Higher education: a short history of change

Don Aitkin

Change' is one of the great buzzwords of the very late 20th century, and nowhere more so than in higher education. We talk about 'change' in this context as though it were something new, but it will be the message of this paper that change is an essential characteristic of the modern university. Whenever we talk about change, however, the meaning of the word changes. In 2000, the final year of the century and the millennium, the word meant 'financial contraction', or 'the threat of Internet providers' or something else disturbing. It has meant in the past growth and expansion, changes in structure, the enrolment of different kinds of students, the expansion of postgraduate work, the funding of research, and so on. It may be true that there is more talk of change today than there was in the 1960s, for example, but I'm not yet persuaded; what I am sure of is that today's changes are on the whole worrying, while those of the past were less so. Growth provides more opportunities for everyone than does contraction.

As a political scientist and historian I know that to get a grip on any important contemporary issue one needs a good knowledge of the last 200 years. For issues in higher education the task is a little easier - the last hundred years is usually enough. You may think that a long time, but my own direct experience in higher education goes back to my enrolment as an undergraduate in 1954, while my father, who worked underground in the North Broken Hill mine in order to save enough money to go to university at all, first went to Sydney University in 1923. He remained involved in university teaching, in one way or another, until 1967. Put the two of us together (and I learned a lot about universities from him) and that's most of the last century.

What follows is a rapid history of change in higher education, not simply in Australia, but in the developed English-speaking world. By and large, all these higher education systems went through such changes, but of course in different ways and to different degrees and with different emphases and with somewhat different timings. The similarity of experience can be explained in large part by the universality of knowledge, the roughly even levels of economic development in the countries concerned, and the rapid development of communications and transport in the past hundred years or so.

I will anticipate a little by saying that in the business of change in universities new endeavours are created, and all endeavours have periods of expansion, stability, contraction, and even decline. Every university I know has examples of these endeavours - new ones, middle-aged ones, old ones, dying ones - and their interplay is part of the tension of the university. If the tension is creative the outcome can be good, invigorating, healthy. If the tension is essentially only about winners and losers then the outcome is usually unpleasant. There is a lot of the second in Australian universities at the moment, and not a great deal of the first. There is of course a similar tension in the system as a whole, because universities themselves are endeavours, and much the same thing can be said about that domain. It is of course characteristic of us as human beings that we like to control our environment and act autonomously. Change to our working environment threatens our capacity so to act, and for this reason it is not surprising that we react badly to change.

A final introductory comment: Australians are lucky to live in a country without national borders, and to be far away from real troubles. But there is a cost. We do lack easy, daily comparisons between Australia and its next-door neighbours, because we do not have any such neighbours. And the consequence is that we tend to explain everything in local terms, as though what is happening in Australia is somehow unique, when often it is not. A second consequence, because of our long history of stable government and the importance of the public sector in Australian history, is that we ascribe more to governments and to political action than is often justified. A great deal of our contemporary situation is popularly credited to the actions or inaction of the Howard Government, or of the Keating Government. Yet even a small amount of knowledge of what is occurring in Britain, Canada or the USA tells us that all four countries are going through rather similar experiences in higher education, as in much else.[1]

Beginnings
From my perspective the modern university can be dated from the late 19th century, and it is built around a blend of intellectual disciplines and professional training. Very few of the disciplines we know in the modern university have an older genesis than the late 19th century, which is when disciplinary associations of academics, journals and conferences begin to flourish, and 'research' starts making a timid appearance in the university. Professional training is of course much older, and was an important part of the mediaeval university, especially in the areas of theology and law, with medicine coming in later (earlier in Europe than in England). It is easy to look at continuity, and that is what university people do when they tell the world that universities are very old. But there is not much resemblance at all between a contemporary university and its predecessor of the 16th century, save the site and one or two of the customs. In universities, as in organised sport, schools, parliaments, courts and much else, the late 19th century is a very important time of creation.

