precarious employment in universities

A reasonably honest portrait of where the system is now

July 20, 2023Universities Accord, Universities Accord Panel, Universities futures, Universities in AustraliaAARE blog, Andrew Norton, Australian National University, precarious employment in universities, Regional University Centres, Universities Accord, Universities Accord Panel, universities futures

On Wednesday, the Minister for Education Jason Clare, spoke at the National Press Club on the interim report from the Universities Accord Panel, chaired by Professor Mary O’Kane, who have been given the job of transforming Australia’s university sector.

The report itself has ambitious long- term goals including parity of participation in higher education between the general population and low SES and regional students with disability. This is a very big ask. The minister himself, in his National Press Club speech, noted that in schools these groups are actually going backward rather than forward. The minister also announced a number of other items, including extension of demand-driven funding to all Indigenous students rather than just students from the regions, as it is now.

If the interim report’s recommendation is accepted there will be some kind of universal learning entitlement for all students, which essentially means that if they’re academically eligible, the system somehow will find a place for them. It implies that universities and other higher education providers might be obliged to take students rather than just having the choice to take them. This makes it different from the previous demand-driven system, which removed funding caps for bachelor degree students, but did not guarantee a place to all who were eligible.

There are a number of proposals around research and associated issues. The most contentious one will be the idea of a levy on international student fees.

How this would work is not entirely clear – the basic idea seems to be that universities will pay a percentage of their international student fee income into a general fund and that money would be redistributed around research infrastructure and other activities around the university sector.

A number of universities would be very strongly opposed to that. International students will also be unhappy that the money they’re paying will not be spent in their institutions.

The minister also revealed some proposed and actual major changes to governance. At the national level the interim report recommends a new body, a Tertiary Education Commission, would advise on costs and writing agreements between the government and universities.

At the university level an interim report recommendation, which the federal government has already accepted but still needs approval from states and territories, will require senates and councils, their governing bodies, to have different compositions. This would reduce the number of business people and increase the number of people with expertise in higher education. I’ve seen firsthand that sometimes the council members don’t have a deep understanding of higher education as an industry so I support that recommendation.

The goals here are to deal with some of the staffing problems universities have had, particularly in precarious employment and underpayment of casual staff; and also to deal with issues around students particularly around sexual assault. I believe the Accord panel wants university governing bodies to be more aware of and more responsible for trying to improve the performance of universities on these matters.

But it is important that councils and senates are also not stacked by internal constituencies. There was a problem all those decades ago that governments were rightly trying to address in governance reforms. But having people with real higher education expertise will help, hopefully a number of them from outside the institution whose council or senate they are on.

What’s missing from this report?

What’s missing is mostly the detail of how we would get from where we are now to where they want us to be. They don’t say a lot on a new system of student contributions, which is one of the most controversial areas they have to deal with. They’ve said that the Job-Ready Graduates package (JRGP) is damaging Australian higher education and has to go, but they have only set out a list of potential alternative student contribution systems.

The report makes a few asides which hint at their views, which means the panel probably won’t recommend just quickly reversing the charges for art students. Nor do they want a flat student contribution rate, as suggested by some university interest groups. But that still leaves a fairly wide variety of possible alternatives. And so I think we will have to wait until the final report at the end of this year to have an idea of where they’re going on that.

The main defect of JRGP is that it puts a lot of debt on graduates who have a limited capacity to repay in any reasonable amount of time, particularly the arts graduates who historically don’t earn as much as other graduates. They are being hit with the highest student contribution rate, about $15,000 a year at the moment. My view is that many of them will take decades to repay if they ever do. And while the HELP loan system is designed to allow you to spread repayments over long periods of time, that should be people who are sick or for various reasons don’t work full-time, not for ordinary graduates getting a fairly typical outcome for someone with their degrees.

The report doesn’t directly mention my proposal for replacing student contributions, which is to link student contributions levels to projected HELP debt repayment times. The goal is that the typical student from different degrees would spent roughly the same number of years repaying their debate, on average. But the minister did mention it in the National Press Club. So that gives me hope.

