Lessons to contemplate as the sector awaits the Accord Panel report

As the Australian higher education sectors readies for the release of the Universities Accord Panel’s final report, and crucially, the government’s response – changes happening in the US and the UK offer some timely lessons for policy makers and the sector to contemplate.

Firstly the news from the US – where a recent Gallup poll published in the Wall Street Journal shows that the general public in the US is losing confidence in higher education. Specifically respondents expressing “a lot of confidence” in the sector have fallen from 57% to 36% in two decades.  The WSJ article goes further and notes that:

“A decline in undergraduate enrollment since 2011 has translated into 3 million fewer students on campus. Nearly half of parents say they would prefer not to send their children to a four-year college after high school, even if there were no obstacles, financial or otherwise. Two-thirds of high-school students think they will be just fine without a college degree.”

While there are many differences between the US and Australian higher education sectors – not least in relation to the number of institutions and the financing for the sector – it nonetheless would be fascinating to know what the respective poll figures would be in Australia.

It will also be fascinating to see what specifics the Accord Panel are recommending in terms of supporting more students into higher education, or whether they believe that the current domestic enrolment levels in Australian universities are primarily due to the strength of the economy and the counter-cyclical nature of higher education?

Another valuable lesson from the UK is outlined in a recent Times Higher Education article focussed on a trial designed to support a new lifelong learning entitlement funding model.

For a few years the UK government has been working on changes to its higher education funding model to introduce a student lifelong learning entitlement (LLE) loan scheme which learners can use to fund their higher education or vocational studies.

The scheme is due to roll out next year and will mark a significant shift in higher education funding. From 2025 students will receive a loan entitlement equivalent to 4 years of post-school education which they can use over their lifetime.

“It will be available for both modular and full-time study at higher technical and degree levels (levels 4 to 6), regardless of whether they are provided in colleges or universities.”

Australia’s Universities Accord Panel’s interim report indicated that they were also looking at how best we should fund lifelong learning. If the Australian government does decide to pursue funding reform to support a lifelong learning model, it is to be hoped that officials carefully examine a trial initiated by the UK Office for Students (OfS) to support institutions in the shift to the LLE.

The OfS undertook a trial (the Higher Education Short Course Trial), inviting higher education institutions to bid for funding to develop short credit-bearing courses in specific subject areas. The aim was to understand how higher education providers could adapt existing modules into short courses for upskilling and retraining, to assess student demand, and test the impact of offering loans for these short courses. The trial ran through the 2022-2023 UK academic year and has now concluded and been evaluated… and the results were disastrous:

• 22 providers participated
• they had intended to offer more than 100 new short courses to around 2,000 students

The reality was that 10 providers delivered only 17 courses, to just 125 students!

The takeaways from the trial include that “creating successful short courses for the new Lifelong Learning Entitlement (LLE) requires “significant thought”, not just an “unbundling” of existing provision” and the “teams in charge of creating the short courses found gaining institutional approval and developing content were more complex than had been envisaged.”

Lots for the sector and policymakers to ponder as we wait for the Accord Panel’s final report and the government’s response to their recommendations…