How can university leaders promote innovation and growth in a complex multicultural settings while addressing social change with evolving forms of cultural, social and emotional intelligence?

Professor Ghassan Aouad is a Muslim leader and chancellor of Abu Dhabi University in the United Arab Emirates. Abu Dhabi University is one of the UAE's leading universities, with over 7000 students of 100 different nationalities.

He talks to HEDx's Martin Betts and Professor Christy Collis of the Higher Education Research and Development Society of Australasia (HERDSA) about his leadership style.

Prior to taking up his role at Abu Dhabi University, Professor Ghassan Aouad worked at universities across the UK and was president of the University of Wollongong's Dubai campus.

Professor Christy Collis is a counselling researcher and higher education specialist. She is the Queensland treasurer of HERDSA, Australasia's peak professional association for higher education research, and Provost at the Australian Institute of Professional Counsellors.

In this podcast chief executive of Year13 Will Stubley joins Melbourne Business School chief learning innovation officer Dr Nora Koslowski and Martin Betts in the HEDx studio to discuss alternative options to the traditional Year 12 to university pipeline.

With the skills the Australian economy needs changing, how can universities keep up to deliver education that is relevant to those changes?

For instance, assuming all bright young students want to study at university might be outdated, and could be one of the reasons why domestic enrolments are declining.

TAFE and vocational education are being mentioned more often in strategies that aim to improve the skills crisis, and their role will likely be discussed in the Universities Accord Final Report.

The vice-chancellor of Western Sydney University, Barney Glover, will begin his new role as the Commissioner of Jobs and Skills Australia in April (whilst remaining VC of WSU).

His appointment has been criticised by some who question how relevant universities are to the future skills agenda.

The extent of the skills growth needed can't be delivered by universities alone, we discuss how the traditional 'Year 13' expectation might be changing for good.

Will Stubley is the chief executive and co-founder of Year13, a wellbeing and career advice website for young adults. The ed-tech company, that aims to improve the school-to-work transition, was founded after one of Mr Stubley's friends committed suicide due to pressures of finishing school. This tragic event motivated him and his co-founders to grow a business that now helps millions of young Australians plan their careers in a way that best suits them.

Dr Nora Koslowski is the chief learning innovation officer at Melbourne Business School. She is in charge of working with ed-tech startups and industry to power online programs and learning innovations at the school.

There is a widely held view among higher education leaders and commentators that the current UK university funding system might lead to a crisis. More than 50 per cent of UK universities are operating in the negative with no prospect of funding levels improving. The hope that increased international student fee income will save the day is diminishing. Current policy changes are coinciding with these declining international student numbers. This scenario is replicated with less intensity in other countries, and the fate of global universities is painted as bleak.

The Japanese word for "crisis", Kiki, when written in Kanji (危機) is a combination of the characters for "dangerous" (危) and "opportunity" (機). It is possible to experience both at the same time and Japanese leaders are admired for recognising the need to respond to danger whilst striving to boldly embrace opportunity.

Sensitivity, ethics and wisdom serve leaders well in both aspects of 'Kiki leadership' when responding to challenges. Last year's emergence of generative AI caused some leaders, institutions, and regulators to see crisis and only respond with a defensive mindset.

It was eye-opening to learn that Arizona State University recently responded by announcing a strategic partnership with OpenAI, the first university to do so. This partnership liberates its staff and students to embrace, experiment and innovate with the technology, grasping opportunity. Loughborough University also made news for using AI avatars to replicate lectures from global experts and subject leaders from the design world. In both instances, a rational approach to exploring opportunity among crisis requires caution and determination in equal measure, with consideration of ethics and viability to be balanced with boldness and experimentation.

Higher education leaders are typically experts in their field of discipline, which they then apply to their wider institution. They lead diverse universities with diverse histories, seeking the opportunity to create distinct missions. Loughborough has a history of being research and sports focused, but its new strategy looks at creating a better future through partnerships with technology providers and ed-tech companies.

There are many opportunities for UK and other global universities to follow in Arizona State's footsteps. There is a strong ed-tech sector well placed to support opportunistic approaches. Forging strong partnerships with ed-tech companies can be one route to differentiation that is not well measured by rankings, but still an opportunity in current circumstances.