Expansion
My current explanation of the importance of the second half of the 19th century in the shaping of the modern university builds on the fact that this is the time also of the second Industrial Revolution (chemistry and electricity). The developments of this second phase of industrial transformation owed much more to laboratory experimentation than did the first Industrial Revolution (coal and iron, textile machinery, steam power). While universities were not an essential part of either process, the expansion of scientific knowledge started to transform curricula, and to move students of science from the classroom into the teaching laboratory. The advance of the university as part of the economic and social growth that followed might have been rapid had it not been for a sequence of depressions (1890s, 1930s) and world wars (1914-18, 1939-45). But it needs to be said that the depression of the 1930s and the second world war gave governments the need and the determination to grapple with large issues, and they developed skill in doing so. This proved to be a decisive preparation for the second half of the century.

The second world war was followed by a sustained period of economic expansion, and all of these governments used the opportunity to engage in what was known in Australia as 'postwar reconstruction'. But more, the war had finished on a note of optimism about the possibility of a fair and just society, in which the linking of education and personal advancement had a large part. Governments built more schools and universities not simply because they had the money to do so, but because electorates expected, even demanded, it. Parents wanted an educated future for their children, and there was a growing realisation that all kinds of knowledge were important.

The cold war pushed governments into investing heavily in scientific research that underpinned the military effort, in research that seemed to underlie social and economic issues, and in health and medicine generally. Universities came to be useful vehicles for these national endeavours, although they had not for the most part been involved in research before the war. In every country universities came quickly to be a national concern and to be nationally funded in some way. In Australia, the Commonwealth Government assumed virtually complete control over funding in 1974, and made tuition free to students. In Britain it was already free, and in Canada and the USA national and provincial (state) governments provided extensive public funding.

Expansion was real, and it brought its own set of problems. Australia can provide the examples. Just before the war 1284 professors and lecturers taught just over 14 000 students. By 1954, when I went to UNE, there were 30 000. Ten years later there were 80 000, ten years later again (1974) 120 000, along with 100 000 students in advanced education, about which more in a moment. The mid 1970s were the highpoint in public support, with about $2.3 billion of public money going to the system. [1]

No element of public funding, even defence during a war, can go on rising indefinitely, and almost from the beginning of postwar spending on higher education there were calls to rein the spending in. Successive universities were established less generously, while a new and cheap form of university, the college of advanced education, was set up everywhere to take some of the load off the universities. The latter were now funded for research, but regulatory bodies were created to monitor and fund the system (the Australian Universities Commission, 1959, was the first) and the way in which the research was conducted (the Australian Research Grants Committee, 1964, was the first). Cabinets now worried over how much the system they had set up was costing, and what they were getting for their money.

The end of the boom
The decision by the OPEC countries to dramatically increase oil prices in 1973 is thought to mark the end of the boom, although a few more years passed before it was plain that the boom had indeed ended. A number of consequences for higher education followed. One was that funding per student declined steadily thereafter, even though student enrolments increased. Universities experienced this funding decline as a series of postponements of planned growth, an inability to fill vacancies, and a shortage of discretionary money for travel, library purchases, conferences and the like. Almost everyone thought that the shortage was temporary, and that full power would be resumed quickly.

A second change came with the introduction in 1978 of a genuinely regulatory body, the Commonwealth Tertiary Education Commission, to co-ordinate all forms of post-secondary education and to convey to the system the government's wishes and funding priorities. The AUC had recommended funding to the government and had seen its recommendations generally accepted, especially in the beginning. CTEC was very different - an arm of government, not a device through which the universities set out their needs and interceded with government.

A third change was more subtle and even more powerful. Slowly, the 'nation-building' ethos of the 1960s and 1970s declined as Keynesian orthodoxy seemed not to work: the post-OPEC years were increasingly characterised by 'stagflation', combinations of high unemployment and high inflation which ought not to have coincided and which governments seemed unable to end. In place of Keynesianism came what would be called 'neo-classical economics', and with it notions of competition, individual choice, the need for a thriving private sector, the deregulation of the market, and so on. Governments began to lack the confidence of their predecessors about their own capacity to achieve national outcomes, and to restrict their notions of what governments were intended for. This change was not just a loss of nerve: the increasing globalisation of the world's economy, pushed in large part by technological advances in communication, meant that national governments were less important than they had been, and private corporations, especially trans-national ones, were now more important. In such an intellectual climate, publicly funded universities were distinctly at a disadvantage.

