By Anthony Richardson*
It’s no secret New Zealand universities are at a crossroads. Financial constraints, a post-COVID hangover and sweeping staff layoffs have all made for testing times in the tertiary world.
So the government’s appointment of a University Advisory Group to “consider challenges and opportunities for improvement in the university sector” is more than timely.
The group is charged with assessing the financial challenges facing universities, their overall performance, and whether different funding models would help achieve better outcomes.
Public submissions have now closed. It will be fascinating to see the answers to the first and perhaps most important question on the submissions form: “What should be the primary functions of universities for a contemporary world?”
There is, of course, no single definitive answer. But there are several working definitions that might help. These often overlap and are sometimes contradictory. The challenge will be to find the right balance between the seven outlined below.
1. Driver of economic and social development
This is a common understanding of a university’s role: as well as teaching the next generation of professionals, university research drives technological development and economic growth.
For example, the foundation of Canterbury College (later to become the university) was informed by the economic and social needs of a newly established colonial settlement. This role is compatible with an understanding of the university as a job factory (see below).
Governments regularly provide funding to universities to meet training and employment goals, such as the current plan to fund a new medical school at Waikato University.
2. Promoter of equity
The motto of Waikato University – Ko Te Tangata (For the People) – clearly states what (or who) a university is for. It offers employment opportunities that should not be restricted to a small minority.
While you are still ten times more likely to go to university if your parents also went to university, over the second half of the 20th century New Zealand radically increased participation in university education.
In turn, however, allowing more students to enrol has raised concerns about the risk of lowering academic and teaching standards.
For the people: the University of Waikato motto states what and who it is for. Getty Images.
3. Profit-making business
With a 20% decline in government funding since 2012, universities have been forced to act as businesses. Shifting to a user-pays funding model means they are selling a product (education) to individual consumers (students).
Furthermore, free market reforms in the 1980s and 1990s largely deregulated tertiary education. This left universities competing with each other in a marketplace.
The importance of university rankings, student recruitment marketing and student experience all flow from this business model. This aligns with another possible function of the university as preserving status and privilege (see below).
Certain institutions and degrees have always been markers of status for those who can afford them. This perception clearly underpins some arguments against taxpayer funding.
4. Job factory
Another stated purpose of the university is that it exists to reduce unemployment by training people for work (or at least removing them from unemployment statistics while they study).
A university’s success is measured by how employable its graduates are. This then feeds into criticism of certain degrees (usually in the “softer” humanities subjects) producing “unemployable” graduates.
This view dovetails in some ways with the understanding of universities as drivers of national development (see below).
5. Incubator of intellectual inquiry and knowledge
According to the Education Act 1998:
a university is characterised by a wide diversity of teaching and research, especially at a higher level, that maintains, advances, disseminates, and assists the application of, knowledge, develops intellectual independence, and promotes community learning […]
John Macmillan Brown.
A university fulfils this role through valuable research, free intellectual debate and the creation of good citizens. This purpose can be seen to be threatened by the shift towards the business or job factory models (see above).
This view of the university’s function also conflicts with the view they should be drivers of economic and social development (see above), which goes back to the country’s colonial origins.
In the words of John Macmillan Brown, one of three founding professors of Canterbury College:
God help me, what would be the good of Greek verse for pioneers in a new colony?
6. Preserver of status and privilege
Elite universities have always offered their graduates enhanced social connections and employment opportunities. They increasingly cloak their status (justifiably or not) in the language of educational meritocracy, measured in university rankings and successful alumni.
Their advertised role as incubators of intellectual inquiry and knowledge complements their other identities as job factory and for-profit business because only the wealthiest customers can afford the products they are selling.
But this is clearly in direct conflict with the understanding of universities as promoters of equity.
7. Social critic and instigator of revolutionary change
There is a long history of universities filling the role of “critic and conscience of society”, which generally complements those of promoter of equity and incubator of intellectual inquiry and knowledge.
At the same time, criticisms of universities as elitist ivory towers also have a long history.
Nonetheless, instigating social change extends beyond campus protests and “culture wars” to include research, social commentary and revolutionary technological developments such as the internet and artificial intelligence.