All universities would do well, as Loughborough has, to see itself as more than its rank. There is demonstrable evidence that rankings can hinder a university's mission and inhibit bold leadership.

Loughborough University started in a position of distinct subject specialisation, and its partnership approaches are now led by an AI computer scientist with a strong research pedigree. Will a vice-chancellor's role eventually be replaced by AI? It appears unlikely in our lifetimes, because of the role's requirement of social interaction, ethical judgement and the ability to decipher big, complex university issues.

We may need more leaders that can practice the art of Kiki. It would be easy at the start of 2024 for leaders to be overcome by a sense of crisis and to be blinded from seeing opportunity. Is the quintessential start-of-year 'all-staff email' a message that will cause a fragile culture to spiral downwards? A response that stirs an ethical and rational approach to seeking opportunity is most needed at this time.

This is a time when we least need our vice-chancellors and presidents to be formulaic and replaceable by AI. We need to see boldness and distinction that will differentiate one university from another. I reflect on these matters in this HEDx episode with Andrea Burrows and Professor Nick Jennings.

Andrea Burrows is the UK managing director for Online Education Services (OES), an education body that partners with universities across Britain and Europe to create 'student-centric' online learning. She has a professional leadership background in marketing, advertising and digital transformation across higher education, finance and professional service sectors.

Professor Nick Jennings is vice-chancellor of Loughborough University with a research background in AI and cybersecurity. He researched AI systems that use both human and software aspects to be robust and useful in large scale environments. Loughborough is a UK university renowned for its sports and research capabilities.

That rough list turned into a honed one – in the form of a post on her blog. In 'Are you prepared for the problems of success?', she outlines her success bugbears. Among them are 'professional jealousy' and 'everyone wants a piece of you'. "These problems annoy me or they make me – sometimes – sad," she said.

Are you rolling your eyes? Mewburn expected some people to react this way. Her friend jokingly referred to her list as 'high class problems'. "They sound very whiny," she acknowledged. Indeed, earlier this year, Campus Review interviewed her about woeful academic job prospects for PhD graduates; in essence, the failure of many. 

Yet she persisted in penning her post for a reason: in addition to offering commiseration to the successful, it also, less obviously, offers lessons for those who are still striving. "I'm actually providing a valuable service by being a bit of a mess in public."

In unprecedented ways, study destination nations around the globe are addressing the community impact of tuition-fee-paying international students. Whether it be Theresa May’s policy of counting all overseas students as migrants, Donald Trump discouraging students to come to the US, or New Zealand prime minister Jacinda Ardern potentially breaking the nexus between education and onshore migration, the free movement of students hoping to study abroad is under threat.

With the highest per capita ratio of fee-paying international students anywhere in the world, Australia could soon find that it is not immune from similar policy pressures.

A number of commentators have suggested that Australia is enjoying a ‘golden age’ in international education. They point to compound annual enrolment growth of above 10 per cent, an increasing diversity of student source countries, and growing interest from postgraduate students as indicative of good things to come. However, close scrutiny of recent political party policy announcements, government reviews and even parliamentary debate indicates that international education stakeholders may need to be alert to unanticipated pushback against overseas students.

Jobs and work rights

A few weeks ago in federal parliament, Pauline Hanson’s One Nation Party moved an urgency motion in the Senate. The motion called on the federal government to ascertain how many local jobs were being lost to young Australians because of international students’ work rights.

On the one hand, it was refreshing to see that an unlikely alliance of Greens, Labor and Liberal senators all rose to their feet and lambasted their One Nation colleagues for their lack of evidence and racist overtones.

On the other hand, it could not be ignored that Hanson and her Senate team were playing to perceptions in certain elements of the community that overseas students are ‘taking the jobs of our children’.

Such rhetoric all too often overlooks the fact that many Australian-born students refuse to undertake jobs such as commercial cleaning, taxi driving and working in 24-hour service stations – jobs that overseas students rely on (and willingly sign up for) to help fund their studies.