Another big political issue, which my student contribution proposal is intended to partly remedy, is the burden of HELP debt. The report mentions ideas which it seems the ATO is already working on, such as taking into account the money students have already repaid that financial year, via the PAYG system, before indexation occurs.

The Accord review panel are also considering moving the repayment system to what they call a marginal repayment system. This means people with HELP debt would pay a percentage of their income above the threshold, not on their entire income as now.

The panel does address some long running problems in the system, including not covering the full cost of competitive research grants. I’m not sure that they have new solutions for that, a lot of these issues have been known for a long time. Governments for various reasons have decided it’s too expensive to fix them.

One potentially complex issue is that the Panel suggests winding back some of the research requirements that were introduced by the Peter Coaldrake review of the regulations for being a university. That will make it easier for some universities to retain their university status. But there’s always anxiety that universities might be reduced to so-called teaching-only universities, particularly if they are regional institutions. That group will be trying hard to make sure that they get good mission-based funding, which respects the role that their research plays in their local areas.

I think the report paints a reasonably honest portrait of where the system is. It highlights the problems around staffing. But these exist for reasons which are deep in the funding system. There is no easy way out of the basic structural problems – universities can have better payroll systems that stop the underpayment of casuals but that won’t remove the underlying reasons why they have so many casual staff in the first place.

The panel and the minister are encouraging critique and alternative ideas. Whether or not we agree with all the ideas presented, that is a good approach to public policy.

Andrew Norton is Professor in the Practice of Higher Education Policy at the Centre for Social Research and Methods at the Australian National University. He blogs at andrewnorton.net .au Follow him on Twitter @andrewjnorton

Header image of the Minister for Education Jason Clare speaking at the National Press Club from the minister’s Facebook page

COVID-19 has destroyed academic careers & stalled equity in our universities: Death knell or opportunity?

December 17, 2020COVID-19 and universities, equity in higher education, precarious employment in universities, Universities futures, Universities in Australia, university funding, university research fundingacademic career, academic workforce, advancing career in academia, early career academic, Jill Blackmore, networking in academia, precariat, precarious employment in universities, Troy Heffernan, work as an academic, working in the academy

In mid-March, my university sent me and my colleagues home to work remotely for what everyone thought would be a week, maybe ten days. It was meant to be just enough time for Victoria to get on top of the virus that was increasingly in the news. More than 280 days later, most of us still have not been back. It seems we’ll be able to return to our desks soon, but during this time higher education has altered in ways few people could have predicted would happen so quickly.

For the last few years, I have been involved in research that examines the university from two distinct perspectives: one from a leadership and administration position, and the other looking at what it means to be an academic in the twenty-first century.

From a leadership and administration perspective, Professor Jill Blackmore covered these topics in detail when she presented the inaugural AARE Leadership SIG Neil Cranston Lecture. Professor Blackmore expertly outlined that while COVID was completely unpredictable, the way universities reacted was largely unsurprising due to decades of funding changes and increased corporatisation and managerialism within the sector. She argues that government and university management have been careless of international students and academics and their health and wellbeing, with significant equity and long-term effects as to the role of the university in a democracy. Professor Blackmore pointed out that COVID-19 has fractured and exposed the precarious arrangement in Australia where the rising Asian middle-class demand, particularly from China and India, has been cross-subsidising domestic student growth and research in Australian universities.

This post aims to compliment Professor Blackmore’s work by focusing on how COVID-19 has exacerbated issues with academic careers, career progression, and equity in Australian universities.

Precariously employed university workers bear the brunt

Perhaps the first issue to arise in higher education following COVID shutdowns was financial as student numbers regularly dropped and governments elected to provide little financial relief. The first groups to feel the brunt of this were those who are precariously employed. The last few years has been overflowing with researchers asking questions about universities having high numbers of casual employees that were carrying the bulk of teaching work, which minimised their opportunity to research; often considered the surest way to secure ongoing employment.

Rates of precarious employment vary greatly with figures anywhere from 10 to over 70 per cent depending on university and faculty. As finances became an issue during 2020, however, thousands of casual employees lost their jobs and suddenly academic questions around job fairness and employment potential have been replaced with financial survival. For all of the problems with precarious employment, and I was precariously employed for well over five years, the light at the end of the precarious employment tunnel for me and so many others was academic opportunity that could lead to employment, but that has now largely been lost.

