The Federal Government’s budget cuts to universities announced over the weekend will hit services to students and exacerbate an epidemic of low morale among university staff, the NSW Community and Public Sector Union said today.
“Universities are already engaging in cost-cutting leading to jobs, resources and valuable experience being slashed from departments,” said CPSU Senior Industrial Officer Andrew Holland.
“This is often a false economy, leading to costly and inefficient outsourcing arrangements.
“The effects of these cuts – in particular the efficiency dividend – will put the jobs of university professional staff at risk and increase the already high workloads of remaining staff to intolerable levels, reducing services and support to students.
“While proud of the work they do, there is an epidemic of low morale among university professional staff as they come under increasing pressure to do more with less.
“The CPSU will vigorously oppose any cuts that cut jobs or degrade the educational support and services our members deliver.
“On-going cost-cutting in universities and TAFEs has driven the rise of precarious and insecure employment to record highs within the sector.
“University professional staff refuse to be made the scapegoat for the Gillard government’s public policy failure to properly fund and resource education in Australia.
“We will be consulting with our members state-wide to identify the areas of greatest risk to jobs and services and develop a plan to protect university education in NSW.”
Contact: Andrew Holland 0418 236 867 / Jackie Woods 0414 241 483
Losing A$200 a student doesn’t sound like a major cut for a multi-billion-dollar industry – so will the new university funding cuts really affect the quality of Australian higher education?
Over the weekend, the federal government announced that A$2.3 billion will be stripped from the university system to used for a proposed boost to schools funding.
Prime Minister Julia Gillard has defended the “efficiency dividend” reduction in university funding of 2 per cent in 2014 and 1.25 per cent in 2015, worth A$900 million, pointing out that total university funding was still rising even after the cuts.
“We have increased funding to universities by more than 50 per cent since we came to government. That’s a lot, by more than half,” Ms Gillard told ABC radio.
“Universities will continue to get more money next year and the year after than this year. What we are looking to do is to moderate the rate of growth, so that we can make a difference for school funding now for 3.5 million kids and of course get school funding and school reform and improvement right for all of the children to follow.”
Universities Australia chairman and Vice-Chancellor of the University of Melbourne Glyn Davis acknowledged that government funding had grown since 2004, and “picked up dramatically” under the Labor government since 2007.
Commonwealth funding for higher education, 2001-2016. Federal Government
But Professor Davis told ABC radio the sudden reduction in funding growth would still have an impact on students and the quality of their university experience.
“It means, in very approximate terms, what is currently A$9400 becomes A$9200 to support each student on average,” he said. “Of course the particular amount for a student varies dramatically depending on whether they’re doing commerce and arts, or medicine and law. But on average it’ll be about a A$200 reduction per student.
“What it does mean is that the things that student support fund – the amount of contact hours, the amount of student counselling, the hours in the library, stock in the laboratories, all of the things that are standard parts of the operation of all universities – just get shaved.
“All of them have to be reduced around two per cent to make this work and to keep universities, which work on very, very fine margins, still in the black, because no university can afford to run deficits.”
Regional Universities Network executive director Caroline Perkins said the federal government was about to undercut its record of pushing for more students from regional, indigenous, low-income and other diverse backgrounds to go to university.
“I do think these cuts undermine the federal government’s legacy in terms of higher education policy,” Dr Perkins said.
“This will give us less funding to support those students, just at a time when participation from these groups was starting to lift. For instance, last year we saw a slight lift in the relative percentage of low socioeconomic status students participating for about the first time ever.”
Only 12 per cent of Australians in regional areas have a university degree, compared to more than double that rate in capital cities.
University students will foot more of the bill for their studies, with Student Start-up Scholarships to help cover expensive textbooks and equipment to be converted to a Higher Education Contribution Scheme (HECS) loan from next year, saving taxpayers A$1.2 billion.
This will mean that students who go on to earn A$49,096 or more (at current rates) will have to repay that start-up money as a loan, on top of their HECS debt.
Students who receive a scholarship before 1 January 2014 will still be eligible for the funding until they come off student payments.
“Many regional students already have to relocate to attend university. By removing start-up scholarships, students will need to increase their debt to the government or have their families take out personal loans,“ said University of Southern Queensland Vice-Chancellor Jan Thomas.