Outside the hothouse of parliamentary debate, there has been a quieter but potentially higher impact government initiative underway. Earlier this year, in response to concerns regarding employer exploitation of overseas students, Employment Minister Michaelia Cash announced a Migrant Worker Taskforce.

Chaired by Professor Allan Fels, this group has been examining whether the current 20 hours per week part-time work entitlement for international students should be radically changed. While no one can deny that the exploitative behaviour of employers has to be curtailed, the ability of overseas students to work in our economy remains a key drawcard, particularly for students from relatively new markets such as Latin America.

Quite apart from the need to supplement their living expenses, students studying abroad are increasingly attracted to countries that can provide them with meaningful course-related employability opportunities. It is difficult enough already for Australia to compete with study destination nations such as Canada that have strong internship initiatives readily available to their international student cohort.

Infrastructure constraints

At federal, state and local levels, politicians from all sides are beginning to raise concerns around big city infrastructure constraints. Whether it be overcrowded trains and buses, arterial roads clogged with traffic, or increasingly expensive residential property, some commentators are pointing to growing numbers of overseas students as part of the cause.

Yet such critics too often choose to overlook the fact that 130,000 Australians are now employed in the international education sector; that our tourism, entertainment and construction industries are key beneficiaries of fee‑paying overseas students; and that our cities are becoming globalised innovative hubs as a direct result of the world’s brightest young minds choosing to study here.

Many would argue that our politicians would do far better to focus on effective policies to enhance our urban infrastructure and positively encourage decentralisation initiatives rather than resorting to a blame game and knee jerk reactions that ‘Sydney is full’ or ‘Melbourne’s population growth is unsustainable’.

The migration barrier

As the recent citizenship fracas among our federal parliamentarians has shown, Australia is a nation built on migrants. More often than not our migration programs have focused on providing citizenship opportunities to highly skilled workers desperately needed for both old and new industries.

A large accounting firm recently informed the author that it has 120 data analyst positions which it is finding all but impossible to fill with Australian-born graduates. The firm sees international students as able to meet some of their skill shortage requirements.

Unfortunately, recent policy responses from our major political parties are only serving to discourage migration pathways for the world’s best and brightest. Whether it be the Turnbull government’s recent radical dismantling of the 457 skilled worker visas, Bill Shorten’s favouring of ‘union jobs’ over ‘guest workers’, or the Greens party argument that Australia’s population is already environmentally unsustainable, such pronouncements serve only to discourage international students from choosing to study here.

Any one of the above issues, if not handled well, could negatively impact upon Australia’s ability to reach its projection of one million tuition-fee-paying international students by 2025.
Throw into this mix increasing concerns around alleged overseas political interference on our campuses, and our sector’s ‘golden age’ could well come unstuck. It is no coincidence, therefore, that one of the key priorities of the federal government’s National Council for International Education is to find ways to better engage with the community about the benefits that international students bring to Australia both economically and socially.

To this end, the International Education Association of Australia (IEAA) is undertaking a comprehensive research project to better ascertain the community’s understanding of our sector, counter misconceptions and partner with industries who employ international students to encourage them to be more vocal champions. We can only hope that projects such as this will counter the type of pushback that is occurring in other study destination countries.

Phil Honeywood is chief executive of the IEAA.

Helen Razer has called these times an Age of False Enlightenment, in which our leaders regularly make claims to know what they do not know. We might dub it the Era of Half Right Answers too, given that so many official pronouncements have a quality of truthiness, a playing for plausibility and traction rather than accuracy and deeper insight.

Current higher education policy exemplifies this trend. The Australian Productivity Commission recently reported on the “tensions between universities’ research and teaching functions”.

“Many university staff are more interested in, and rewarded for, conducting research, due to established cultures and the importance of international research rankings,” it said. “Teaching therefore plays second fiddle to research, with consequences for student satisfaction, teaching quality, and graduate outcomes.”

The Productivity Commission’s half-right solution is to link university funding to graduate employment – the sort of brutish, un-nuanced neo-liberalism for which it is renowned. Such measures are at once reductive and ineffective. Reductive because, though unfashionable to say so, education is about more than training students for employment; ineffective because it is unclear what jobs will be available to them anyway, and thus what universities should train them for.

