(Image: Private Media)

This is part three of the series Hard Knocks Uni: the Crisis in Higher Ed. Read part one here and part two here.

Deakin University in Geelong just cut 200 jobs. It’s hard to imagine the hand-wringing such a story would cause if it happened in a factory or a mine. But the Deakin cuts barely registered beyond local news. 

For some reason, the discourse is desensitised to job losses in higher education. Nobody can figure out why.

“I’m shocked by the extent to which the government completely ignored this quite large sector of the workforce as if they didn’t exist,” historian Judith Brett said. “There are massive job losses in this sector that no one is worried about. These are jobs that will simply not come back.” 

Lack of transparency

We don’t know just how bad the jobs crisis in higher education is. On one end of the spectrum an Australia Institute report last month put the number of job losses at as high as 40,000, or one in five. University lobby groups and some observers say the figure is likely to be lower. Others say it could be much higher if you take into account the industry built around international students.

Universities Australia, the peak body for the sector, believes 17,300 people left the sector last calendar year, including casuals, but has no figures on the extent of job losses brought on by the pandemic.

“We know there will be more job losses,” its chief executive Catriona Jackson said.

Part of the difficulty is the sector’s reliance on casual and short-term workers, many of whom don’t show up in official figures. More than 70% of teaching staff at universities are casuals. Most universities aren’t required to report on the actual number of casuals, and they’re not obliged to give accurate representations of academic versus professional staff cuts. 

Adam Lucas, a senior lecturer in science and technology at the University of Wollongong, says even during recent wage theft claims and underpayment scandals, universities avoided disclosing the figures. 

“Some of the big unis have already had to pay back a lot of money to casuals,” he said. “But they still won’t even reveal their methodologies of how they calculate their employment figures, 

“There are no consistent standards by which they have to report their employment figures.” 

Because of the large number of casuals and contract workers, it’s difficult to get a full picture of how many people are employed in the sector. The National Tertiary Education Union (NTEU) estimates about 100,000 were hired as casuals at the beginning of 2020. 

Even in Victoria, where universities have stricter financial reporting standards, Lucas says universities are still gaming the system: “There is obfuscation, secrecy, declaring things are commercial in confidence and being totally lacking in transparency. They are deliberately concealing how many casuals they actually employ.”

It isn’t just the universities. The federal government has become far less transparent with its data on higher education. As Mark Warburton from the University of Melbourne explains, the lack of up-to-date financial data means we don’t know the numbers on which job cuts are justified.

“[The government] used to produce regular reports that summarised funding going into the sector. In 2014, it ended,” he said.

“You don’t get summary reports of information that tell people what’s going on in the sector. Student data has lagged, and you don’t get it until the following year. It used to be the case that by the middle of 2020, 2019 data would be out. But we still don’t have 2020 data.”

All this adds to the opacity around the health of higher education.

Where are the cuts coming from? 

The Australia Institute, which relies on ABS figures, claims most of the 40,000 jobs lost this year have been permanent, full-time positions, and all at public institutions. 

The NTEU tells Crikey it is aware of at least 2129 courses being axed across the sector and another 510 programs cancelled. Most universities approached by Crikey refused to provide a breakdown of which faculties were worst affected.

Anecdotally, there’s a sense many of the cuts have come in arts subjects such as humanities and the social sciences — studies of religion, theatre and performance — but also in the hard sciences, medical and health departments, and research, where funding has been decimated. 

In the past 12 months, the medicine and health faculty at the University of Sydney lost 49 full-time equivalent staff — more than any other faculty at the university. This doesn’t take into account casual or contract staff. 

On top of all that, there’s a feeling the numbers at universities don’t quite add up. Last year, for example, institutions in New South Wales spent more money ($293.9 million) paying redundancies than they lost in revenue ($286.6 million). 

Some wealthier institutions overperformed financially. For example, Monash University, which once anticipated $350 million in lost revenue, posted a $259 million surplus at the cost of 277 jobs. At the University of Melbourne, what was once expected to be $900 million in lost revenue over three years ended up being an $8 million profit. But 450 people lost their jobs. 

Why is there a tension between what universities say about their financial state, and what actually happened? In part it’s because demand from China didn’t fall as much as expected despite border closures. And in part it’s because much of university revenue is tied up in things like endowments and buildings, which can’t be spent in a crisis but still counts.

And it’s also because of job cuts. 

Managers justified those cuts because they helped save universities’ bottom line. But a snapback in foreign demand, particularly from places like India, might not be all that likely. Without more support, cuts will join casualisation and stolen wages as cornerstones of the higher education business model.