The AHRC had been asked by 39 universities to look into the 'nature, prevalence and reporting of sexual assault and sexual harassment', and ran the first National Student Safety Survey (NSSS), which gathered data relevant to university student experiences of sexual harassment and sexual assault.

It surveyed over 30,000 students and found that one in five had been sexually harassed in a university setting, and 1.6 per cent sexually assaulted either at uni or travelling to or from campus.

Of those who were sexually assaulted, only 13 per cent made a formal complaint to the university, and only six per cent of those who were sexually harassed did so.

The report made nine recommendations, one of which focused on ensuring accessible and easy to understand reporting processes were made common knowledge among the student cohort.

An audit of current processes and counselling services, and ongoing student surveys to track the prevalence of incidents, were also recommended.

A subsequent 2021 NSSS was run by the Social Research Centre and funded by Universities Australia (UA).

It surveyed 43,812 students to find out the prevalence of sexual harassment and assault, including when and why it occurred.

It also investigated awareness of and responses to reporting incidences of sexual violence.

The second NSSS found one in six university students had been sexually harassed, and one in 20 sexually assaulted, since starting university. These assaults occurred mostly in club or society events and spaces, or in residential accommodation.

The second survey also included more anecdotal and qualitative evidence of sexual violence on campus, including testimonies from anonymous students.

Students most at risk were female, sexually diverse, or disabled undergraduates who live on campus, and perpetrators were overwhelmingly men.

Only one in 20 students who were sexually assaulted made a formal complaint, and of those only a third were satisfied with that process.

When the results were released in 2022, showing no improvement from the earlier survey, both UA and individual universities initiated anti-sexual violence campaigns.

As a result, "we're now starting to see quite a few unis have action plans. Nearly all Australian universities now have standalone sexual assault or sexual harassment policies, which is great. They weren't there a decade ago," according to Dr Alison Henry, a researcher in the sexual assault area.

But how did we get here?

Dr Henry, whose PhD thesis focused on regulatory responses to sexual assault and harassment in Australian university settings, said the problems started with the way in which universities were originally established in Australia.

"Universities are regulated and funded at a federal level, but they're actually set up under state and territory legislation," she explains.

"And underneath that ... all universities are independent, self-regulating autonomous bodies."

These means that universities are essentially autonomous and independent, and don't tend to work in unison to affect changes.

It's consequently not possible for government to implement changes and, Dr Henry says, there hasn't been the political will to "use the levers that are available within the regulatory and the legislative framework".

UA has tried to fill that gap with providing best practise guidelines and providing training, but as a member organisation rather than a regulatory one, can only do so much.

"Even though they've put some good materials out, they haven't followed up with seeing who's picking it up. And there's no obligation on the universities to pick it up," Dr Henry said.

There is a regulator in the sector, the Tertiary Education Quality and Standards Agency (TEQSA). After the Change the Course report was released in 2017, it was tasked with monitoring the sector's responses to its findings.

TEQSA has also tried to guide the sector, creating notes and resource links, but as each university has its own approach, this hasn't always been effective.

"You can go to each of the 39 university websites and they call [sexual assault and harassment] different things. They have different disclosure or reporting mechanisms," Dr Henry said.

"Some of them have online forms, some of them have an email address, some of them have 1-800 number."

Dr Henry said she understands future regulatory and legislative reform will stem from the Department of Education's draft Action Plan addressing gender-based violence in higher education.

The plan has seven recommendations, one of which is establishing a National Student Ombudsman that can investigate and resolve dispute.

Another is increasing transparency around data collection, reporting mechanisms and accountability.

The Universities Accord Interim Report, released in early January, recommended five priorities for action.

Priority five outlined the immediate need for better university governance, through state and territory government and university collaboration, to improve student staff and safety on campus.

The aforementioned reports, along with other possible recommendations made in the soon-to-be-released Universities Accord Final Report, aim to tackle the worsening sexual violence issue by bringing the universities together to drive reform as a whole sector.

This story is an extension of our Campus Podcast: The vexed question of sexual assault in universities, in which education editor Erin Morley interviewed Dr Allison Henry .

In a new “wage theft” report released on Tuesday the union says 97,500 university staff suffered underpayment in 55 incidents in 32 education institutions.

