Uni study

At the end of last week, Julia Gillard, the Education Minister announced a review of the higher education sector. It will be chaired by Denise Bradley, the former vice-chancellor of the University of South Australia, and report by the end of the year. She is going to need to get cracking.

Australian universities are still good. One or two are very good - they make the top 100 in the world according to the best regarded of the ranking systems. But they're not great - they aren't of the calibre of Harvard, UC Berkeley, MIT, Chicago or Oxford. Realistically they're not in the next tier down either, with the likes of Wisconsin, Johns Hopkins, Tokyo, or Imperial College in London.

They are not in the tier below that either. The ANU is ranked 57 (its highest rank was 49), Melbourne is at 79 - which puts it below Sheffield, Arizona and Case Western Reserve. That's the context, or part of it.

The scarier* part is that all the OECD countries, well nearly all, have been shovelling money into universities while the previous Coalition government did not. Mostly, they were neglected, sometimes they were thrown a bone or two. The OECD figures on this are unequivocal and I say that as someone who's had to sit through discussions between the then Education Minister Julie Bishop and her then shadow, Stephen Smith. Oh. My. God.

The thing is, the last government didn't really like the universities. It thought they were full of 'elites'. It suspected the uni folk were a bunch of lefties who liked Paul Keating. John Howard defined himself as the common man (the fact that he was completely uncommon in his ambition, work ethic, intelligence and political nous is beside the point). His government correctly calculated that most people thought the unis were full of smart-arses and that not shovelling large quantities of money into them wouldn't lose any votes.

But this new government has as Prime Minister a policy wonk. We know that he's very clever indeed and it's part of his appeal. We like thinking that this clever man is looking after the country. You would think he might have a bit more sympatico when it comes to the universities, even if there aren't many votes in it.

I think you'd be right. Here's a prediction: the review will report that the unis need a lot more money if Australia's going to compete in an increasingly knowledge-based global economy. Here's another prediction: the universities, for their part, will accept that they can't be all things to all students and specialise. A big chunk of the 38 of them will agree to concentrate on teaching. A smaller chunk will trundle on doing a bit of teaching and a bit of research - but will concentrate their efforts on their strengths. The Group of Eight will agree to specialise a bit more too and in return receive even more of the research funding.

And then, barring complete global financial disaster (not assured), in next year's budget the government will allocate some meaningful money. The vast majority of which will be delivered in its second and third terms.

The universities, which would rather have jam now, will accept that more jam tomorrow is better than no jam at all.

(*The really scary part is how much money China is investing in its universities and research infrastructure. Of which, more another time)