We need better teaching at every level

It's taken an eternity, but the econocrats have finally twigged that the big problem with the nation's education and training system isn't its high-cost to budgets, but its failure to provide enough of our youth with the skills they need to get and keep a decent job.

When the Productivity Commission set out to find a "new policy model" that could "shift the dial" on productivity improvement, the penny dropped. It decided that "if we had to pick just one thing to improve ... it must be skills formation".

That's because the adoption, use and spread of new technology – the long-run drivers of productivity – require people with the right skills.

As befits its obsession with productivity, the commission doesn't bother to acknowledge that knowledge is valuable for its own sake. Humans value knowing things about their world.

But the more prosaic role of education and training is to equip people with the skills that help them earn a living.

As economists go, however, the commission's more broad-minded than most: "There is additional value in improving skills formation – from foundational to advanced – because it gives people better job security, income and job satisfaction.

"These effects are not well measured in the official statistics, but have major implications for prosperity and quality of life more broadly."

Trouble is, the commission finds our present education and training performance – from schools to vocational education and training, to universities – is falling well short of what it should be.

"A good school system ensures that people have the key foundational skills – numeracy, literacy, analytical skills – and the capacity to learn so that they can easily acquire knowledge throughout their lives," the commission says.

What shocks me most about our schools' performance is their high failure rate. Evidence the commission doesn't quote is the Mitchell Institute's estimate that 26 per cent of students fail to finish school or a vocational equivalent.

It seems so many kids have been getting behind and dropping out for so long that schools and their teachers have come to accept this as part of the natural order, not as a sign something's going badly wrong with teaching.

The commission notes that, while the regular testing under the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development's PISA program shows Australian school students' academic achievement is still above the OECD average, our average scientific, reading and mathematical ability is falling in absolute terms.

We've gone for decades underpaying teachers relative to other graduates, so we shouldn't be surprised our brightest people don't go into teaching.

We have a growing proportion of lower performers and a falling share of high performers. Other evidence shows our rates of participation in year 12 physics and advanced maths fell by about a third between 1992 and 2012.

One of the worst inhibitors to  gains in learning is "learner [dis]engagement" – being inattentive, noisy or anti-social. About 40 per cent of our students are involved in such unproductive behaviour.

The commission fears our youth may now be less capable than earlier cohorts. For example, an Australian 15-year-old in 2015 had a mathematical aptitude equivalent to a 14-year-old in 2000.

"Australia's growing group of low performing students will be increasingly exposed to unemployment or low participation in the future world of work," the commission says.

Its review of the evidence on school performance concludes we need to focus on improving the quality of the teaching workforce and on methods of teaching that have been proved to be more effective.

We've gone for decades underpaying teachers relative to other graduates, so we shouldn't be surprised our brightest people don't go into teaching.

Many teachers are teaching "out of field" – subjects for which they have no qualifications.

We've done too little testing of the effectiveness of different ways of teaching, and too little dissemination of the results of what testing we've done. It's obvious our classroom teaching isn't as effective as it needs to be, but we've done little about it.

The commission has less to say about the failings of VET – vocational education and training – except that it's a "mess" and still recovering from a "disastrous intervention".

This was the utterly misguided attempt to drag TAFE into the 21st century, not by doing the hard yards with the teachers union, but by applying the magic answer of "contestability" – allowing private businesses to sell taxpayer-subsidised training for profit. Many rorted the system and cheated students until the government belatedly woke up.

Turning to universities, their performance is also falling short. In 2014, more than 26 per cent of students had not completed their degree within nine years of starting – a significant loss of time, effort and money for the students, as well as taxpayers.

And this is before we see any effect from the leap in uni admissions following Julia Gillard's (misguided) decision to provide government funding for any students the unis choose to enroll.

The proportion of recent graduates finding full-time employment is falling, with the under-employment rate among recent graduates rising from 9 per cent in 2008 to more than 20 per cent.

