Tertiary education policy for the digital age

In Australia, the education landscape has changed dramatically in the last few decades. In particular, higher student numbers have devalued bachelor’s degrees, and technology has rendered old teaching methods almost redundant. It begs the question: are we getting good value for the $40B+ in taxpayer dollars being spent on tertiary education every year? I would argue that we are not. There have never been more students attending university, and yet ironically university degrees have never been less relevant. This fact is well illustrated by the highly paid workers of the tech industry. Many of them are stereotypical college dropouts. It is well known in that industry that anyone can learn to code or become a product manager or designer through completing free online courses, and in many cases this training is more highly regarded than a degree because it’s current. Recognising this, top employers such as Google, Apple and IBM have dropped university degree requirements for almost all of their roles.

Ask most people with university degrees how much of their course content they use in their job, and the answer is usually the same: barely any. This is the case even for highly technical professions like my own, civil engineering. Graduates typically learn more in their first few months on the job than they do in their entire degree. I estimate that in my work I use at most 4 out of the 40 units I studied in my 5 year, $100,000+ degree. That’s not great value, either for myself or the taxpayer.

On the flip side, it’s clear that year 12 is not a sufficient level of education for skilled work in modern Australia. As such, it is a matter of equity that all Australians have access to affordable and relevant tertiary education. The problem with our current system is that what it delivers is in most cases neither affordable nor relevant.

I’m proposing three policy ideas that will help to make education more affordable and relevant, with better outcomes for students and employers.

Policy Idea #1 – Make university free for online courses

Free university has long been a catch-cry of the political left, and is a worthy aspiration, but is mostly seen as unaffordable in Australia. This need not be the case, because online learning gives us the opportunity to drastically reduce the cost of a university degree, and with improvements in digital technologies, these courses can be just as engaging, if not more so than on-campus ones.

Our universities are stuck in an antiquated paradigm that has barely changed in 200 years. The idea of having academics with no teaching qualifications stand up and give the same set of lectures year on year made sense in a time before computers and the internet but is now almost completely redundant.

Rather than pay academics across the country billions of dollars to deliver the same content again and again, those funds can be invested in developing highly engaging online lessons, delivered by the best teachers, incorporating animations and interactive content. These lessons cost the same to deliver to 10 students or 10,000.

It’s now possible for anyone, anywhere in the world with access to the internet to learn from the very best teachers on any given subject. Even in courses with a lot of face-to-face discussion and tutorials, these can be easily replicated online without the need for expensive physical classrooms.

Although current online course fees are similar to on-campus fees, this is due to temporary factors such as the high cost of setting up online courses, higher marketing costs and the fact that most universities still need to maintain physical buildings to service their on-campus students.

The key advantage for online compared with on-campus learning is that after a course is created, it costs much less to offer it to more students. As enrolments increase, cost per-student decreases. Currently only about 14% of students study online. This cost per student would be massively reduced were this to be increased to 50% or even 75%, and it’s likely that this massive cost reduction compared to in-person learning could fund the dream of free university education, with no additional cost to government.

There are a number of ways this could be achieved: the government could offer a bulk-billing incentive style scheme, with extra funding for universities that offer ‘bulk-billed’ online courses. The government could also use its massive purchasing power to procure degrees in bulk, for example putting out a tender for 10,000 science degrees to be delivered online.

Policy Idea #2 – Increase funding for micro-credential style courses, and decrease funded places for bachelor’s degrees

Micro-credentials are up-to-date, efficient, job-focused short courses that provide specific skills that are valued by employers. They offer vastly better value for the money and time invested by students and the taxpayer. Students can mix and match micro-credentials to build up an attractive toolkit of skills specifically catering to the career they are seeking.

Full bachelor’s degrees still have their place, especially as a foundation for further study and a career in research, however for most students who just want their ‘piece of paper’ to enter the workforce, they are an inefficient and costly option compared with micro-credentials.

Currently, universities are strongly incentivised to enrol students in bachelor’s degrees and are therefore equally disincentivised to offer less lucrative micro-credentials to undergraduates. Instead, micro-credentials are mainly targeted at employers as a means of upskilling their workforce.

By reducing the number of Bachelor’s degree places, micro-credentials would become the default university option for a cohort of students who are unlikely to pursue postgraduate study anyway. To capture this cohort, universities would be forced to develop compelling micro-credential offerings geared towards in-demand undergraduate skills.

One major problem with micro-credentials is that at present, they can’t replace bachelor’s degrees as a proxy for candidate suitability for entry-level roles. For this reason, this policy must also be paired with a policy promoting work placements and internships.

Policy Idea #3 – Incentivise internships, by making government funding of some university places contingent on there being a corresponding internship place

Employers fall back on university achievement as a differentiator for hiring candidates because typically they have no other way of judging the suitability of a candidate with no relevant job history. Because of this, candidates for entry level roles need to obtain a degree just to be considered.

Internships and work placements disrupt this paradigm because they replace the need for a degree in answering the fundamental question: “Can this person do the job well?”.

By making university funding contingent on internship opportunities, universities will be laser focussed on forming partnerships with employers that can provide these internships, and ensuring their courses align with the needs of these employers.

Encouraging internships is an essential step in challenging the conventional wisdom that a degree from a good university is the only way to get an entry level job.