Your AM Headlines + Why Universities Became Big Business

0:00Your listing too. I'm on my media podcast. Hello, I'm Charlotte Mortlock with the latest from the Quicking Newsroom. Did you know the average salary for an Australian university vice-chancellor is over $1 million? That's almost double the Prime Minister's salary. Today, we're looking at Australian universities. And it's a particularly timely topic because one nation just released their plans to slash student visas. We're going to unpack how and why universities went from being educational institutions with a public service mindset to big business running on a commercial model. But first, here are your headlines for Wednesday, September 16th. Good morning, I'm Georgie Page. Snowtown serial killer James Valsakis will be released from prison after a review upheld a South Australian parole board decision.

1:03Valsakis, who was 18 at the time, has spent more than 26 years behind bars for the role he played in the Snowtown killings, known as the bodies in the barrel case, where 12 people were murdered in South Australia between 1992 and 1999. Valsakis pleaded guilty to four of the murders and in 2022 was sentenced to life imprisonment with a minimum term of 26 years. The South Australian attorney general said he would review what further steps could be taken to keep Valsakis behind bars, but noted the decision had already been thoroughly considered with multiple review processes. Karl Stefernovic has denied conduct opposing his business partner after their relationship soured and he has agreed to buy her out of their controversial podcast company. Stefernovic and the joint owner of podcast company 123 podcast, Keshe and Ibrahim, have irreconcilable differences and new South Wales Supreme Court hearing was told on Tuesday.

2:04Ibrahim filed an urgent application for the court to defer a meeting scheduled for Friday, fearing she would be removed as a director of the company. Both she and Stefernovic own 45% stakes in the company that oversees the Karl Stefernovic show. The matter has been set for a hearing on October 13. A form of play school presenter turned Labour staffer has been sacked for Vals, Sexist and Racist Tweets. Actor Ries Maldon was fired from his taxpayer funder job with first term Tasmanian Labour Senator Richard Dowling on Tuesday. After historic Tweets resurfaced, including a 2014 post using racist and homophobic slurs, and a more recent post likening Indigenous Senator just into price to a Nazi collaborator. Maldon is also known for co-authoring a children's book in 2010 with Kevin Rudd and start on TV shows including The Secret Life of Us. And it might be time to start prepping for those summer holidays because the competition watchdog says

3:04airfares are about to climb heading into Christmas and New Year. The regulators latest quarterly report found capacity cuts, strong demand and the rising fuel cost linked to the Middle Eastern conflict are pushing fares on major domestic routes. The watchdog's chair said planned capacity cuts, resilient demand and high load factors all point to further rises. Average domestic airfares rose 3.5% in May and 4% in June, while seat capacity fell 2.3% over the same period, the lowest in four years. Passing your numbers held steady so airlines filled more than 80% of seats. Coming up, a young boy with an ambitious target greeted with a hug and life-changing news from the PM, plus why unies have become so focused on increasing student numbers. A 12-year-old boy walked 500 kilometres from Warren in Central West New South Wales to Canberra

4:07to raise money for children's charity Little Wings, which provides medical support for sick children and their families. Dusty Langby got to know Little Wings as his younger brother had to be flown to Sydney to see specialists. He raised $530,000, short of his ambitious $1 million target, but upon arriving in Canberra, he was greeted with a hug from the PM and a pledge to match every dollar Dusty had raised, along with announcing a two-year extension on a funding agreement to Little Wings. And while Taylor Swift delighted fans at the Emmys by appearing in a pre-taped sketch with host Mariska Harkety, her reason for not attending the ceremony has been revealed. Instead of walking the Emmys red carpet, Taylor was spotted watching her new husband Travis Kelsey in the Chief's NFL season opener, alongside an unexpected seatmate in Tom Cruise. The pair were caught deep in conversation, high-fiving and hugging as Kansas City ran away with the win.

5:10Sometimes the most well-intentioned policies create the messiest problems. Back in 1989, the Australian government capped undergraduate places at universities. The deal was the government paid a subsidy per place and students topped up the rest via Hex. Basically, Canberra controlled how many people got to go to university. Good for the budget? Not so good if you were one of the students who missed out on a bachelor's degree, simply because there weren't enough spots. So, in 2009, the Rudd government called time on that model. They announced the uncapping of undergraduate places in the federal budget. Once it kicked in, universities could enroll as many eligible students as they wanted. Sounds good, right? Except it created a whole new problem. Julie Hare is a specialist journalist who's been covering Australian universities for 25 years. Early to mid 2010s when we had something called the Demand Driven System.