Research positions axed

Faculty finances are also deciders of post-doctoral and research fellow numbers and opportunities, and these too have been negatively impacted. Over the last few years, researchers have noted a shift from academics being teaching and research focused, to more heavily being focused on one or the other. Times of prosperity also led some faculties to increased numbers of post-docs and research fellows to help bolster research outputs and grant opportunities. However, these positions often came in addition to the faculty’s operation. Subsequently, a financial downturn quickly sees those additional post-docs and fellowships as superfluous because the faculty is already operating at full capacity without them.

Career progression disappears

The same situation has also occurred for those on grants and fellowships who do not hold continuing positions. Gaining a grant or fellowship was once seen as the pathway to secure employment, but when finances are down and employment opportunities are rare, transferring grant and research success to continuing employment has become more difficult in 2020 than many ever could have predicted.

For similar reasons (and the forthcoming view is entirely anecdotal at this point), 2020 marks the first time I have heard of colleagues from local and international universities, faculties, schools, and departments sometimes being discouraged from applying for research-only grants. This may seem counterintuitive in the university space, however, it makes sense once you consider the financial implications of someone who was carrying out teaching and researching duties, moving to a research-only position for several years. Regardless of their salary being paid as part of the grant, they still need to be replaced within the faculty (to cover their teaching, administration, or leadership duties etc.) and this is an expense some faculties do not want to pay in times of economic difficulty and downturn.

The above is only a few of the numbers of changes that are taking place in higher education, but there are other repercussions that must be considered. Primarily, what does the job market look like into the future, and who is in the best place to benefit?

Frankly, for some universities and some disciplinary areas, the outlook is not positive. Employment and career prospects in many areas will be paused, or take backwards steps. There will be more competition for jobs, and due to restructures and employment downturns in some institutions and faculties, researchers with years of publications and experience will be vying for positions that only one year ago may have been more likely to be filled by Early Career Researchers who have recently received their PhD, or researchers finishing post-doctoral work or fellowships.

Will only the privileged survive?

Academics are being told this is just a case of things being postponed a little, or that there’s still casual work out there, or that people could use this time to get their publications up for when things settle down in a year or two. So this really becomes a question of, who can survive this postponement? Who can actually publish without work until things settle down and the job market opens again? The answer, I fear, is one that will set back the forward steps universities had made to diversify their workforce. Being able to wait for the job market to settle, being able to survive on the hope of stringing together casual work, or having the ability to write and publish without financial or institutional support, all seem to point to universities returning to their traditional roots of privileging the privileged.

As we try and move past an impossible year, my primary questions surround just how well attempts to increase diversity and inclusion of academic staff have been. Some researchers would say these attempts were never successful, and they might be right. I would hope some areas have been more successful than others. However, I would also question if any system has been successful if an unexpected issue (such as a financial downturn) causes a sector to return to its default mode; and that default mode remains being one that benefits the economically and socially privileged.

Opportunity to diversify as universities rebuild

As 2021 approaches and many universities are reporting to their staff that the rebuilding process is being planned or starting to get underway, the sector has an opportunity to review how its workforce is constructed. Nothing will undo the damage of COVID within the sector, but the future could be improved if rebuilding included new structures that were no longer at their core centred around privilege.

Dr Troy Heffernan is Lecturer in Leadership at La Trobe University. His research is centred on higher education with a particular focus on policy, leadership, administration, management, and inequalities within the sector. His current work explores vice-chancellors’ approaches to management, the emotional labour involved in higher education leadership, the consequences of precarious employment, the implication of personal networks in academic promotion and hiring, and understanding the repercussions of higher education’s shift to business models and marketized practices. His work has received numerous awards for research excellence, and he regularly participates in public and invited speaking engagements. Troy is on Twitter @troyheff

Universities are exploiting their sessional academics. We need to do better for our precariously employed

February 17, 2020academic workforce, precarious employment in universitiesacademic workforce, early career academic, precarious employment in universities, sessional workers in universities, Troy Heffernan

As the 2020 academic year begins, this will be the first in my seven years of working in universities that I have a permanent position and am not relying on contracts or sessional work. I know how privileged I am to be in this position, but I also know first-hand what precarious employment feels like. I have lived it and I have researched it. It is difficult to describe the phenomena of precarity if you have not experienced this type of employment.

