Our universities have become corporations, focused on the bottom line, while spending big on consultants and exorbitant executive salaries. Jude Manning is a student witnessing the consequences.
Academics and expert commentators decry that our Universities are behaving like businesses, despite lacking actual shareholders. From semi-private and secretive financing to increased spending on marketing and consulting services, overpaid executives with little academic experience, the focus is on profit, not student outcomes.
Courses are cut, classes are overcrowded, teachers are underpaid, and certain disciplines are undermined in favour of others, with the $50k Arts degree a typical example.
Less widely discussed is the way corporate values have shown up in the education students actually receive.
Job-ready
Recent years have seen a sharp uptick in course materials which emphasise ‘job-readiness’. It is no longer sufficient for a University to offer degrees in abstract fields such as ‘Politics’ or ‘History’, the University must articulate how this knowledge will be operationalised by students for market participation.
So, instead of advertising lofty values like inquiry or criticism, units now promise ‘agility’ or ‘interdisciplinary cooperation’. They always emphasise ‘the real world’, and constantly refer to ‘life and work’ after university. They articulate, in unit descriptions, a corporate, anti-intellectual strain of politics which sees traditional higher education as stuffy and out of touch.
John Mikler, head of Government and International Relations (GIR) at USyd, attributed the rise in the employability agenda to a corporatised executive branch and the advice of external consulting services.
“There’s this disconnect that’s grown between the self-styled ‘executive’ of the university … and the rest of the academia. So these ideas about employability … tend to be coming out of the top levels of the university, not out of the academics who are actually doing all the teaching and the research.”
So, in my fourth year at the University of Sydney, instead of doing a research Honours like my wiser colleagues,
I filed in and out of classes on ‘Interdisciplinarity’,
I did faculty wide group work on real world problems (like the inability of the NRL to market to women), and I competed desperately with my peers for an ‘industry placement’ opportunity, which in my case turned out to be a glorified cold-calling sales gig. All instead of actually studying the topics I had signed up to study.
Much of this is thanks to government incentives, in particular the Morrison era’s Job-Ready Graduates scheme, designed to make Australian higher education better suit the needs of the labour market. Famously, it doubled the cost of Arts degrees to subsidise more useful degrees like nursing or teaching.
Changes to funding model
It also included something called the National Priorities and Industry Linkage Fund (NPILF), which carved out existing university funding and made it conditional on labour-market outcomes, industry engagement, and Work Integrated Learning (WIL) opportunities.
Despite loudly criticising the reforms at the time, the Albanese government has left them in place.
One major issue these employability agendas often face is guaranteeing enough WIL opportunities for all their students, meaning programs often exacerbate inequities by forcing students to compete for them.
And that’s if students are even in a position to participate. Dr Sally Patfield, higher education researcher at the University of Newcastle, emphasised, “These kinds of opportunities work best for students who are already well-positioned to take advantage of them … by contrast, students who are mature-aged, first-in-family, or living with disability, for example, are often balancing paid work, caring responsibilities, or might have additional access needs.”
The alternatives can be grim for students who don’t participate. At the University of Sydney, they had SSPS 4111: The Future of Work, an academic unit that reflected on changes in “the quantity and quality of jobs” over time. They could, instead of working, study why they can’t find it. Presumably, this was designed
to prepare students for future conversations with Centrelink officers.
Programs cancelled
The program I took – the combined Bachelor of Advanced Studies – has just been canned. After a decade at the centre of USyd’s employability agenda, it failed to convince students of its value. Of the many students, teachers and academics I spoke to, few understood what the program really offered, why it was implemented, or why it was killed.
The logic behind it, however, remains very much alive. A spokesperson for the University told me, “Industry engagement, interdisciplinary learning and practical experience remain central to how we prepare graduates for a changing workforce and society.”
Many in the sector indeed see the importance of industry engagement – especially WIL. Head of WIL at UNSW Engineering cited their placement program as one of the most valuable and rewarding components of the entire degree, and wanted to further embed WIL in education,
We’ve all had the experience of showing up to our first job, and it’s nothing like what we studied.
For other faculties, it is crucial that programs evolve to reflect their contemporary fields. But conforming education to market expectations is anathema to the entire premise of the Liberal Arts. How are universities supposed to critique society if they’re too busy asking what it wants from them?
If that sounds a little grandiose, don’t worry. The moral question usually runs into a much more mundane one. What on earth do we teach a literature student to prepare them for the job market?
Arts degrees weren’t built to be practical, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t useful. It just means universities should double down on what they’re supposed to create: critical thinkers, adept researchers and clear writers. Unpaid consulting work for the University’s corporate partners will never do this.
Wollongong University Inc. Profit over jobs as consultants prosper
The AI threat
This is all made more ludicrous by the looming impacts of AI on the job market. Many of the practical skills that this employability drive claims to offer are the exact ones being phased out by AI. The skills that make a good student are the only ones that, so far, can’t be replaced.
AI is good enough to write a work email, but still makes a dreadful essay, article or short story. It has replaced the Google search, but lacks the experience and contextual awareness of a good researcher. It’s alright at summarising information, but can’t really judge it independently. At least not reliably enough to replace us – yet.
In short, our universities are underselling themselves to a market that is evaporating.