Some of the biggest incidents listed are $22m repaid to casual staff at the University of Melbourne for underpayments across eight years; at least $11m in underpayments at the University of Tasmania; $10m that RMIT University agreed in 2021 that it had underpaid; $12.8m back paid at the University of Sydney; and at least $11m repaid to University of NSW to staff in a case that is still under way.

The union blames many instances of what it labels “wage theft” on wrong payments being made to casual workers because the conditions of the award were not followed.

NTEU national president Alison Barnes said the widespread casualisation of university workforces was a key factor in the wage underpayments, which had a “devastating impact on the lives of university staff”.

“It can mean struggling to make ends meet, being unable to afford to pay bills, or being forced to take on additional work,” Dr Barnes said.

“Unaccountable vice-chancellors on million-dollar salaries have been in charge of this crisis with almost no accountability.

“We need urgent action from all governments to reform the governance model for universities and protect workers from exploitation.”

While some cases of claimed underpayment are still being investigated, nearly all have been admitted by universities, which are making efforts to repay lost wages.

The NTEU said eight wage loss cases, potentially worth millions of dollars, are still underway.

The Australian Higher Education Industrial Association (AHEIA), which represents most universities on industrial issues, said the union had included historical figures in the wage underpayment total in the report, which had “increased the aggregate”.

AHEIA executive director Craig Laughton said universities had responded to the underpayments, paid back money owed and put in improved governance processes for the future.

“Universities have invested significant amounts of time and effort to identify any issues, find the people adversely impacted, and pay those people back in a timely manner,” Mr Laughton said.

Universities face further pressure from the federal government’s Universities Accord review, which found in its interim report that “large-scale wage underpayment is a clear failure of institutional governance and management, for which [university] councils are ultimately accountable”.

A university council is a university’s highest governing body.

The interim report says universities must address the staff underpayment issue “urgently”.

“Complex industrial agreements and government policy and funding arrangements had contributed to the [wage underpayment] issue, however, institutions have an obligation to ensure appropriate governance settings and frameworks to avoid these circumstances emerging,” the interim report says.

“This includes implementing updates and changes to workforce system architecture, such as payroll and time recording systems.”

In an era where university rankings dominate higher education discussions and marketing messages, more critics and leaders are questioning the validity of their influence and power. These efforts have the potential to reshape the landscape of higher education, ultimately making it more equitable and meaningful for students and institutions alike.

Each of our journeys into the realm of university rankings began with a shared belief in the need for a rethink. The methods used by league tables have, as we have published in Significance, "no legs to stand on".

The development of newer research assessment reform efforts, such as the Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA) and the Coalition on Advancing Research Assessment (CoARA), provides the perfect opportunity to address this issue. Taking a critical statistical approach allows us to challenge the rankings from a quantitative and scientific perspective.

Understanding the external policy drivers facing global university executives – and gaining insight into the thoughts, strategies and views of their leaders – can help identify the barriers to change and inform a way forward.

Collaboration across these areas of expertise is born out of a shared passion to question the role that rankings play in students' decision-making processes and universities' behaviours, given their clear methodological limitations.

We have delved deeply into the subject, including in publications and in a podcast episode that asked, "Do university rankings really tell us anything?". This has occurred in parallel with earlier episodes of the HEDx podcast and writings from it that pose the question “What if there were no university rankings?”.

The short answer is that rankings do not provide a meaningful assessment of an institution's quality, or its suitability for prospective students, and if we didn't have them we would have to develop better and more robust approaches to assessing institutional quality, leadership and culture.

Our critiques of existing ranking agencies have extended to offering “free and friendly" advice to those who do the ranking. We advocate for a more inclusive approach that visualises all world universities, abandoning flagship overarching rankings, and including qualitative data alongside quantitative metrics. Ideally these assessments won’t take the form of ‘rankings’ at all, but rather profiles that surface and contextualise the relative strengths of all institutions.

The International Network of Research Management Societies (INORMS) initiative More Than Our Rank (MTOR) aims to provide just such a platform for universities to share their stories beyond rankings. This initiative is a welcome alternative in a world where reductive league tables omit the rich and diverse narratives of universities.

As we seek to achieve sustainable research funding, there is criticism of the way we currently do so in Australia; through surpluses generated by international student fees. This acknowledges the real challenges that universities face when trying to balance their ideals with their financial needs.

This is demonstrated by the Queensland University of Technology's dual role in being the first Australian university to participate in MTOR while also continuing to participate in and seek marketing advantage from rankings.