“More than 30 per cent of our students are financially disadvantaged. Very many more are educationally disadvantaged. It costs a lot more in academic and pastoral support to get those students up to the standard that Australians expect of a university graduate. Every time these dollars are chipped away, it affects our ability to do that for those students.
Professor Thomas said USQ was expecting to lose at least A$3.8 million of government funding next year, with further cuts in 2015, which will not just affect students and staff.
“Our Toowoomba campus alone contributes nearly 2,400 jobs in full-time jobs, and every one dollar spent in regional uni delivers three back to the region. It’s too early to say on job losses or where we’ll make up the ground, but anything that affects regional universities has a knock-on consequence for our regions too.”
University of Queensland Vice-Chancellor, Professor Peter Høj, said one of his concerns was the impact on Australia’s international reputation for quality education.
“Everyone talks about how hard to export with a high Australian dollar. Universities have created the third highest export sector in the country, A$15 billion per annum in high education export earnings, and we do that because we have highly ranked universities,” he told ABC radio.
“So if we underfund universities, those rankings will slip, and you will actually see an export-earning capability that also gives soft power in Asia slip.”
Professor Høj said the A$900 million efficiency dividend was “a double hit” to the university sector, coming only six months after the federal government cut A$1 billion to university and student programs.
“When I was a young lecturer back in the late ’80s, we had a student to staff ratio of 13 to 1; it’s now 21 to 1,” Professor Høj said. “It’s not as though there hasn’t been a productivity increase.”
This article was originally published at The Conversation.
Read the original article.
"The magnitude of the cuts made to the sector over the past 6 months will challenge the ability of universities to continue to meet the high standards of educational quality expected of them. These cuts also come at a time when Australia already sits a disturbingly 25th out of 29 advanced economies for public investment in universities - as a percentage of GDP."
Should universities suffer to pay for school funding?
By Andrew Norton, Grattan Institute
Anyone believing new tertiary education minister Craig Emerson was just minding the higher education shop until the election has been proved wrong by this weekend’s announcement of funding cuts.
About A$2.3 billion will be harvested from higher education and go towards schools funding reform. Ahead of the Council of Australian Government’s meeting this week, the Prime Minister Julia Gillard said the government would use the extra funds to offer $2 for every $1 the premiers put in.
But the university cuts are significant, and not just for the amount of money involved.
The biggest policy shift is the conversion of the Student Start-up Scholarships from grants to loans. Under the current system, students receiving Youth Allowance, Austudy or Abstudy are paid A$1,025 lump sums twice a year. The scholarships are intended to cover large up-front expenses such as textbooks or equipment.
From 2014, new students will have to choose between forgoing the A$1,025 or adding it to their HELP debt.
Perhaps the government plans to distinguish between “capital” investment in education, to be funded through income-contingent loans, and living expenses, to be funded through welfare payments like Youth Allowance. Inevitably, however, this reform raises questions about whether all student income support will eventually be loans rather than grants.
The government is also trimming HELP loan scheme costs by ending discounts for up-front payments and voluntary early repayments.
Under the current system, students receive a 10 per cent discount if they pay their student contribution up-front. For example, the student contribution for a business student taking out a HELP loan is A$9,792 a year. By paying up-front with the discount the price comes down A$8,813.
The discount’s rationale is that HELP lending incurs interest subsidies and the risk of bad debt, which together cost taxpayers about A$1.5 billion a year. Up-front payments limit the government’s exposure to these expenses, but they have to pay the discount’s value to universities. That’s the money the government saves with this measure.
Of course, some savings will be lost later due to increased HELP lending. But there is evidence that many people who pay up-front will still do so without the discount, so the government is likely to come out ahead with this change.
The 5 per cent voluntary repayment bonus is supposed to be an incentive to repay HELP debt early, and so also reduce interest costs and the risk that the debt will go bad. For example, a person who voluntarily repays A$1,000 extra of their HELP debt, on top of compulsory payments via the tax system, would have A$1,050 deducted from their HELP debt.
The early repayment bonus is not achieving its objectives. A few years ago, the Australian Taxation Office published data showing that most voluntary repayments were made when the debt was nearly paid off in any case.
The bonus also interacts with a design flaw in the FEE-HELP loan scheme. Full-fee postgraduates and Open Universities Australia students can take out unnecessary FEE-HELP loans and then use the bonus to repay their debt for less than the original loan amount.
Effectively, they can engineer themselves a subsidy. Getting rid of the early repayment bonus is good public policy.
