Into the mix

The Bradley targets might mean universities can no longer privilege the academically competent at point of application but have to embrace selection of the full mix, says Conor King. Glyn Davis’s much reported claim that at a real low-SES rate in Victoria of only 19 per cent it would be impossible to enrol low-SES students to the government’s 20 per cent target misses the point he was likely trying to make. On the logic of the reported statement, it would be equally impossible to enrol high-SES students above the population benchmark (Australia of 25 per cent or Victoria at presumably somewhere around 30 per cent). Yet most Victorian universities manage to do so, some better than others. What I think Glyn Davis was getting at was that disproportionately more high-SES students apply and they are more likely to bring with them impressive school leaving results. The counter argument by the equity lobby (such as Jennifer Oriel, (CR, 11.05.09)) is that the potential of the low-SES is not shown to its full by the school results such that once admitted, performance is on a par with other students. Hence, we need better ways to find those good students to improve their school outcomes and their route to university. Both arguments are soundly rooted in the glorious university tradition of discrimination on the basis of academic capability. It’s a discrimination I wonder about, and will worry at, for the rest of this article. In combination, the government’s various tertiary targets and compacts mean that it wants to create the situation where pretty much everyone undertakes tertiary level education and training of some sort. Its 40 per cent completion target is about giving a higher education to all those who want entry to university and many who do not yet realise they have that aspiration. The budget backs this up through targeting the two main new funding, elements directly at questions of access. This is clearly so for the low-SES participation money. It is also true for the teaching and learning performance funding which explicitly cites performance of underrepresented students as part of the suite of measures to be used. The government wants broad, evenly based access and is prepared to target funding to achieve that. What it has yet to do is target funds to enrolment of students with lower demonstrated capacity at entry. Combine that with removal of the Learning and Teaching Performance Fund and you can understand, some universities see some financial challenges ahead. So where does that leave institutions explicitly devoted to selection of the academically best? Can such institutions fit within a framework of higher education open to anyone? In a student-choosing university model what should be the powers of student-rejecting institutions? The realpolitik says that the current high demand universities will continue to choose their ideal set and everyone else can fit in elsewhere. The alternative is to say that if some institutions are sought after by more applicants than they have capacity or desire to accept then, as the recipients of Australian taxpayer-funded students, those institutions should take a random set of those applicants. In the case of Melbourne University, it has many of the best minds across a wide range of fields. The argument seems to go that these minds should only engage with the best and brightest of the coming generations, or perhaps the other way round: that the best and brightest of the young require exposure only to the best of the old. It is a version of the research-teaching nexus argument. I can partly come at this – for those who truly are the best and brightest with academic ideals at heart. What I find hard to conceive is that the 30,000-odd graduate and undergraduate students hanging out at Parkville all make the grade as devotees of learning, focused on the monastic pursuit of knowledge. Rather, I am sure that there are many such within the student body but that the majority are there based on solid school results to get a decent education from a useful name brand as the basis for later life and employment. Now that is perfectly reasonable behaviour, but their stronger academic competence does not provide an especially solid rationale for choosing them ahead of other competent applicants. Melbourne has many times the VTAC applicants it needs to fill the places it wishes to allocate. My guess is that it could almost fill its first year VTAC intake from low-SES applicants if it so wished, albeit tumbling down the TER ranks a bit. Or to go with the argument above, it could select the truly great minds (probably still high-SES weighted) and then fill the rest from low-SES, producing an overall level of low-SES a tad higher than 19 per cent. I do not think it should do either, since both would create an inverted discriminatory mix, but it is valid to ask on what basis it and other student-rejecting universities will make their selection decisions over the coming decade. Perhaps we are reaching the point when we can no longer privilege the academically competent at point of application but have to embrace selection – and effective teaching – of the full mix. Conor King is a principal consultant with PhillipsKPA. See letters to editor, page 16.