This demonstrates the operational realities of needing to both ‘play’ and ‘change’ the rankings game. However, we might want to seek better evidence that rankings do drive international student university choice before continuing to use this as an excuse for maintaining our involvement in rankings.

This debate isn't limited to Australia. In the Netherlands, the University of Utrecht has recently withdrawn from global rankings, while an increasing number of US universities are opting out of the US News and World Report subject rankings on the grounds that they embed inequities. A number of significant reports from the United Nations University International Institute for Global Health, the European University Association, and other Dutch Universities, have all argued for a change in the way our sector engages with rankings.

Despite these positive developments, the recent announcement of a new ranking by the Australian Financial Review has raised eyebrows. This new ranking, developed by a former vice-chancellor and a professorial statistician for the Australian National University, adds another layer of complexity to the rankings conundrum for Australian institutions while adding nothing of any quality or substance to the assessment of our universities’ strengths.

So, where are we heading with all of this, and what advice do we have for university leaders and policymakers?

The answer is clear: it's time to rethink our engagement with university rankings. University leaders can no longer lay claim to intellectual credibility while allowing intellectually incredulous assessments to drive their institutional strategies. Neither can they pay lip service to caring about equity, diversity, and inclusion, whilst uncritically supporting inequitable ranking methodologies.

Disengaging with rankings altogether may not be an option for institutions reliant on international recruitment. We propose that those who are in this bind, should educate those who use the rankings to make decisions about their limitations, and at the same time promote how they are engaging responsibly with the rankings.

Leaders should prioritize their institution's unique identity and mission over chasing arbitrary numbers. Policymakers, particularly those tasked with creating a more equitable higher education system, should recognize the potential harm rankings can cause.

We would call for the sector to reimagine new forms of university assessment that are independent, robust, and reliable. The power to redefine the future of higher education lies with those who recognise that rankings should not drive decisions; rather, they should be just a reflection of a university's character and impact.

It's past high time to break free from rankings that have hindered the progress of higher education. Let's celebrate diversity, innovation, and a commitment to students. After all, as Minister for Education Jason Clare said at the launch of the THE World University Rankings in Sydney recently, "Great universities are not just about rankings, they are about students. They are not a place of privilege; they are a place of opportunity."

It's a message that can guide changing the future of higher education for good.

Adrian Barnett works is a professor at the School of Public Health & Social Work at Queensland University of Technology.
Elizabeth Gadd is head of Research Culture & Assessment at Loughborough University in England.

Universities worldwide are standing at the crossroads of tradition and innovation. Australian and British institutions, many of which are pillars of academic excellence with unique heritage, are having to navigate through the choppy waters of contemporary government policies.

As Australia embarks on a journey towards broadening participation and fostering equity through the Universities Accord, the UK finds itself at a policy impasse; grappling with the sustainability of its tuition-fee system amid contentious debates over student numbers and levelling-up reality.

Yet, regardless of these distinct policy climates, there is a shared push towards embracing the digital age – a transformation that demands not just technological adoption but a reshaping of partnerships and skills agenda. Amid these diverse environments, there is a notable divergence in how leaders are embracing digital strategies and partnerships. This inconsistency persists even as the broader societal and economic forces steer us inexorably towards a far more interconnected, digital future.

Home-grown success

Operating within both the Australian and UK contexts are numerous global tech firms and a plethora of home-grown EdTech providers, among which Online Education Services (OES) stands out for its specialisation in advancing digital delivery through university collaborations.

OES itself is the progeny of a joint initiative between Swinburne University of Technology and SEEK. Swinburne serves as a paradigm of the technical university archetype; it’s known for its robust commitment to digital innovation and alliances with the corporate world. Institutions that fit this paradigm typically sprout from industrially rich regions with working-class roots, carrying a torch for inclusivity and access to education for all.

British innovator

Aston University in Birmingham in UK has a similar pedigree to Swinburne, having started its life as a technical school and evolving into the UK’s first college of advanced technology. It was a pioneer of the concept of the integrated placement year, which is part of why it is now such an entrepreneurial institution.

The Aston University Strategy 2030 was born out of extensive consultations and stakeholder engagement, and focusses on future-readiness that is anchored on technology partnerships. It embraces inclusivity, entrepreneurship and socio-economic transformation as guiding institutional principles for its communities and partnerships. Now unfolding where the first Industrial Revolution began, it reorients the institution towards Industry 4.0, centring on digital technologies and innovation.