Precarious employment encompasses a wide range of employment situations

The first thing to note about precarious employment in universities is that it actually looks like an incredible variety of different employment situations. It can be long-term contracts of up to three years. In these positions someone might teach classes, hold a research allocation, and provide doctoral supervision. Essentially the person is a full-time academic carrying out duties of someone expected to be within the institution long-term; which begs the question of why not make these people permanent employees? Instead, they perform the same duties, are still on contract, and do not have long-term job security.

However it is at the other end of precarious employment where most will find themselves; this work is around being contracted to teach classes or mark assessment. The primary danger here is underemployment and the traps that surround it.

A university semester lasts four or five months but the contracts can be for only a few hours a week to cover preparing and teaching a class, and later on marking the assessment. The payment is minimal and often the paid hours underestimate the hours these tasks actually take to perform.

So how did we get here?

It is important to think about how we got to the current state of things. Precarious employment in academia has existed for decades, but its extent and function has changed for two main reasons.

The first is there are simply more PhDs looking for jobs in academia. There was a time when precarious employment was primarily held by those completing their PhD, or maybe immediately after completing their degree: it was the contract and sessional work one did before securing a continuing position. However the academic job market has since become increasingly competitive as many more PhDs graduate and look for work.

The second reason, evident in most analyses of the higher education sector, is that it is a cheaper way for a faculty’s teaching to be carried out. As one group of researchers concluded, some universities are hiring ‘armies’ of sessional academics to teach and mark assessments. Most are not doing this because they have to, they do it because it is cheaper, and can free up funds to spend elsewhere. It is probably also a flow on effect of changes to university funding.

My research points to negative and exploitative practices

I undertook a study involving more than 100 sessional academics to investigate the issues sessional academics face as a growing part of the workforce in academia.

I asked about the career support available to them and their views on their precariously employed years. My work points to some negative and some clearly exploitative practices happening in our universities.

A negative factor is that most casual and contract employment relates to teaching and marking with no research component. However, the common – and grounded in truth – trope in academia is ‘publish or perish’. Contract employees who are being paid to teach and mark are still producing research, but they are doing it in their own time without mentoring, career or financial support from the university, even though, in most cases this research work will be attributed to the university for research excellence and ranking purposes.

Around 20 per cent of participants also spoke of exploitative practices such as not being paid for increased workloads, unethical author attribution practices that disadvantaged the casual employee, and concerns or complaints readily being met with threats of cutting contracts short or failing to renew contracts.

There are, however, pockets of good practices happening for precarious academics; those who are lucky enough to have access to support and mentoring, universities that invest in their research and teaching development, and universities that provide opportunities for funding and grants. However, these are not representative of the majority of experiences from participants.

Good practices that could help precariously employed sessional academics

My research showed there are things universities could do to make sure their sessional employees are growing and developing as academics rather than contributing to the ‘academic exodus’.

The first is that precariously employed staff should be able to attend, and – importantly – be paid to attend, professional development around teaching and research. When most staff are employed to cover teaching duties, improving their teaching skills is beneficial to the institution. And all universities should be focused on improving research skills and opportunities for researchers – particularly if they are the affiliate institution benefitting from the precariously employed staff’s research outputs.

Involvement in professional development is also important because it lets casual and sessional staff interact with other staff members when they likely do not have a desk and so spend little time on campus unless directly carrying out their duties. My study showed mentorship and related guidance is highly valued by precariously employed staff because they view it as one of the keyways to improve their work, and better prepare themselves for future job opportunities.

The standout finding from almost every study about precarious employment, mine included, is that, almost nobody wants to be precariously employed. Some people might not want to work full-time, but very few people want to spend year after year with no job security.

So the real answer might be that universities take steps to reduce their contract staff. But until that happens, the best thing we can do is to make sure our precariously employed colleagues are given as much research support and career guidance as possible. Their goal is a secure position in the academy so surely their institutions, their students, colleagues, and the academy benefit in the long term.