But the fact that graduate full-time starting salaries have fallen from 90 per cent of average weekly earnings in 1989 to about 75 per cent in 2015 suggests this has more to do with the weak state of the labour market than with a decline in the quality of degrees.

Which ain't to say quality hasn't fallen. More than a quarter of recent graduates in full-time jobs believe their roles are unrelated to their studies, with their degree adding nothing to their employability.

Australian unis continue to perform poorly on student satisfaction measures relative to unis in Britain and America.

There's a lot more to the commission's critique of the unis' performance, but I'll leave that for another day.

Sufficient to say the commission has convincingly demonstrated the case for putting the quality of the nation's teaching at the top of our list of things needing urgent improvement.

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TAFE mustn't be another bad deal for the young

When they look at the economy that older generations are leaving for them, young Australians have a lot to be angry about. Some of their fears and resentments are misplaced, but most aren't.

Oldies who should know better have, for their own reasons, given them an exaggerated impression of the likely extent and timing of digital disruption in the jobs market.

There's much resentment of the higher education tuition fees the young have to repay, but I've never thought it unreasonable to ask them to contribute about half the cost of their qualifications, which will greatly increase their lifetime incomes – especially when repayments are geared to the size of that income and the loan carries a real interest rate of zero.

But I must add some qualifications. It is a bit rich for federal governments to have been tightening up on subsidies to students at the same time as they've been increasing subsidies to the retired, particularly those who believe themselves entitled to a handout because they're "self-funded" (that is, too well off to get the age pension).

You can understand why young people resent being lumbered with education debt when governments have gone for years tolerating distortions in the tax system – negative gearing and the capital gains tax discount – that favour older people buying investment properties over first-home buyers, and push the price of homes and the size of home loans even higher.

And it's understandable that graduates should be uncertain about the economic value of their degrees at a time when so many uni leavers are taking so long to find a full-time job – which is partly because the past few years of weakness in employers' demand for workers is being borne mainly at the entry level, and partly because universities have lowered the average value of their degrees by lowering entry standards and by educating far more people for particular occupations than are ever likely to be needed.

A big part of this last problem comes from the way successive "reforms" by both sides of politics at both levels of government have stuffed up the choice between going to uni and going to TAFE or a for-profit provider of VET – vocational education and training.

The plain truth is, while it's right that, in our ever-more complicated, knowledge economy, almost all students need further education after completing their schooling, it's wrong to believe everyone should go to university.

The less academically inclined – of whom there will always be many – would be better served going on to vocational education and training, as would the economy (that is, the rest of us).

Yet recent times have seen multiple pressures for every kid to go to uni. The first and most potent is that being a graduate carries more social status – an irresistible lure to many parents and students.

The long-standing policy of encouraging students to stay to the end of year 12 adds to the presumption that young people will and should go on to uni. The last years of high school are overwhelmingly academically inclined.

It was always accepted, in principle, that not all students were suited to university and that, for many, their last years of schooling should be a "pathway" to a trade or other technical qualification.

Great idea; doesn't seem to have amounted to much in practice.

And then we have the introduction in 2012 of demand-driven federal funding of undergraduate places at university, which has prompted a huge increase in student numbers as unis – some more than others – dropped their entry standards so as to maximise their federal grants.

Would it be surprising if this led some students to go to uni when they should have gone to TAFE?

I'm told that, at NSW TAFE's big campus at Ultimo in Sydney, more than 30 per cent of the students are there because, though they already have a uni degree, they can't find a job.

I'm told there's a shortage of architectural drafters because people who should have done the tech course have gone to uni to be architects. Then they're disillusioned when they're put to work doing drafting.

But would it be surprising if school leavers are steering clear of vocational education when they've read so many stories about the tribulations of TAFE and some private providers ripping off the young and trusting, so as to rort the federal government's VET version of the student loan scheme?