The strategy is robustly supported by alliances with major tech corporations like Amazon, Microsoft, Capgemini, and Adobe, with each partnership reflecting the university's strategic focus encapsulated by those three words: inclusive, entrepreneurial and transformational.

Tech collabs

An exemplar of these international tech collaborations is Aston University's Adobe Creative Campus for Midlands initiative. With its Adobe Chair in Digital Literacy, student-led digital innovation hub, and engagement with the new Digital Futures Institute, the initiative seeks to promote digital literacy among all students and support digital innovation in wider university activity.

One of the strongest features of the partnerships with global tech companies arises from access to their own wider networks of corporate partners. Using tech company partnerships as a route to wider inclusion in this way is also how some of the three different elements of the strategy intersect and augment institutional outcomes.

This strategy takes physical shape in the form of the Birmingham innovation precinct adjacent to Aston's campuses, where chance encounters among students, staff, and partners are cultivated on a foundation of tech innovation and strategic partnerships, effectively blurring the boundaries between organisational, digital, strategic, and physical spaces.

Aston has also adopted a university-wide AI platform. This, coupled with the AI-driven creative campus infrastructure, is a testament to the university's commitment to digital innovation. Aston is not merely adapting to the advent of AI and technology but is proactively applying these tools to achieve targeted social impact, embedding this pursuit at the heart of its institutional identity. This integration exemplifies how universities can fully leverage technology and partnerships to foster inclusivity and drive transformation.

Recognizing such a purpose, international cooperation, particularly with entities in the US, Asia and beyond, emerges as a vital channel for mutual learning. The goal is to establish overseas innovation centres and hubs, a concept that resonates with the prospects for numerous Australian universities.

New ways to evaluate

Aston's strategic outcomes are gauged using innovative benchmarks beyond traditional rankings. This includes clear measures of socio-economic impact, such as the UK's Social Mobility Index, which assesses the extent of social advancement achieved by an institution's graduates, including their demographic shifts.

This index integrates metrics of access, progression, and graduate results across all study modes, and works well with the university's commitment to inclusivity and transformation.

Aston's approach has seen it secure second place in the 2023 national rankings. The execution and evaluation of the new strategy prioritise outcome-driven and purpose-oriented metrics over the conventional yardsticks of academic reputation, research performance, or subjective assessments by peers and collaborators.

The future

While the corporate world shifts uniformly towards digital models, universities vary in their adoption of Education 4.0. As a trailblazer in this area, Aston is aligning its objectives, operational processes, and external alliances with this digital-first approach.

As work dynamics evolve, it's crucial that students gain exposure to global industry practices in the most successful innovation economies as well as in emerging markets.

While the pathways to pursue such exposure are available, it requires leaders who not only align with the strategic ethos of the institution but also bring a commercial acuity to technology partnerships.

Such bold leadership must be accompanied by tangible metrics of socio-economic impact and transformation to truly realise the growth in skills through equity as advocated by the Australian Universities Accord.

Professor Martin Betts is the founder of HEDx.
Sue Kokonis is chief academic officer at Online Education Services.
Professor Aleks Subic is vice-chancellor and chief executive of Aston University, UK.

The prevailing stereotype of a student starting university is that of a young school leaver heading to a highly regarded institution of higher education, with a profession in mind at the end of it. In the past, parents have invested heavily in creating this opportunity by supporting their children in many ways including financially.

If we examine this ideal more closely, can we still say that it’s true? And is this pathway relevant for the full range of lifelong learners of 2023 and the future?

For some, it is. School leavers who are part of the upper quartile of socio-economic status families are, as they have always been, almost guaranteed entry to a highly exclusive and reputable place of study, with little risk from debt. Meanwhile, participation rates for school leavers from lower quartiles is much lower and has barely changed in much of the US, UK and Australia.

After years of focus on widening participation we have barely moved the dial. In fact, recent data suggests participation rates for this group is more at risk of declining than growing.

Some private providers are adopting lifelong-learning-based strategies to address this. But for many universities, particularly those driven by their reputation and rankings, exclusion prevails as a strategy and culture. They are obliged to operate with regulators who can appear to protect the exclusive culture and present barriers to greater innovation and inclusion.

How has the sector responded to this challenge? Have we done enough to improve equity of opportunity for all learners, and are we meeting the needs of a future workforce for employers?