Higher education institutions must increasingly prepare students for portfolio careers in a complex AI world. This involves a great deal more than the short-term application of their skills in the zero-hours contract, gig economy.

If universities are hyper-focused on research, the Productivity Commission has missed the root of the problem. It has failed to see that the issue for students and researchers alike is the way in which universities pursue their research agenda. It has confused the obsession with research and the obsession with research metrics.

The first point to observe is that the problem has been a long time in the making. In 2015, the Grattan Institute provided clear evidence that teaching revenues support university research to the tune of around 20 per cent. Shortly afterwards, Universities Australia’s Keep It Clever campaign confirmed it. While this raises questions about how students benefit from the research agenda, what is more concerning is the way that agenda is measured and rewarded.

University research is funded mainly by the Commonwealth government, through yearly research block grants. The grant is calculated on the percentage of competitive research funding a particular university has secured in the previous year, plus its number of research higher degree completions.

The second point to make is that research income – grant money towards specific projects – is an input into research, not an output. This seems stunningly obvious. Yet universities defend the situation saying that, despite its lack of logic, this is the system they are in and they cannot afford to ignore it.

The question then becomes: How should institutions dedicated to extending human knowledge through excellent research respond to a skewed policy framework?

The typical reaction is to pass the requirement to earn research income onto individual academics. This creates a distraction for those working in the humanities or pure sciences who do not need much by way of external project funding, and so do not need to pursue it. Forty per cent of their time and salary is earmarked for research, and these are the resources they really need.

While it is bad enough to measure research in terms of an input, such muddling also undercuts the drive for excellence, turning the pursuit of truth into the pursuit of money. Baldly put, the hyper‑focus on research metrics leads universities to lose sight of what research actually is.

To understand the invidious nature of the problem, consider its effects on the main government tool for promoting research quality: the Australian Research Council’s (ARC) Excellence in

Research Australia (ERA) exercise. In peer review disciplines, ERA has the great advantage that the research universities actually conduct – the books, articles and reports actually written in specific disciplines – is assessed by national and international experts. Yet even here research income (remember, an input into research) is a factor in determining the final grade achieved. The reason given is that research income is a proxy for research quality.

This too is patently absurd. What kind of signal is sent by crediting researchers at one university over researchers at another simply because they have been funded? In other areas of life, people are rewarded for what they do, not what they are paid to do. Judgements about quality are made when there are outcomes of quality to judge.

Cometh the hour, cometh the spieler. This is the modern scholar the current system promotes: a researcher‑cum‑entrepreneur who has an ear to the ground for changes in government priorities and is willing to turn a hand to whatever new project is strategically appealing. They know which prestigious international professor is willing to come Down Under for a spot of research and put their name to an ARC grant at 0.2 for three years.

Will they spend that much time on it? It doesn’t matter. They say they will, and that is what gets rewarded.

So it goes on. For a while things look good. The grants pile up and the money rolls in. But the reality cannot be avoided forever. Eventually someone asks: What is your research agenda? What, in terms of scholarship, have you have achieved? And that agenda is revealed for what it is: a jumble of opportunistic applications and disconnected results. An empire of scraps.

Research leaders in our universities need to understand this path for what it is: a temptation to short-term gain at the expense of the long-term mission and international standing of the universities they serve.

And the Productivity Commission should not confuse two different things: a hyper‑focus on competitive research metrics, with the important public commitment, via individual researchers and their institutions, to research itself.

Associate Professor Craig Taylor is director of the Flinders Institute for Research in the Humanities. Professor Julian Meyrick is strategic professor of creative arts at the College of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences, Flinders University.

Signed by almost 200 UN climate body-member countries in 2015, only Syria and Nicaragua refused to join the deal. It committed nations to attempt to limit global warming to 1.5° Celsius above pre-industrial levels. Currently, the world temperature is 1.05° Celsius above the pre-industrial average.

Though withdrawal can only be effected in four years, Trump's declaration sends a clear, isolationist message: his administration isn't bothered by climate change.

This not only bucks global trends, but US ones: several states, like California, have voiced resistance to his decision and signaled their intention to continue to reduce carbon emissions and invest in renewable energy sources.