The truth is that the efforts of federal and state governments of both colours to make VET "contestable" by making for-profit education providers part of the system have been a disastrous failure.

Now the federal bureaucrats have belatedly sorted that mess, we're left with private providers who will only ever cherry-pick the most popular and profitable courses, usually those with low capital costs.

So we're back to relying on good old government-owned TAFE – always the education system's poor relation, towards which the feds' commitment runs alternatively hot and cold.

But the misguided reformers were right to believe TAFE needs to change from its old complacent, inflexible ways, where the convenience and income of staff were given priority over the changing needs of employers and of young people wanting to gain skills relevant to the needs of present and future employers.

TAFE will need to change a lot if it's not to be yet another respect in which the young are getting a bad deal.

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We’ve turned our unis into money-grubbing exploiters

Of the many stuff-ups during the now-finished era of economic reform, one of the worst is the unending backdoor privatisation of Australia's universities, which began under the Hawke-Keating government and continues in the Senate as we speak.

This is not so much "neoliberalism" as a folly of the smaller-government brigade, since the ultimate goal for the past 30 years has been no more profound than to push university funding off the federal budget.

The first of the budget-relieving measures was the least objectionable: introducing the Higher Education Contribution Scheme, requiring students – who gain significant private benefits from their degrees – to bear just some of the cost of those degrees, under a deferred loan-repayment scheme carefully designed to ensure it did nothing to deter students from poor families.

Likewise, allowing unis to admit suitably qualified overseas students provided they paid full freight was unobjectionable in principle.

The Howard government's scheme allowing less qualified local students to be admitted provided they paid a premium was "problematic", as the academics say, and soon abandoned.

The problem is that continuing cuts in government grants to unis have kept a protracted squeeze on uni finances, prompting vice-chancellors to become obsessed with money-raising.

They pressure teaching staff to go easy on fee-paying overseas students who don't reach accepted standards of learning, form unhealthy relationships with business interests, and accept "soft power" grants from foreign governments and their nationals without asking awkward questions.

They pressure academics not so much to do more research as to win more research funding from the government. Interesting to compare the hours spent preparing grant applications with the hours actually doing research.

To motivate the researchers, those who bring in the big bucks are rewarded by being allowed to pay casuals to do their teaching for them. (This after the vice-chancellors have argued straight-faced what a crime it would be for students to be taught by someone who wasn't at the forefront of their sub-sub research speciality.)

The unis' second greatest crime is the appalling way they treat those of their brightest students foolish enough to aspire to an academic career. Those who aren't part-timers are kept on serial short-term contracts, leaving them open to exploitation by ambitious professors.

However much the unis save by making themselves case studies in precarious employment, it's surely not worth it. If they're not driving away the most able of their future star performers it's a tribute to the "treat 'em mean to keep 'em keen" school of management.

But the greatest crime of our funding-obsessed unis is the way they've descended to short-changing their students, so as to cross-subsidise their research. At first they did this mainly by herding students into overcrowded lecture theatres and tutorials.

Lately they're exploiting new technology to achieve the introverted academic's greatest dream: minimal "face time" with those annoying pimply students who keep asking questions.

PowerPoint is just about compulsory. Lectures are recorded and put on the website – or, failing that, those barely comprehensible "presentation" slides – together with other material sufficient to discourage many students – most of whom have part-time jobs – from bothering to attend lectures. Good thinking.

To be fair, an oddball minority of academics takes a pride in lecturing well. They get a lot of love back from their students, but little respect or gratitude from their peers. Vice-chancellors make a great show of awarding them tin medals, but it counts zilch towards their next promotion.

The one great exception to the 30-year quest to drive uni funding off the budget was Julia Gillard's ill-considered introduction of "demand-driven" funding of undergraduate places, part of a crazy plan to get almost all school-leavers going on to uni, when many would be better served going to TAFE.

The uni money-grubbers slashed their entrance standards, thinking of every excuse to let older people in, admitting as many students as possible so as to exploit the feds' fiscal loophole.