The same cannot be said of an “efficiency dividend” cut to university funding of 2 per cent in 2014 and 1.25 per cent in 2015. The cuts will apply to the core tuition subsidy Commonwealth Grant Scheme, to research student funding, to equity support, and to some other programs that less directly affect students.
Although universities have previously experienced long periods of below-inflation increases in per student funding, these are the first cuts to nominal per student funding since the Dawkins reforms were introduced more than 20 years ago.
It is very unlikely that hundreds of millions of dollars in genuine “efficiencies” can be found by next year, so the cuts will almost certainly have negative effects on the student experience.
For undergraduates, this poor outcome could have been avoided with compensating increases to student contributions, as has occurred on all previous occasions when public funding was reduced.
A further reform announced on Saturday goes beyond higher education, affecting all tax deductions for self-education expenses. These are to be capped at $2,000 a year. This will especially affect postgraduate coursework students whose degrees are linked to their jobs, the trigger for tax deductibility.
The after-tax impact on students could easily be thousands of dollars a year, depending on course fees and marginal tax rates.
Except for the “efficiency dividend” there is at least an arguable case for each policy change. But these latest announcements add to a long list of messy, ad hoc higher education cuts without any obvious strategy to save money at least expense to public policy goals.
Frequent fiddling undermines policies that are retained as well as those that are cut, as nobody knows what will go next. Long-term decision making by universities, their staff and their students needs more policy stability than we have. Andrew Norton does not work for, consult to, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has no relevant affiliations.
This article was originally published at The Conversation.
Read the original article.
By Michelle Grattan, University of Canberra
The higher education sector is to take heavy budget cuts to help pay for the government’s Gonski school funding plan, a key measure in Julia Gillard’s bid for re-election.
About A$2.3 billion will be saved in the portfolio over the budget period, through a mix of measures that target both universities themselves and those paying fees.
In addition, another A$520 million will be harvested by the cash-strapped government from capping the tax deduction people can get for their self-education expenses.
The tertiary education measures include an efficiency dividend for university funding of 2% next year and 1.25% in 2015. The dividend will average A$300 million a year, a total of A$900 million over the budget period.
The 10% discount available for paying fees upfront is to be removed and the 5% bonus for voluntary repayments of HELP debts will also go, producing savings of about A$230 million.
Student start-up scholarships will be converted into loans, repayable along with students' university fees after people are earning a specified level of income. This will save A$1.2 billion.
Tertiary Education Minister Craig Emerson said that taking account of the A$2.3 billion savings, Commonwealth funding for higher education would still continue to increase sharply, as would the number of higher education places.
The Gonski school funding plan will be discussed at Friday’s Council of Australian Governments meeting, with the government currently frantically trying to negotiate a deal with the states.
“Prime Minister Gillard has committed to making every school a great school,” Dr Emerson said.
Treasurer Wayne Swan announced that from July next year work-related self-education expenses will be more fairly targeted through an annual cap of A$2,000 a person.
Mr Swan said the majority of those with self-education expenses would not be affected – the typical claim for formal qualifications was A$905, less than half the proposed cap. For other expenses, such as conferences, seminars and workshops the typical claim was only a few hundred dollars.
He said the present uncapped system provided an opportunity for people “to enjoy significant private benefits at taxpayers' expense.
“Without a cap on the amount that can be claimed under this deduction, it’s possible to make large claims for expenses such as first class airfares, five star accommodation and expensive courses.”
Universities Australia said the A$2.3 billion represented the biggest reductions in funding to the university system and student support since 1996. Almost A$1 billion would be cut from university revenue with the remainder of the burden falling on students.
Chair of Universities Australia, Glyn Davis, said the cuts came on top of the A$1 billion stripped out of the system less than six months ago in the government’s mid year budget review.
“We are concerned at the long-term impact these cuts will have on university research and education,” Professor Davis said.
“The magnitude of the cuts made to the sector over the past six months will challenge the ability of universities to continue to meet the high standards of educational quality expected of them. These cuts also come at a time when Australia already sits, disturbingly, 25th out of 29 advanced economies for public investment in universities – as a percentage of GDP.
“For students, the loss of a range of income support measures will be compounded by the inevitable withdrawal of existing academic and professional support services provided by universities.
“This comes at a time when global competition has never been more fierce, when our competitors are investing heavily in higher education because they recognise that funding higher education and research is a long term investment in their country’s future well-being.