Academics, too, have joined the global chorus of ire. The following are a sampling of reactions from our home soil:

The world has spent the last 2.5 decades looking for climate leadership. Every time it has backfired. Both the Kyoto Protocol and Paris Agreement were watered down for the US. This is now a chance to forget about the US and for a critical mass of leaders to move ahead without them.

The world should now look for the response of the EU and China.

– Dr Luke Kemp, researcher in international climate change negotiations and lecturer at ANU.

Trump’s decision to withdraw from the Paris accord is not based on scientific evidence or on the economic interests of the US, but on the political imperatives of the culture wars being waged by the political right in the US, imperatives that led to his nomination and election.

– Professor John Quiggin, Australian laureate fellow in economics at the University of Queensland.

Regardless of whether the US is part or not of the Paris Agreement, its current downward emissions trajectory is unlikely to change significantly, given it is driven by the economics of falling prices and abundance of natural gas and renewable energies.

– Pep Canadell, CSIRO research scientist and executive director of the Global Carbon Project.

President Trump, in withdrawing the US from the 2015 Paris accord, is effectively signing the death warrant for millions who will suffer and die from the effects of additional climate change attributable to this reckless decision.

– Dr Liz Hanna, president of the Climate & Health Alliance and an honorary senior fellow at the Climate Change Institute, Australian National University.

The US is responsible for more than a quarter of the carbon dioxide that has been added to our atmosphere since the Industrial Revolution. Trump’s announcement shirks the responsibility that the US holds in the climate problems that now face the entire world.

– Dr Nerilie Abram, Research School of Earth Sciences at The Australian National University.

The biggest damage was done not to global climate action, but to America’s influence and standing in the world community.

– Associate professor Frank Jotzo, director of the Centre for Climate Economics & Policy at the Australian National University's Crawford School of Public Policy.

Trump is a b-grade disaster movie. The Paris accord will survive him because it has to. As a species it took us 177 years to become so economically carbonised that our lives literally depend upon it today. But as the countdown continues, we now have only 33 years to scale back to zero.

– Dr Paul Read, senior research fellow at the Monash Sustainability Institute at Monash University, and a co-director of the National Centre for Research in Bushfire and Arson.

President Trump’s announcement overnight that he will withdraw the US from the Paris climate agreement comes as no surprise. After all this is the man who claimed that climate change was a hoax created by the Chinese.

– Dr Christian Downie, research fellow and the higher degree research convenor in the School of Regulation and Global Governance at The Australian National University.

Do you agree or disagree with these academics? Send in your thoughts to be included.

In a rare display of discord with the US, the Australian government has declared it will remain a signatory to the accord.

On the one hand, Conor King, executive director of the Innovative Research Universities (IRU), claims it’s a success. King, who wrote the IRU report, Impact of More Students at University released on 26 April 2017, says the numbers speak for themselves: enrolments in the STEM disciplines are up, and those in law, business and arts are down.

For instance, from 2010-2015, the rates of health course graduates increased by 19 per cent, natural and physical sciences by 22 per cent, engineering by 12 per cent, and IT by 16 per cent. By contrast, graduations in society and culture (including law) and business increased by 9 and 6 per cent respectively.

King stated that the figures align with the government's innovation vision. Though he cautioned, "it's not about STEM versus humanities or business. It's about giving students the opportunity to study what they like."

Though not everyone agrees that demand driven, rather than Commonwealth capped, is best. Education policy commentator Malcolm King told Campus Review in 2016: "While our universities speak of liberalism and the spirit of enquiry, they are using the uncapped, demand-driven enrolment system to churn students through their packed faculties, leaving thousands to graduate onto the dole with high HECS debts".

But not all is unsettled in the demand-driven debate. A mostly uncontested benefit is that it has allowed increased numbers of low socioeconomic status students to enrol in university.

“Since 2012 [low-SES enrolment] has been higher than any point earlier in the century, reaching 17.7 per cent in 2015,” the second part of the report informed.