The result's been a marked lowering of the quality of uni degrees, and unis being quite unconscionable in their willingness to offer occupational degrees to far more people than could conceivably be employed in those occupations.

I suspect those vice-chancellors who've suggested that winding back the demand-determined system would be preferable to the proposed across-the-board cuts (and all those to follow) are right.

The consequent saving should be used to reduce the funding pressure on the unis, but only in return for measures to force them back to doing what the nation's taxpayers rightly believe is their first and immutable responsibility: providing the brighter of the rising generation with a decent education.

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Our universities aren’t earning the money we give them

Sorry, but the small funding cuts imposed on the universities in the budget don't rouse any sympathy from me.

In an ideal world we'd be investing more in our universities, but our world is far from ideal. And so are our unis. They're inefficient bureaucracies, with bloated administrations and over-paid vice chancellors.

To hear them talk, you'd think unis were the fount of all economic virtue. According to Sydney University's Michael Spence, the budget was "an opportunity missed, because the government's done nothing about the significant cost of research and, of course, university research is fundamental to the innovation economy about which the government is so enthusiastic".

Sorry, prof, but the electorate's too well-educated to swallow such spin. The unis contribute to innovation, but it comes from other sources as well, and the unis' contribution should be better than it is without extra funding.

It's true our unis are obsessed by research, but any innovation this leads to is almost accidental. The research the unis care about is papers published in prestigious foreign journals, which they see as the path to what they're really striving for: a higher ranking on the various international league tables of universities.

Education Minister Simon Birmingham boasts that, on one table, six of our 43 unis are in the top 100, with nearly half in the top 300.

The pollies should stop doing this. It just encourages our "sandstone" unis – the self-dubbed Group of Eight – in their crazy, self-absorbed race.

Had Birmingham's predecessor succeeded in deregulating fees and let the sandstones exploit their monopoly pricing power, they would have delighted in overcharging their students and increasing students' cross-subsidy of the academics' research.

All of us should strive for excellence in our work, but when you start trying to force the pace with league tables and the dreaded KPIs – key performance indicators – you lose the plot.

You shift the rewards from intrinsic to extrinsic, and almost as much effort goes into trying to game the indicators of excellence as being excellent. The big rewards go to those who excel at appearing excellent.

Our big unis are so obsessed by research that academics' promotion is determined almost solely by how many papers you've had published and how prestigious were the journals you got into. Plus how much in research grants you've brought to the uni's coffers.

Apart from the time they spend thinking of ways to turn the same bit of research into more than one paper, our sandstone academics seem to spend more time applying for research grants than doing research.

Then there's the cultural cringe. The sandstone unis are filling their upper positions with sunshine-seeking Poms, Canadians and the odd eccentric Yank, in the belief they'll do better than the locals at getting published in prestigious international journals.

Our academic economists have even conned the federal government into spending taxpayers' money in ways that penalises those economists foolish enough to want to research the Australian economy.

That's because American journals won't publish articles about a small and boring country like ours, but our own journals don't rank in the unis' eternal quest for a higher international ranking.

Notice anything missing? Ah yes, all those students hanging around universities.

The unsatisfactory state of our unis is partly the product of our federal politicians' – Labor and Coalition – decades-long project to quietly and progressively privatise our universities via the backdoor.

Like so much misconceived micro-economic reform, this project hasn't worked well. Put a decades-long squeeze on unis' government funding and what happens? The unis intensify their obsession with research status-seeking and do it by exploiting their market power over students – while building ever larger bureaucracies.

There are some excellent teachers in universities, but they're the exception. The unis pretend to value good teachers – and award tin medals to prove it – but, in truth, there are no promotions for being a good teacher.

Students are seen as a necessary evil, needed because the public thinks teaching their kids is the main reason for continuing to feed academics.