The very recent past
By the late 1980s the higher education system in all of these countries was in a mess. Funding per student had continued to decline, while governments looked for even further economies. In Australia the so-called binary system had lost its founders and any sense of rationale. The advanced education system, unfunded for this purpose, was seen to be doing important research for sponsors, while the universities had never agreed that they should vacate the vocational field to the colleges. Within a few years in the late 1980s and early 1990s, the binary system was swept aside, fees were re-introduced (through a clever system called the Higher Education Contribution Scheme), and a new and competitive higher education system was created with around 40 players, all of whom jostled to become 'the best'.

In this new environment there was a shift of cost from the public sector to the private, with students, their parents and the staff of universities all receiving some share of the burden. This last decade of the 20th century saw at least a doubling of higher education enrolments all over the world, but a comparable increase in public funding in only two countries, Norway and Singapore, both small, rich and far-sighted. Yet there was no real suggestion that any country's higher education system should be rescaled to fit the public money available. By the end of the century education had indeed become a priority for families everywhere. Secondary schools now had high retention rates, because unskilled jobs for young people, or indeed for anyone, were not to be found. Part-time work, usually requiring some skill, was abundant, and that enabled students to acquire some kind of financial support for further education. Newer professions like tourism and public relations and advertising had appeared, and they too established curricula and sought graduates. Universities had become the credentialling authority for much of the workforce, and for all professions.

Private money was becoming a more and more important element of the total cost of the higher education system. By the end of the century the State of California was providing only 23 per cent of the cost of the much-respected University of California system. In Australia, it is probable that more than half of the money spent by universities was earned by them through fees, grants and services of all kinds. In 1975 that proportion had been trivial. The Commonwealth Government no longer accepted true financial responsibility for the higher education system after 1995, when it refused to provide the money for long-awaited salary increases. The shift in perspective can be seen as a shift from supply to demand. In 1975 universities and colleges decided what they would teach, who would come to learn, and how the students would be assessed. By and large, the community accepted this state of affairs. In 2000, much more occurred through the demands of students for one kind of course or another. If there were no students, or not enough students, courses were closed and staff made redundant. A crude 'efficiency' calculus affected universities everywhere.

Another outcome of the recent change, already hinted at, has been a search for identity or distinctiveness on the part of universities. In the binary period (1964-1988) they were a group of like institutions, distinguished from other and lesser institutions. The end of the binary period affected all but five of the original 19 universities, and only a very few of the colleges escaped being amalgamated. The result was a system of mixed institutions that took some time to sort itself out. By the turn of the new century it could be seen as a competitive domain consisting of groups and associations of universities, competitive both internally and externally. The groups included the set of former metropolitan institutes of technology (self-styled 'the Australian Technology Network'), the oldest, largest and most research-intensive universities (the self-styled 'group of eight'), and a loosely associated set of regional universities. Some belonged to no group. All sought to be distinctive, meaning that they did some things that no one else did, or claimed to be the 'best' in doing something that everyone did. No generally accepted standards have yet developed which would allow general agreement on what counts as best or who does it, but there is little doubt that the next decade will see a strong push for such standards. The Commonwealth Government, with the assistance of the Australian Vice-Chancellors Committee, has established a quality monitoring system for higher education, which will result in regular audits of universities. Similar systems exist in the United Kingdom and New Zealand, while established unofficial pecking orders exist in the USA and Canada.

The decline of public funding pushed the universities of all four countries into seeing the world as a source of fee-paying students. The Australian universities were more than decently successful in the Asian region, attracting more than 70 000 students, or about 10 per cent of all their enrolments, from this area of the world. Recruitment went hand in hand with partnership-building, so that by the end of the century Australian universities were involved in teaching 'off-shore', either in the premises of universities with which they were in partnership, or in campuses which bore their own name. Thousands more students were being taught 'online', through Internet-based systems that were rapidly developed in the 1990s. Academic life would now increasingly involve staff in teaching overseas, a change which seemed by and large to be welcomed, though conditions were often other than five-star.

