Proposed fines for “over-enrolment” risk further handicapping the universities most disadvantaged in the “Hunger Games” system the Australian government wants to replace, experts have warned.
Submissions to a Senate committee say automatic penalties for exceeding student quotas will inflict most harm not on the large city universities, where the government wants to restrict growth, but on struggling institutions where demand is more volatile.
The National Tertiary Education Union (NTEU) said universities could exceed their quotas “without a single additional admission” if current students decided to take on more subjects when local job opportunities dried up. “Study-intensity decisions respond to labour market conditions and are outside a provider’s control,” the union stressed, in a submission to the Senate’s Education and Employment Committee.
The NTEU said it supported a crackdown on over-enrolments because they had fuelled an expansion of class sizes and casualisation of the teaching workforce. But penalties should be discretionary and applied only after “mandatory consideration of matters outside the provider’s control”, it insisted.
The committee is inquiring into the “Open the Doors of Opportunity” bill, which legislates a system of “managed growth” supervised by the Australian Tertiary Education Commission. It limits admissions in excess of universities’ domestic quotas to a 5 per cent “buffer”, up to an overall cap of 750.
