Don't go to university next year. Just don't
I spent my entire young parenthood urging my children to study hard and go to university. Silver bullet, I said. It will change your life, your heart and your mind, I said.
Hell, I did the same to myself as I ground my way through a PhD. This was the pinnacle. Hard work, surrounded by smart people urging me to push myself. Just two years ago, I was walking through the grounds of a gorgeous sandstone university with my grandchildren. You'll be going here one day, I heard myself say earnestly. (Yep, tiger mothers turn into tiger grandmothers.)
Now, as a bunch of 18-year-olds are worrying about what to do with the rest of their lives, I urge them to take a deep breath. And wait. I urge parents to stop pushing. This is beyond the usual advice I give about gap years, which always assist maturity. Do not force the next generation onto a treadmill with no safety barriers, no assurance and no confidence in the future. Do not force them to attend institutions which do not have students' best interest at heart.
Going to university in 2026 is a risk no-one should take. Universities are now places of chaotic cost-cutting and cruel managers whose sole interest is the bottom line. Entire disciplines are being cut, staff numbers slashed and there is an even greater than usual reliance on casual staff who are, appropriating Beyonce's poeticism, underpaid and overwhelmed.
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I spoke to Graeme Turner, seasoned academic, researcher and author of Broken: Universities, Politics and the Public Good, who acknowledges the crisis in which higher education finds itself. Minutes into our conversation, he says: 'If the government wants to have a higher education system, it is going to have to face the fact that it will have to pay for it. It's the same problem they face with aged care and childcare. You can't prioritise essential services and turn them over to a market and assume it's going to work. History shows it doesn't.'
History also shows we have a Labor federal minister for education, Jason Clare, who has broken promises, including the promise he would ditch the appalling scheme by which arts students would have to pay 50 grand for a degree. Yep, that one was a Coalition special – Job-ready Graduates, devised to ensure no-one ever did a degree about critical thinking ever again. That fee is still there a full three years after Labor was first elected. I live in hope the Australian Tertiary Education Commission, with Barney Glover, Larissa Behrendt and Mary O'Kane in its interim phase, will seize this moment to provide advice to Clare to stick to his guns. That would be a revelation to all of us. But Andrew Norton, professor of higher education policy at Monash University, now tells me he thinks it can only happen in 2027.
The National Tertiary Education Union (I was a member for 15 years) tells me that more than 10,000 academics have been dumped since the end of 2020. That's thousands of people whose careers were destroyed by the commercialisation of higher education. And sure, never mind fancy-pants careers, the quality of the education those people were providing has deteriorated too. How collegiality in these institutions has survived is a bloody miracle.
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