Finally, all universities have to balance some or all of these purposes, whether complementary or contradictory. The answer to the University Advisory Group’s first question is not straightforward. Any useful answer lies in some mix of these various options.
*Anthony Richardson, Senior Lecturer and Deputy Director, Te Puna Ako Centre for Tertiary Teaching and Learning, University of Waikato. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
38 Comments
For a start, any qualifications related to any vocation on immigration green lists should have free fees.
As for the change agency role of University, Parliament is over represented by University academics, relative to the general population. They don't seem to be capable of delivering practical solutions for the advancement of the country.
Last Government had a finance minister with a Bachelor of Arts, and this time round we have an English Literature with a Post Grad in Journalism. Meanwhile the dude with some real world experience in banking (Simeon Brown) is off tinkering around with Transport.
I have to wonder if Government is being used as more of a cadetship/apprenticeship scheme for people who have changed their minds around their qualifications. Watch post politics as Nicola enters the finance world/bank and Simeon gets a cushy number at a tier one civil roading company.
allowing more students to enrol has raised concerns about the risk of lowering academic and teaching standards
We've beaten down education standards across the board from primary to tertiary levels. Then we wonder why productivity has been down in the dumps for almost a generation in this country.
Being a millennial myself who spent a few high school years studying in Singapore and uni send abroad in northern Europe, the strong sense of entitlement that young Kiwis bring to their workplace worries me.
The base assumption is that more education = better workers/economy. Instead, we've just diluted the quality of the education and created a really expensive extra add-on for a chunk of the population who were inevitably going to be middle class office workers anyway.
I'm also a millennial and I'm super reluctant to hire anyone over about 50.
It comes from a tradition that goes a long way back.
I first learnt about it when I met a couple of odd-looking leather-clad Swiss in Golden Bay.
The whole thing is fascinating. From what I remember, the basic idea is that part of becoming qualified in a particular trade is to go abroad (or at least outside of your local area) and work for an established business (for food and board - not wages). Lots of obvious benefits and no surprise that they still commonly use the system and that it has evolved into a comprehensive framework for apprenticeships more generally.
There really is no better way to become competent at something than working alongside someone that already is. The fixation on providing businesses with 'job ready' candidates is short sighted to say the least.
I'm sure there'll be lots of opinions why on the job training can't work in our modern economy. Not least of which would be the fact that despite all of the talk of a 'knowledge economy' and 'life-long learning' we seem to be devolving into a low-skill economy (chicken, meet egg).
Job training can work, but it also comes at its own costs.
Your productive staff lose productivity by training instead of working, or remedying trainee errors.
Usually why you try to start with the basics, and work your way up from there. But even at minimum wage, that can also be kinda expensive.
Thats why there used to be youth and training wages to encourage employers to take on trainees and invest in them. Now that everyone gets the minimum wage, training on the job has become far too expensive. Employers can simply import a worker to work for minimum wage, rather than train up a local young person.
The Swiss system is tied to getting students leaving school into apprenticeships with a view to future careers in the industry whatever that industry or service may be. It is very well thought out - none of this: "congratulations you have finished minimum schooling - what happens next is not our problem" BS.
NZ Inc could learn a lot from studying such as system.
And benefit even more from actually implementing it.
To prospective uni students: Never forget the university is a for-profit organization. They will encourage you to take any additional paper whenever possible. Resist. Get the skills you need then get out. It takes up enough time and costs enough as is.
Don't overlook Ara / Te Pukenga. Some of the programs are shite, some have been brilliant. If you want to be there, they can be a gold mine for an eager learner if you are lucky enough to have one of the old guard lecturers. The workloads are lighter, and it is more down-to-earth and often easier to apply skills later.
Don't be afraid to leave for a few years and come back if you're not sure why you're there. Don't let others put pressure on you. Working a few years does wonders. Coming back as an adult student makes it far easier.
Unfortunately, both at uni and Ara, some of the lecturers do not want to be there are ineffective to the point you will learn 3x more by spending the time reading the textbook. Some are ineffective teachers who should have quit a decade before, who proudly proclaim their passing rate is low. Why so proud, you are an ineffective teacher? How awful and what a waste for everyone involved (unless you're the uni, repeat students = more fees of course).