I gave a little speech the other day on leadership in higher education. Much of it was pretty standard stuff until I got to the bit where I wanted to talk about how successful leadership in higher education should be measured. There was some enthusiasm for successful leadership to be measured along sound business lines –the management of a tight ship where income is not exceeded by expenditure, where the best people are hired and inspirational leadership rockets a pretty ordinary HE institution up an international list of world-class universities, a list that few can pronounce and even fewer understand – the Boys Own Dream of the Vice-Chancellor!

Then in a moment of uncharacteristic clarity it came to me, why should the quality of an HE educational leader be judged any differently from how we judge the quality of the performance of all the others who work in HE? Yes, I thought, this is the answer. The three key metrics for judging success in education including HE should be participation, retention and successful completion, the three old hardy annuals of getting them in, keeping them there and getting them through. Yes, let the VC be judged precisely on the performance of his/her institution on those three measures.

The connection an HE leader has with their different communities, the scholarship programs they support, the direction in which they drive programming and collaborative partnerships, and the articulation agreements they seek to have with other providers are all critical to establishing pathways into HE for under-represented groups. The student demographic profile of an institution and the degree to which it responsibly reflects the wider community of an HE institution is a direct reflection on the quality of leadership at that institution.

The HE leader that ensures that the right kinds of support programs are in place and resourced adequately, who is prepared to make retention a key strategic priority is one who is demonstrating sound leadership. Finally there's that question of successful completion. Oh, is it to be successful completion of courses or programs or qualifications. Well let's keep it simple and make it the successful completion of qualifications. That seems only fair since it is the successful completion of qualifications that is the marketing promise of HE institutions and, a little sweetener here for the VC, the track into postgraduate qualifications.

So that was done and dusted, I had solved all the issues of summing up successful leadership in higher education. Then the questions flew sharply and quickly. What about research performance? What about the capital works program? What about the civic relationships, the chummy chats with business, industry and commerce, the sector politics, the successful outcomes to industrial negotiations, the keeping the council and the senate under some semblance of order? What about ...? What about ...? What about ...? There seems to be no end to the list of crucial success factors and KPIs that seem not to be about participation, retention and successful outcomes and perhaps even leadership and much more about the normal requirements of a management.

But as I headed home I wondered if that was really the case. Participation, retention and successful outcomes seemed to me to be the whole point behind virtually everything that the HE leader did. Of course there was an issue that if these were to be the measures, they depended in very large part to be reliant on others. Those who teach and support students, maintain the facilities, prepare the laboratories and so on are surely driven by those three goals. And if they are not, shouldn't they be? Should not the entire institution be united in a desire to be the best institution on those three counts? 

Or are our HE institutions a little more focused on other things? Things that require more complex words to describe and which inevitably become a little more elusive when we try to pin them down? That seems a pity. Leadership has become such a complex and mysterious thing. It was bound to happen once it became a subject in higher education. Why must we shroud so much that we do in complexity when really the essential core of education in general and higher education in particular is simple. Students come into our care, we take them along a pathway and they demonstrate the knowledge, skills and understandings that allow us to give them the attestation of an academic qualification.

I got into trouble once and was lambasted in a rather polemic book written by a right-wing commentator for a quip when I was speaking about standards in education and had said that I felt the same way about standards as Gandhi had when asked about British civilisation. He had replied that he thought it would be a good idea.

Leadership in higher education? Now there's a good idea!

 Dr Stuart Middleton is director external relations as Manukau Institute of Technology, New Zealand.

The late 1980s had seen thoughtful reviews of post-compulsory education and training, driven by the then government’s policy hopefully entitled Learning for Life. This was the same Labour government that had reformed the administration of the school sector largely by handing great autonomy to the schools. Think of the USA in which each school would be a School District and you grasp what happened largely following the ideas of a couple of Tasmanian devils. But this set the tone and when it was the turn of the tertiary sector, autonomy ruled.

The Learning for Life reforms funded all institutions in bulk and similarly, gave them each a governing council – polytechnics, wananga, private training establishments each started to flex their muscles with an autonomy that previously only the universities had enjoyed. At the same time constraints on the teaching of degrees were freed up and polytechnics and colleges of education (aka Teachers Colleges) set about creating degree programs.