What is to come?
I have little faith in crystal balls, and recognise that some technological changes, like the Internet, can have rapid and unforeseen consequences. But it does seem to me that one can make some sense of the next ten years if we take account of the last one hundred or so. There is, to begin with, no going back to the past. We will continue to live in a world in which virtually all children complete secondary education and most expect to go on to substantial post-secondary education as well. Parents will devote more of their resources to ensuring that their children have the right access to what they see as the right education. They will want more public money spent on education as well. Questions of access and equity will remain important, and will compete with questions of freedom of choice. Australia will become even more open to international influences and trends, in education as in other parts of life. I offer what seem to me to be three likely developments in the next ten years.

The first concerns funding. Since no one is proposing a reduction of the size of the higher education system in Australia, and since a rationalist approach might involve the reduction of even more faculties of arts and science, there will remain terrible pressure on funding. A likely outcome is a combination of public guarantee and private supplementation. A former Labor Minister for this area, Peter Baldwin, proposed a few years ago that all graduates of secondary education who achieved a certain level in the exit examinations should be given an entitlement to five years of post-secondary education at either TAFE or university, at their choice, providing they could find an institution which would admit them. The entitlement would accompany a need on the student's part to undertake a HECS obligation. This was and is a good idea, but it is not enough. Universities need the capacity to charge extra fees themselves if the level of public funding is inadequate, as it is now and seems likely to be in the future. How students are to pay for the 'gap', as we would call it in health care, remains an issue, but some version of the above seems a likely outcome.

The second concerns research and scholarship. The balance of university research has always been much affected by how many staff there are in particular area, which is a function in large part of undergraduate enrolments, and on what the peer review system of American (and British) journals and funding agencies think is an important question. The current mood of government is that Australia needs to concentrate on research likely to solve Australian problems, and add to the social and material well-being of Australians. One outcome, in my opinion, is that there will be something of a divorce between teaching and research in the same academic organisational unit. Many staff will undertake their research somewhere else - in Co-operative Research Centres and other nodes perhaps connected to universities but not part of a department or school. If this occurs it will alter the feel of universities as they have been since the 1960s.

The third concerns the professional training role of universities. Given the great growth in the amount of knowledge that has taken place in the last half-century, it seems highly probable to me that the professions will move slowly and then quickly to desiring graduate entry for the degree program that leads directly to the profession concerned. Medicine has begun to go down this path, and the early signs are that the graduates are a lot better, not just because they are older and more experienced students, but because their choice of profession is sounder, and less based on parental or school pressure, or the outcome of the exit examination from schools. Governments will not fund such a change directly, but they will not stand in the way. A change to a Baldwin-type 'entitlement' is likely to lead to a sounder choice of first profession. I see it being helped along with a mixture of public, private and professional funding that will quickly make graduate entry degrees the preferred form. Such a change will then lead to a range of new undergraduate degrees, not simply to a return to the traditional BA and BSc. Combinations of interesting areas that are usually hard to combine (for example, environmental science, sociology, law) will attract students who want both to be educated and to develop a sense of where their professional interests might lie.

For the rest, I think we can expect even more internationalisation, meaning more foreign students, more Australian students spending some of their time abroad, more teaching off-shore, more links between Australian and foreign universities. I perceive that education is becoming one of the best and most civilised ways in which the world becomes more global. And we can expect universities to experiment with providing even more services to their communities. Some will last, others will prove attractive to non-university competitors who will move in and compete successfully. That whole process will itself continue the change that has been occurring since public funding grew tight. All staff will enter universities knowing that part of their task is to raise money, not simply to spend it.

Finally, universities will remain centres of critique and discontent. They have this role because that is how we teach, and there is an easy spillover from critiques of knowledge into critiques of society. It is probably also true that universities attract people who like critique and who are at least somewhat disenchanted with the society they live in. I thought of Australian universities for a long time as 'secular monasteries', and something of that flavour remains despite the need to raise money and be open to the community. Not only that, it is important that universities continue to train people to be critical. Perhaps they cannot help it, but it is a vital contribution to the health of our society.

Notes
[1] In writing this essay I was aided by the stimulating discussions at the Oxford Round Table in Higher Education, August 1999. The Australian statistics used are taken from The National Report on Australia's Higher Education Sector (DEET, Canberra, 1993). An up-to-date version of this most useful book is most necessary.