82, 1007, 1629 respectively. A score for capacity in health care innovation, based on research base, entrepreneurial climate and public support, produced Singapore 4.05, Japan 3.21, India 2.01 and Australia 2.00.

With that background in mind let us explore the educational policy issues facing Australia.

The foundation is laid in K to 12 where there is concern about basic literacy and numeracy skills. The Third International Mathematics and Science Study (1994-95) showed level 8 attainment in science and mathematics in Australia to lag behind that in Singapore, Japan, South Korea and England, but to be ahead of scores in the USA and Hong Kong. There is widespread resistance to skills testing from teachers' organisations. Test proponents dismiss this as naked protectionism but others argue that evaluation lowers student self-esteem and stifles creativity. The last point needs serious consideration because within Asian countries with a pattern of successful skills acquisition through traditional methods - rote learning, tables, spelling lists - one regularly hears fears expressed that students are trained to be passive, unadaptable and unoriginal.

In fact, as any ballet-dancer or pianist knows, an adequate skills base is a necessary prerequisite for creative self-expression and feedback both positive and negative is part of learning. Tests cannot capture the full educational experience but are needed for both internal and external accountability.

The quality of teaching depends on the attractiveness of the profession and that, in turn, has funding implications. This leads inevitably to the issue of public subsidy to private schools. On the one hand it is argued that freedom of choice is desirable and its encouragement by the expenditure of tax dollars attracts a private contribution which generates a net public saving. On the other hand it is argued that such a practice erodes parental support of public schools and creates inequity which is wasteful of talent. Some even expouse the extreme view that equity transcends all other considerations and that a net lowering of standards would be tolerable if the distribution were totally uniform.

Secondary schools simultaneously train students for direct entry to the workforce and for passage to further education. This creates a fundamental tension not least because of the greater prestige attaching to more 'academic' options. Partly in response and partly to make direct improvement in school-leaver skills there is a move to introduce VET (Vocational Education and Training) programs in senior secondary. There is a serious problem over implementation and this is both financial and organisational. Significant work experience is necessary to achieve an appropriate level in the qualifications framework but the logistical difficulties - particularly in regional and remote areas - are horrendous. This component of the high school VET program may therefore be replaced by reading and classroom discussion of the workplace and examined in theoretical mode. Best intentions could lead to absurd outcomes.

A major issue is to determine the balance of expenditure between vocational training and more generalist education. The debate is going on within the World Bank and other international agencies where education policy is receiving more prominence. The trigger is that many developing and, for that matter, developed countries have discovered that concentration on vocational training has restricted flexibility and left these economies unable to make the 'next leap'.

The point is that vocational training prepares people to enter the workforce of existing industry. That is clearly important and employers need a regular replenishing flow of skilled personnel. Moreover, when addressing unemployment, governments look naturally at skills training related to existing and projected demand. Problems arise from the speed of technological change - the nature of a typical US worker's job changes six times in a lifetime, it is alleged - and the temptation to protect failing industries with a skill-locked labour force. Investment in R & D, the argument goes, produces a greater job pull and that requires a workforce with adaptable and transferable generic skills.

This does not, of course, imply that vocational training is irrelevant. It does, however, argue that, in a climate of life-long learning, vocational delivery should concentrate on the flexible provision of short skills update programs. It suggests also that in secondary schools, TAFE and universities the emphasis should be the development of capacity for skills acquisition rather than merely the transmission of facts and training matched exclusively to immediate workplace practice. It warns too against over-investment in perceived training needs as opposed to research infrastructure.

There are complex issues about where and how to deploy the research dollar. Before tackling these let us review the sector within which most of my direct experience lies - the universities.

Worldwide there is a trend dubbed 'massification' where more and more students crowd into universities. In continental Europe some new universities were created but public investment has been capped and an open access policy is generating dangerous straining on the traditional universities. In the UK and Australia, teaching and technical colleges have been renamed and government support spread thin. In Hong Kong and Singapore there has been substantially increased public investment.