I can't help thinking that universities being "for-profit" is too restrictive and stifles free thinking. The trouble is a lot of university subjects are technical in nature. Perhaps we should have a couple of not for-profit universities that focus on more abstract higher learning.
My daughter is in halls at Auckland Uni. She went to a state school. My wife and I both earn wages and are "fortunate" enough to earn over the threshold for most scholarships. My daughter is in halls with mainly private school kids whose parents own multiple homes and are far wealthier than her. Most of them are on some kind of scholarship as their parents' wealth is not from salaries and they can get around the means testing. It seems as though those that have wealth get education for free but those with more modest means have to pay. We could have one down the Maori scholarship route, but it didn't seem right as although she has Whakapapa she doesn't identify as Maori and thought the funding should be for those from disadvantaged homes.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2023/01/elite-revolt/
Too many universities. Could be cut 90%
Trade Trading? Think Medical School at the Polytech.
Universities were supposed to be institutions devoted to higher learning, and as such they only took the best and brightest (10%-15% of the population, around half of which would not graduate due to bell curve marking). Now they have been turned into sausage fee factories churning out 50% of the population. Standards have been dropped to accommodate this dumbing down of the average student, and the basic undergraduate degree is practically worthless on the job market as everyone has one.
Vocational colleges have been removed - both nursing and teaching used to have their own educational institutions, these have now been sucked into the University model.
The end result is that kids are incurring huge student loans for life, for a piece of paper that confers absolutely no advantage over other job applicants, and does nothing to prepare them for the actual job they will end up doing (which most likely will have nothing whatsoever to do with what they studied at Unversity).
To counter this decline in standards and uselessness of undergraduate degrees, more Universities will move to the US Ivy League model - separating "top" Universities from the "bottom" and moving sought after degrees like Law and Business into their Masters degree programme. This has occurred in Australia, where the likes of Melbourne University (or Group of 8 as they call them in Australia) attract all the top students, while the others become more like the US Community Colleges. The unfortunate thing that is happening in NZ is that our Universities are not even aspiring to be Ivy League or Go8, or even Community Colleges. They want to be what is known as Tribal Colleges in the US - institutions focused on indigenous learning. If you have clever children, you need to start saving a college fund so they can go overseas and be properly educated at a respected institution. Otherwise in a global market for talent, they will be left on the scrap heap.
for a piece of paper that confers absolutely no advantage over other job applicants
There's a big difference between having a degree, and having a degree but knowing how to use this in a job interview to back yourself and negotiate a better salary. One is a piece of paper, the other is a skill that is usually self-taught.
Online education already massively disrupting full in person delivery. Many degrees can be offered full online. NZ students replace some recordings of a lecture with a better version from US, India or wherever.
E.g. undergrad business degree. Why do in person. Why not free online?
5. Incubator of intellectual inquiry and knowledge
This is the correct answer, and from this naturally flows jobs, prosperity and progress. Revolutionary change? maybe, but only in the limited Thomas Kuhn sense of paradigm shifts, ie relativity overthrowing Newtonian mechanics, or Copernicus heliocentric model overthrowing Ptolemy's geocentric model. Universities must foster heterodox thinking, logic and reason as described by Karl Popper. Universities absolutely must avoid becoming ideologically, or politically driven purveyors of dogma because that would be the death of intellectual inquiry, and the death of knowledge creation.
Hmm ... People who comment should disclose whether they went to Uni, completed / dropped out, and what their majors were. Then we could put their comments into context.
I did a B.Comm that included accountancy (mainly management accountancy), management studies, economics, philosophy, commercial law, statistics and just one computer related paper. First salaried job? Computer programmer. Were the other papers useful in my life? Absolutely friggin' Ay they were. My father used to say that the primary benefit of a higher education is as a "b.s. detector". He was not wrong. I continue to add papers at the rate of about one every two years.
My father used to say that the primary benefit of a higher education is as a "b.s. detector"
How does this contrast with that classical phrase, "bullshit baffles brains"? Because since the days of the COVID debacle, the current Ukraine war and the upcoming war with China, it seems to me that it is the most highly university educated people who fall the hardest for obviously false but state backed media narratives.
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