A rule that required Australia’s universities to conduct “world standard” research in at least half of the fields they teach has been discarded before it was ever properly put into practice, leading to mixed opinions.
The “research breadth” rule, introduced in 2021 following a review of Australia’s provider category standards, could have resulted in universities losing their title if they did not meet the required benchmarks.
It replaced an earlier rule that universities must deliver postgraduate research degrees in three broad fields, with no specifications around quality. Reviewer Peter Coaldrake said this standard was too easy to satisfy and risked devaluing universities as institutions.
But the new rule is currently unenforceable because the government lacks a means for judging research quality, and has never found another way to judge whether something is “world standard”. Excellence in Research for Australia, the national research assessment exercise, was last conducted eight years ago and was officially jettisoned in 2024.
That did not stop the panellists overseeing the biggest research review in years, the Strategic Examination of Research and Development (Serd), from recommending the rule’s removal. “[It] has limited the ability of universities to focus on areas of comparative strength and reduced the ability to generate scale,” Serd’s final report says. “This has led to a broadly homogenous approach, resulting in too many broad-based universities.”