Do students intuitively understand the dangers of a narrow vocational base or are we encouraging unrealistic aspirations? One stark fact is that students with entry scores in the 90's are purchasing full fee places in my institution while others with scores in the 30's are accepting government-subsidised places elsewhere. Nevertheless sour prophets, wrongly in my opinion, predicted that university access was being over-expanded years ago when the proportion of school-leavers gaining entry was a tiny fraction of its present size.

It is now widely understood that Australia's leading universities have an income which is about one-fifth that of their comparators in the United States and Japan. The recent past has seen an effective 20% reduction in government support as a result of cuts and unsupplemented salary rises. The latter are not the indulgence of weak Vice-Chancellors but a realistic response to the need to recruit internationally and in competition with local industry. In mining, IT and business it is quite common for our new graduates to be offered more than the senior lecturers who have taught them.

To understand the funding situation better we must recognise that a higher proportion of our income, of the order of 60%, is directly government. U.S. universities have a 30% rule of thumb - no more than that should come from any single source. It must also be remembered, however, that even private universities there are heavily dependent on competitive income indirectly sourced from government research funds and the like. Other major sources are fees and benefaction.

At a series of seminars at Yale in the mid-60's the British contingent of economics dons attacked the 30% philosophy. They found the raising of money from alumni and corporations distasteful and assured the Americans that is was inconceivable that a benign government would ever deny the universities the money they needed, fail to ensure that the professors were well paid or ever tell the universities how many students they could teach.

Forty years on, Australia engages in the same debate. The purity of universities, I am told, requires total dependence on the public purse. On the other hand, government slashes our eighth largest export industry and lacks the will to deregulate.

Despite its bipartisan birth the Dearing report in the UK was too strong for those who might implement it. Here the one clear message from the West report, consistent with Dearing's call, is that universities must be allowed to set their own fees and cope with equity considerations through their own system of scholarships. This is only the first step in shoring up Australian Higher Education and does not, in any way, relieve the pressure on government to increase investment in this public good. Moreover, as a developed nation, we have an opportunity and obligation to interpret the benefits of university education more widely than in simple material terms. Menzies understood that the civilising aspirations of higher education cannot be set aside, even temporarily, but current fashion is short on both rhetoric and reality.

Let us return to more pragmatic issues. We are cursed that our universities are least able to provide in those areas of greatest relevance to the corporate sector. In fact staff are less easy to find and retain in fields of rapid development and state-of-the art equipment is likely to be beyond reach. In simple terms, we need more industry funded chairs and laboratories and universities must be prepared to deliver a specified product.

Is this less true of the arrogant sandstones? In the SPIRT (Strategic Partnerships with Industry-Research and Training) competitive scheme, the new 1999 pledged industry contributions plus Commonwealth funding amounted to $56.3 m. The five universities of the technology network (Curtin, UTS, University of South Australia, QUT, RMIT) totalled $8.2 m compared with Sydney $6.0m, Queensland $5.8, Melbourne $5.4, UWA $5.2m and UNSW $4.8 m.

To achieve the next leap and to tackle the problems identified in Going Global we require considerably more investment in research. Not all should be in universities but 52% of citations on US industrial patents are to universities and a 1996 New England Journal of Medicine study by Blumenthal and others found that 90% of pharmaceutical firms had collaborations with academic institutions where interdisciplinary networks and research training opportunities naturally arise.

The longstanding problem in Australia is that we do badly in developing and commercialising our research. In taking corrective measures we must not weaken the basic creative base, so let me give the last words to Bennett Shapiro of Merck & Co., Inc. (quoted also in Going Global)


"If we push universities toward more applied research, our future competitive status will be in jeopardy. The balance has already shifted too far, with universities and national laboratories finding economic justifications for structuring a research agenda that is more useful to companies today. The result will be an impoverishment of discovery to fuel the industries of tomorrow.".