Bold leaders of real change in the system – whether in universities, private providers or other participants – have to be resilient and resolute in leading change for genuine societal and national benefit.

One group that is increasingly part of driving this change is employers. Shortages in the supply of future workers (arising from birth gaps and declining future population) is becoming critical. Increasingly, the war for talent means employers are having to look beyond traditional degrees – and therefore universities – to source the skills and capabilities they rely on for their workforce.

But this change is going further than a challenge to the traditional degree and to universities. Places of learning and places of work are becoming indistinguishable. Conceiving of them as one place is key to creating talent to meet the capacity and capability of the future of work.

What this requires is that we re-examine the longstanding dichotomy between skills and education. It calls on us to open up learning content and opportunities for multiple purposes, diverse audiences, and real work-integrated learning. For instance, the scenario of 4+1 days in a working/learning week is a revolutionary idea that gets us closer to an idea of lifelong learning.

With this scenario, new sources of learning will have to emerge. They might come from previously unimagined partnerships between universities and employers, which will need a new breed of facilitators to imagine, broker, and create the new ways in which these relationships could work

There is already a history of university and employer relationships around specific professions and disciplines. For instance, nursing, engineering, accountancy and teaching are built on this model. The quality of these relationships between institutions and workplaces depends on traditional practices such as placement and accreditation, the use of industry advisory boards, and employment of visiting industry teaching staff.

Now, with technology and practices changing so rapidly, placement and accreditation are being challenged. In addition, the widespread evidence of placement poverty, and of declining domestic enrolments at times of high employment, show us a system that is  no longer meeting the learning needs of either students or employers.

The culture of our learning providers has to value what it is that learners value, which includes a greater focus on innovation in learning, which could help to overcome declining confidence in the higher education system.

Recent data in the US suggests that net public confidence in higher education as a system has become negative. This appears to be substantially driven by the outdated cultures within institutions. It now needs us to overcome a resistance to seeing students as customers for whom we need to measure their experience. With accelerating technology changes this is becoming more important. It is making the need to prepare graduates for lifelong working and learning more challenging.

One could argue that higher education has gone from being a rite of passage for the privileged few, to being more directly connected to closing skills gaps. The over-riding sense is that education needs to meet people, both learners and employers, where they are at.

This means both in the multiple and continuous life stages where they are turning to learning, and in gaining the skills they need to be productive in a changing world of work. We can meet learners where they are at through technology, at work, at times that suit them, and through the facilitation of others. There is no longer an absolute requirement for learning to be on campus, face to face, and at times that suit the institutions and their systems.

In this year’s list, the same seven Australian universities – Melbourne, Queensland, Sydney, UNSW, Monash, ANU and the University of WA – remain in the top 100 but all have dropped in rank except UWA, which, at 99th, is in the same position as last year.

Melbourne dropped from 32nd to 35th, Queensland went from 47th to 50th, UNSW from 64th to 71st, Sydney from 60th to 72nd, Monash from 75th to 76th, and ANU from 79th to 83rd.

Australia’s next best institution, the University of Adelaide, also suffered, falling from the 101-150 bracket into the 151-200 range even as plans progress for it to merge with the low-ranked University of South Australia (in the 501-600 bracket), which will drag its ranking down further.

The slide in rankings follows the spending cuts universities imposed on themselves when the pandemic hit in 2020, which reduced research staff levels, and the Covid lockdowns, which slowed many research programs.

The ARWU rankings contrast sharply with the QS World University Rankings released in June which, after changing their methodology in a way that favoured Australia, placed an unprecedented three Australian institutions into the world’s top 20 and nine into the top 100.

This year’s ARWU results halt a long improving trend for top Australian universities, which rode on the 2014-19 Chinese student boom and poured the fee revenues they earned into research programs.

The extra spending on research had a major impact on the research-based ARWU ranking, which judges universities solely on the quality and volume of research outputs. Its measures include a university’s number of Nobel prizewinners, highly cited researchers and papers published in top journals.

Four universities in particular – Melbourne, Queensland, Sydney, and UNSW – all with strength in the Chinese market, made improvements in their ARWU ranking, which then attracted more Chinese students.

Globally, the ARWU lists the world’s top 10 universities as Harvard, Stanford, MIT, Cambridge, Berkeley, Princeton, Oxford, Columbia, Caltech and Chicago, in that order.

The top 10 list is unchanged from last year.