Reforms were bringing about the development of a national qualifications framework that was more robust in theory than in practice in those early days. The universities had stood outside of it believing that its focus on achievement-based learning was reducing knowledge and their important work into, to quote a prominent academic, “intellectual finger food”.

So the 1990s had been characterised by change in status and the leavening of the tertiary sector with increased status for polytechnics and private training establishments. With autonomy came freedom and coupled with the funding by volume (commonly referred to as “butts on benches” or worse), competition was unleashed and funding budgets blew out all over the place.

The polytechnics in the early 2000s realised that with, on the one hand, volume driven funding and, on the other, no caps on that funding, low level courses were a great generator of revenue. Much of this was excellent in that it was opening up pathways into tertiary for those who failed to breach the defences of the academy.

But not all of it was excellent and courses such as “twilight golf” and rather flimsy computer course that consisted of a self-instructional CD attracted the wrong kind of interest. One institution in one year accounted for most of the growth in tertiary education through one single program that acted as a portal for Maori students (60,000 enrolments). This tested not only the budgets but also the rhetoric of learning for life etc and rather than have the wit to capitalise on this situation, successive governments spent too much time on trying to dampen it down.

So it was in that mood that the 2000s started – growth, no limits to either our thinking or our hubris, we had momentum – that the government announced another set of reforms and set up the Tertiary Education Advisory Commission (TEAC). Competition was to be replaced by collaboration, institutional grandstanding by partnership and a great up-swelling of awareness about the needs of the nation, aspirations of the community and the strategic direction of tertiary education.

Shaping was to be the theme and the four TEAC reports were successively titled Shaping ...... first, a Shared Vision then ... the System, and following ... the Strategy finally ... the Funding Framework. The TEAC devised the drivers for change that it wished to use and these were indicative of how this was to be achieved: there would be a “network of provision”, in which each type of tertiary institution would make a “distinctive contribution”, you get the picture? A clear result was to be a shift of considerable control from institutions back to the centre, to the Tertiary Education Commission.

Now it would appear that the system has become over those 20 years more clearly centrally managed apart from the huge millstone of student debt which is likely to soon be around someone’s neck, but whose? It is true that growth in tertiary education is now more controlled and funding continues to be an incentive to work hard (to make ends meet that is rather than to be rewarded).

The two decades have been characterised by change but to what purpose? The performance of the tertiary sector plods along much as it always has so in that regard there has been little impact on real access other that the illusory kind produced by expanding the tertiary sector downwards to include low level programs that once would never had made the cut. Tertiary has become postsecondary.

That might have been a good thing if there has also been an accompanying increase in the success of students in attaining higher qualifications but that appears still to await us somewhere in the future. I calculated that of one hundred babies born in New Zealand last year that based on current levels of performance of different ethnic groups in tertiary education only 29 would achieve a postsecondary qualification. It is not just what happens in tertiary places of education but also in the K-12 schooling system.

I am not encouraged to believe that any of the English speaking education systems (and that includes Australia) are going to do better than this. And as for the goal of 40 per cent reaching degree level qualifications, that seems to be a real pork pie in the sky.

The goals such as the US goal of college for everyone and the 40 per cent of the UK and Australian communities with degrees have no connection with current performance and outcomes in tertiary education. We forget that we are but one dot on the educational landscape. If we can join the three dots that matter then we will be more likely to make a contribution.

Dot 1: two years of early childhood education. Dot 2: graduating from high school with the agreed level of high school leaving qualification. Dot 3: attaining a postsecondary qualification. This last one could be a certificate, a diploma or even a degree. Where these three dots are joined without a gap the young person is likely to go on to a further qualification at a higher level. Postsecondary qualifications at any level bring value to the community. Those at diploma or above bring increased financial rewards to the individual.

So the key improvements needed in tertiary education continue to be elusive in New Zealand and, it seems to me, in Australia. But it is not for the lack of trying, or lack of commitment to change or of appetite to do so in the past 20 years reforming and changing the system.

It might be interesting to speculate on where we will be when Campus Review turns 40!

Stuart Middleton is director of external relations at Manukau Institute of Technology in Auckland, New Zealand and writes on education at EDTalkNZ.