“Our market research shows that 88% of parents want their children to go to university, 93% consider universities as important in providing the skills and knowledge for tomorrow, and 87% support an increase in funding for universities."
Opposition leader Tony Abbott said the only way to get the investment needed in education and disability reform was to have a government able to deliver a stronger economy.
Greens leader Christine Milne said: “Cutting one area of education to fund another is wrong.
“These funding cuts are a direct result of the Government’s failure to fix the mining tax.”
Country independent Rob Oakeshott said there must be no more cuts for the tertiary education sector in the budget.
Independent Andrew Wilkie said the decision was robbing Peter to pay Paul and he would not support it. Michelle Grattan does not work for, consult to, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has no relevant affiliations.
This article was originally published at The Conversation.
Read the original article.
NSW unions will today launch a High Court challenge to the O’Farrell Government’s electoral donation laws, arguing they breach the freedom of political communication and association that is implied in the NSW and Commonwealth constitutions.
As well as Unions NSW, other parties to the High Court action are the United Services Union, the Australian Manufacturing Workers Union, the Transport Workers Union, the NSW Nurses and Midwives Association and the Teachers Federation.
The laws were passed by the NSW parliament last year and hinder working people in expressing their political views by:
Banning peak councils such as Unions NSW from levying its affiliates to run movement wide election campaigns (such as the highly successful Rights at Work campaign);
Combining the caps on election spending for political parties and affiliated unions;
Banning trade unions from paying affiliation fees to political parties
Unions NSW Secretary, Mark Lennon said the High Court action would serve as a crucial test case on the basic concept of freedom of political expression.
“If they’re allowed to stand, the O’Farrell Government’s electoral donation laws will muzzle debate and silence the voice of working people in NSW,” Mr Lennon said.
“This case transcends the interests of any one political party. At its heart, our High Court action is about the right of working people to ensure their collective voice is heard.
“The O’Farrell Government’s election funding laws are a cynical attempt to undermine the political strength of its opponents, all the while masquerading in the public interest.
Bret Walker SC will represent unions NSW and its affiliates in court.
Snaps during Labourstart conference Sydney (Photo credit: markfchristopher)
"With increased casualisation on the one hand, and longer working days on the other, the major parties' 'dignity of work' rhetoric is wearing thin, writes Sarah Burnside" Noting that Australia has the fourth highest proportion of part-time workers in the developed world, ACTU president Ged Kearney argued that many who do not feature in the unemployment statistics are still struggling to make ends meet. The ABC alsoreported Beyond Blue chief executive Kate Carnell expressing concerns about risks of depression and serious illness posed by “job insecurity, over-work and under-work”. The Indignity Of Work
English: Histogram of countries by weeks paid maternity leave provided by law (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Have
you or your partner had a baby? Were you able to access any paid time off work
to spend time with your child in those important first weeks and months?
Working people and unions fought hard for the right to take time off work when
you have a child. We won our first universal Paid Parental Leave scheme in 2011
and Paid Dad and Partner pay in 2012. We are proud of these achievements and
the difference they make in working families' lives. But improvements are still
needed.
The Federal Government is currently conducting a Review of the Paid Parental
Leave Scheme and we want you to get involved.
We will use your stories in a submission to the Federal Government’s Review.
The union movement will be talking about the importance of spending time and
caring for new babies and telling the Government where the scheme needs
improvement.
For many households the reduction in wages they experience on the Paid Parental
Leave Scheme is a barrier to taking the leave. We want to see this addressed.
We also know that women retire with much less super than men. We want to see
this addressed by having superannuation paid during Paid Parental Leave. And we
want the time that parents can have spend with their new child increased.
So we can include your thoughts, please take the time to complete the survey or
send us an email.
More information on the Paid Parental Leave scheme and the Review can be found
at www.facsia.gov.au/pplreview
.
I hope you can join us in improving the lives of working families.
The main purpose of this post is to reflect on how badly things are going in Higher Education in the USA. I think with what has been happening at Sydney University industrially this is relevant.
"Most adjuncts teach at multiple universities while still not making enough to stay above thepoverty line. Some are onwelfareorhomeless. Others depend oncharity drivesheld by their peers. Adjuncts are generallynot allowedto have offices or participate in faculty meetings. When they ask for a living wage or benefits, they can befired. Their contingent status allows them no recourse."
