From the Vice Chancellor
Two
issues in education have serious consequences for all Australians. The
first is growing inequality in access to quality schooling and the
second is the decline since 1997 in public outlays on our universities.
Since the late 1980s we have positioned education as a cost rather than an investment in our shared future. Governments – state and federal, Labor and Liberal – have been shifting the costs of education to the individual for more than 20 years. The user pays – and he or she who can afford it – buys a better education.
Inevitably this means that schools in prosperous areas with affluent parents are much better resourced than those in poor areas. Children of prosperous parents find it easy to move through the education system while those from poorer backgrounds struggle to succeed in schools which are poorly resourced. Fewer talented poor children succeed in school and those who do then face a tertiary education system being reshaped on the user pays model.
But perhaps this is an international trend? It isn’t.
Of great concern for Australians, citizens of a country which has prided itself on its egalitarian approach, is the recent OECD finding that Australian students’ social backgrounds – the circumstances into which they are born and something none of us can control – are more strongly related to achievement at 15 than in very comparable countries like Canada and Finland but also in a developing nation like Korea! I want to stress this. Social background is disproportionately influential in determining educational achievement in Australia.
In South Australia the differences in outcomes for children living in different suburbs are enormous:
• a child from a well to do area is much more likely to remain in school and complete year 12 than a child from a poorer area. For example, a child in a school in the local government area of Playford has about half the chance of finishing high school as a child from Walkerville or Burnside;
• students in Adelaide’s affluent eastern suburbs are seven times more likely to attend university than those from the outer northern suburbs.
Should we care? We should. Increasingly, completion of 12 years of school matters and graduates have the best employment outcomes. Indeed, it has been estimated that graduates earn $500,000 more in lifetime earnings than non-graduates. Going to uni still matters.
But what is happening to our universities, generally seen as the base of an effective knowledge economy?
Public investment in higher education in Australia at 0.8 per cent of GDP has fallen under the OECD average of 1.1 per cent of GDP, and well below the US and a number of Western European knowledge economies.
The most recent OECD report on education points out that Australia represents a special case. In other OECD countries public investment in higher education has increased, even when private spending has increased. But here, as private funds (largely student fees) have increased, public funding has dropped in real terms. Between 1995 and 2002, the OECD identifies a decline in public spending on tertiary education of eight per cent in total and about 30 per cent on a per student basis. This is despite political assertions of the importance of a "knowledge economy" and "the development of a clever country".
My message is simple: as citizens, we should all pay attention to education. It’s not just a matter of whether our own children do well. There is evidence from recent work by the OECD that Australia is not doing as well as other countries in capitalising on the talent we have in our society or in investing in universities - a major part of the supporting infrastructure of that knowledge economy our governments tell us is so important. On that point, at least, they are right!