Since Julia Gillard's spendthrift decision to remove the limits on how many uni places the government is prepared to fund, the unis have slashed their entrance requirements so as to rip as much money off the feds as possible.

Are they producing more would-be teachers or journalists or candlestick makers than the economy needs?

Who cares? All the unis know is that cramming more students into lecture theatres yields economies of scale that can be diverted to pay for more research – and pay for some part-time casual to do your teaching for you.

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Why I don't feel sorry for fee-paying students

I have my heroes among leading American economists and psychologists, some of whom I know. One I don't is Alan Blinder. But when he wrote a book called Hard Heads, Soft Hearts, I knew I'd found my guiding star as an economics writer.

There are plenty of lovely souls whose heart bleeds freely for all manner of people who want us to believe they're being treated badly.

But hanging around with economists has left me imbued with the harsh reality of opportunity cost, my version of which says you can have anything you want, but you can't have everything you want. So be careful deciding.

The hard-headed truth is, feeling sorry for almost everyone is little different from feeling sorry for no one. I have only so much compassion to go around.

So, sorry, but among all the people claiming to have been hard done by in this month's budget, I don't have much sympathy to spare for the university students complaining about the increase in their debts.

By contrast, I have much sympathy for all those unemployed people hoping and searching for jobs that don't exist – unless, of course, the government's own figures for job vacancies are grossly understated.

Had industrial fate not intervened to prevent me attending my 43rd successive budget lock-up, I planned to wear my jumbo size JOB HUNTER NOT DOLE BLUDGER T-shirt, put up to it by friends at the admirable Brotherhood of St Laurence.

How prescient that would have been. The budget turned out to include an attempt to traduce the reputation of all job hunters by launching the government's umpteenth Crackdown on the Crackdown on all those "leaners" who lounge about taking drugs when they should be out pounding the pavement.

Did you know that some people are being given the dole before any savings they have are completely exhausted? It's an outrage on us upright citizens, groaning under the weight of massive taxation.

Isn't Centrelink bright enough to understand that forcing the jobless to go cap in hand to the Salvos whenever some large and unexpected expense occurs is part of their punishment?

Not content with cracking down on the unemployed, this budget cracks down on those lazy loafers at Centrelink. Do you realise there are days that pass without people on benefits being harassed in some way?

Do you realise that older people, some just a few years from pension age, aren't hassled nearly as much as young people are? It's wrong, it's discriminatory, and the ironically named Christian Porter and his hardworking sidekick Alan Tudge are just the punishers and straighteners we can trust to stamp it out.

I don't understand those two. Do they enjoy beating up the poor, or is it a hateful job they must do to keep their jobs in the ministry, to gratify all those pathetic voters desperate to feel morally superior to someone?

Nor do I get Malcolm Turnbull. He produces a surprisingly good budget intended to convince us he's not the pale imitation of Tony Abbott we thought he'd become, that the Coalition is committed to fairness after all, but can't resist adding the most lurid attempt to stigmatise anyone of workforce age who can't find a job.

Is Turnbull that much in fear of losing votes to the Redheaded One? Malcolm, you're a rich man, you don't have to sink so low.

(But let's not have too much righteous indignation from the Laborites. They're the crowd who went for six years without affording a significant discretionary increase in our pathetically low unemployment benefits. Perhaps they had to spend too much trying to prove they could punish asylum seekers with just as much relish as the Liberals.)

Back to the revolting uni students. You'd never know it from their cries of woe, but Education Minister Simon Birmingham has thrashed them with a pillow.

Their tuition fees – and hence their debts to the government - are being increased by just 7.5 per cent on top of indexation to consumer prices, spread over three years. When fully implemented, this will increase total fees for a four-year degree by between $2000 and $3600 – with that range roughly aligned with the likely earning-power of the particular degree.

We keep being told that the level of income at which people with debts begin having to start repaying them has been lowered from $52,000 a year to $42,000. What we're rarely told is that the bottom rate of repayment has been lowered from 4 per cent of their income to 1 per cent.