6:12There was a lot of money sloshing into the system. There was no caps on domestic students. Anyone who wanted to go to university could pretty well get a place. That included people with incredibly low AITRs. AITRs under 50, AITRs as low as 30, AITRs as low as 29. Universities basically exploited a lot of students that shouldn't have gone to university who would have been better off either doing a pathway or a job. I'm not trying to say, you know, universities for some people are not for others. But university is definitely not for some people. And a lot of those kids during the demand driven era were from poor backgrounds, not particularly well-educated. Didn't have the literacy and numeracy to cope with a university degree, and either dropped out or left with a degree that wasn't worth much. Which means they end up with debt, a lot of debt. By the mid-2010s, the uncapped demand driven system had also seen government spending ballooned by 50%. So the caps came back on. And then just international students, universities really woke up,

7:15especially the big research universities. They really woke up to the rivers of gold that international students brought. And so that kind of, I think that really fundamentally shifted the business model of universities. So they haven't been government funded for a long time. But the amount of government funding's been shrinking. It's a very tricky thing because governments don't want to fund the whole funding package for domestic students. So they really encouraged universities to bring in international students. Universities became financially dependent on international students. Then, COVID hit, and international student numbers fell off a cliff. Basically, universities have been playing whack-a-mull for decades. Resolving one problem creates another. Enter one nation's announcement this week. Paul Enhancens' party wants to slash international student places from 590,000 to 350,000 and cut the number of graduates staying in Australia after their studies from 270,000 to just 40,000.

8:19Experts say the move would see universities collapse, campuses close, and the country left poorer and less skilled. As the industry grapples with constant policy whiplash, it's also grappling with something bigger, its own identity. What do people actually want from a university degree? They don't get the same degrees as we used to have when I was younger when universities were much smaller. I think our universities are far too big, much too big, and by international standards absolutely enormous. How anyone can get a good, personalized education out of that and get to know your lecturers and even get to know your fellow students. I'm obsessed with this that people go to universities doing an entire undergraduate degree and don't make a friend along the way. Universities are not supposed to be like that. Universities meant to be something else. It's meant to be a right of passage. Where you learn and you learn how to learn and you learn how to think about big ideas, even if you get the ideas wrong, you just learn to think. And I think that's really getting lost. And they're in a lot of debt.

9:20Over 40% of universities have spent most of the past five years in deficit, and the average funding per domestic student has fallen 6% in real terms since 2017, despite enrollment growth. The business model is problematical in that the government wants a lot of students to be educated, but isn't prepared to fund the full lot, which means universities have to reach out to. They've been very entrepreneurial. Australian universities have been incredibly entrepreneurial over the last 30 years or so. It was Australia that actually pioneered the international student market. We did that long before other countries. But the tension between what the government wants from universities and Jason Claire, the Education Minister will say the primary purpose of an Australian university is to educate Australian students. But they can't afford to do it on the money that they give. I mean, they literally aren't given enough funding per student to educate those students. Academic jobs data shows the average salary of a vice chancellor is over $1 million in Australia.

10:23Julie acknowledges the role is genuinely difficult. These people are running organisations with tens of thousands of students and enormous complexity. And yet... But I don't think the big salaries have actually returned in terms of expertise. I don't think there's been a similar uplift in ability in running these organisations. Some critics say there's too much emphasis on degrees altogether that some professions shouldn't require years at uni. Most careers do need university degrees these days, so there's been a professionalisation of jobs that previously didn't need them, such as nursing, teaching, journalism, a whole lot of degrees. Nursing for instance really wanted to professionalise nursing because with improved status became an improved pay in those sorts of things. And these are very feminine ice careers. Women now go to universities at much greater rates than men, and they do that for reasons other female jobs tend to require university degrees.

11:23It's a good thing or it's a bad thing, I don't really know. Would love to know what you think. Did you go to uni? Did you like it? And have you ended up using your degree in your career? Let us know via our DMs or the quickie at mummemeer.com.au Thanks for listening today. For more news like this, please click follow on the quickie wherever you get your podcasts, and please leave a rating and review. Mummemeer acknowledges the traditional owners of the land on which we have recorded this podcast.