Combining the two changes, the time it takes to repay loans will increase by less than a year.

Uni students come mainly from the comfortable middle class and go to uni to get a certificate that pretty much guarantees them a well-paying job, including a much lower risk of becoming unemployed or staying jobless for long.

It's true the wider public benefits from the money governments spend educating people to graduate level, but equally true that the personal benefits to the particular graduate are about as great.

On average, Birmingham's changes will increase the graduate's share of the cost of their degree from 42 per cent to 46 per cent – and, thanks to the unchanged design of the loan scheme, do so without discouraging students from poor families from bettering themselves.

Sounds fair enough to me.

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Students pay for status under uni fee rise

With the Senate as unco-operative as it has become, it's not at all certain Education Minister Christopher Pyne's proposal to deregulate university fees will become a reality. But if it does it will involve harnessing the university status drive to help balance the budget.

The government's plan is to allow the universities to set their own undergraduate tuition fees for new students from January 2016. But this would be accompanied by a cut averaging 20 per cent in the government's contribution towards the cost of courses.

Joe Hockey has argued that fee control is holding back our unis, stopping them competing with the best overseas.

"Australia should have at least one university in the top 20 in the world, and more in the top 100," he said.

So the economic rationalists' claim that fee deregulation would make the unis more efficient is being combined with a status argument: we need to raise our top unis' rankings on the various international league tables.

What's the link between fees and higher international status? Allowing our top, research-oriented "sandstone" unis to charge much higher fees would allow them to divert more funds to their research effort (probably including paying higher salaries to attract higher-status foreign researchers), the thing that would do most to boost their international rankings.

This is the very motive for the sandstone (Group of Eight) unis' vigorous support for fee deregulation.

Both the proponents and the opponents of fee deregulation assume that the immediate fee increase needed to allow all unis to at least recover the cost of the reduction in the government's contribution to course costs would be just the first of many.

This, I have no doubt, is the main motive for the purse-string departments' advocacy of fee deregulation: giving the unis freedom to raise their fees whenever they want to will allow the government to continue to reduce its own funding of them - not just for teaching costs but also for research via the Australian Research Council.

The fact is, successive governments have been reducing their funding support for unis for decades. Although total spending on universities as a percentage of gross domestic product in Australia is about average among the advanced economies, by 2004 the proportion paid by government was third lowest. Fee deregulation would allow it to go a lot lower.

I don't doubt the econocrats are genuine in their instinctive belief that de facto privatisation of our unis would increase the competition between them, making them more efficient and improving the quality of service to students.

But this motivation would come a distant second to reducing the unis' drain on the budget. And I doubt the econocrats have given any serious consideration to the many instances of "market failure" involved in partially deregulating a government-owned oligopoly with considerable market power.
The scope for stuff-ups - "unintended consequences" - is enormous.

If the tertiary education "market" did operate in roughly textbook fashion, with individual unis lacking pricing power, competition between them would greatly limit their combined ability to raise their fees very far.

And yet it's clear the government and the sandstone universities are confident of their ability to impose big fee increases over a few years.

Why? Because they know that - though it's assumed away in the textbook model - the higher-status unis would be able to get away with making students pay for that higher status along with the cost of their tuition.

The tuition fees unis charge foreign students have long been deregulated. They vary widely between unis, with the sandstones able to charge a lot more than the "red bricks" (as the Poms would call them). As well, the level of fees charged varies by course, with those for higher-paid professions higher than for lesser-paid, regardless of differences in the actual costs of delivering such courses.

The econocrats assume deregulated fees for local students would follow the same patterns, but that's not guaranteed. There ain't a lot of precedent for this radical experiment.

Since the buyers' knowledge of the relative quality of degrees is far from perfect, there's a high risk the lesser-status unis would hike their fees by more than expected precisely to avoid sending a signal that their product was of lesser quality.

The non-sandstone unis don't like the sound of all this, but they won't openly oppose it because they don't want to publicly acknowledge their lesser status.

Meanwhile, some status-seeking students at sandstone unis could be obliged to pay not only the full cost of their tuition but also to cross-subsidise their uni's research effort.

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University status comes at a high price

Has it occurred to you that universities are fundamentally about the pursuit of status? Almost every aspect of their activities focuses on the acquisition of rank. And Christopher Pyne's proposed "reform" of universities is about harnessing the status drive to help balance the budget.

Ostensibly, unis exist to add to the store of human knowledge and to educate the brightest of the rising generation. All very virtuous.

When you think about it, however, you see that unis are about the pursuit of certification, standing, position and prestige. The main way they earn their revenue is by granting superior status to young people seeking to enter the workforce.

In theory, a degree proves your possession of knowledge in a certain area. Often in practice it certifies little more than that you're smart enough and persistent enough to have passed a lot of exams. Either way, try climbing the employment ladder without one.

This makes universities gatekeepers granting access to the good, well-paying jobs in the economy. Which gives them a kind of monopoly power.

In the old days the government paid them to teach, assess and certify young people; these days the young people are required, to an increasing extent, to buy their qualifications directly, making them customers as much as pupils.

Such is the strength of the unis' monopoly over access to the good jobs that most young people would be prepared to pay huge fees and take on very large debts before they resigned themselves to a lifetime of low socio-economic status.

The status symbols issued by unis are themselves subject to a well-understood system of ranking: doctorates rank above master's degrees, with thesis masters outranking course-work masters. Then come bachelor's degrees, with honours degrees higher than pass degrees and first-class honours higher than second class. Not forgetting the ultimate status symbol: being awarded a university medal.

But uni degrees are subject to a second, informal status ranking: employers (and parents) tend to be more impressed by degrees awarded by the older, bigger "sandstone" universities than those from younger, outer-suburban or regional unis.

While in the public's mind the unis' existence is justified by their teaching, few people become academics because of a burning desire to teach. Academics want to do research and, though some become good teachers and enjoy teaching, for the most part teaching is regarded as an unfortunate distraction.

The unis try to conceal the conflict between their priority (research) and the public's (teaching) by claiming that academics at the forefront of their discipline's research effort make the best teachers.

Students know this is rubbish. It pretends good teaching doesn't require possession of teaching skills and forgets that most undergraduate teaching has little to do with the teacher's super-specialty.

Academics know the fast track to the top comes from the quality and quantity of their research, as evidenced by their publication records. Promotion assessments - moving people up the status ladder from lecturer to full professor - give little weight to teaching, contribution to public debate or even the writing of textbooks.

The universities themselves are driven by their desire to raise their status relative to other unis by increasing the quantity and quality of their research. The government publishes regular rankings of our universities and their faculties, largely determined by their research output.

Universities threaten to sack academics who fail to reach research output quotas. They urge staff to compete for government research grants, granted partly on the basis of previously published research. Staff who win grants are rewarded with money they can use to pay part-timers to take over their teaching obligations.

The quality of published research is determined largely by the reputation of the academic journal that published it. All journals are ranked, with American and British journals scoring many points and Australian journals scoring few points.

(Since international journals are reluctant to publish research into Australian issues, this means our government uses our taxes to fund a universities-designed scheme that discourages our academics from doing empirical research on problems of particular relevance to us.)

In recent years the eight sandstone unis' greatest motivation has been to raise their position on a couple of regular international rankings of universities. To this end they've come increasingly to offer senior positions to American and British academics rather than locals, since the foreigners are more likely to get themselves published in more prestigious journals.

Some unis' drive to lift their international reputation involves a policy of never hiring lecturers whose highest qualification is a PhD they themselves granted. Cultural cringe, anyone?

How does this obsession with status-seeking tie in with the Abbott government's plan to deregulate uni fees? Watch this space.

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