Academy of Social Sciences in Australia
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President's Report
Professor Stuart Macintyre
Australians abroad
A few weeks ago I joined a group of Australians studying here in Harvard to celebrate the Prime Minister's Apology to Aboriginal Australians. There is a large group of these Australian students, some in graduate coursework at the Kennedy School of Government, some in the Law School, some in the Business School and others pursuing doctoral research across a range of the social sciences.
They are a striking illustration of the internationalisation of university study, and also of the patterns among expatriate Australians that Graeme Hugo has been studying. Their appreciation of their courses of study and the intellectual stimulation of Harvard is strong.
They are closely involved in events here, especially the presidential primaries, and I was struck by the strength of the enthusiasm for Barak Obama. At the same time they follow closely what is happening back in Australia. I could not help but recall the difficulty of doing so when I was a doctoral student in England in the 1970s. Fellows who undertook similar overseas study in that distant era will recall the lack of information from Australia. Aerograms were the principal medium and occasionally I could persuade a correspondent to smuggle a newspaper clipping into one, if only to give the football results. One night late in 1975 an undergraduate contemporary who was working in The Age's London office rang to say that an odd report was coming down the telex, something about the prime minister being sacked. We agreed that it must be a mistake in transmission.
The graduate students here watched Kevin Rudd in Parliament; they read online news from the Australian press as regularly as they read the print version of American media; and they are in regular contact with friends and colleagues back home. The shrinkage of distance, the capacity to follow and be involved in affairs across national boundaries, and the growing numbers of non-resident Australians who contribute their diverse experiences and understandings to Australian intellectual life is remarkable.
University funding: an update
I wrote in the last Dialogue of the keen debate here on the funding of higher education. The mounting cost of college tuition and the spectacular growth of university endowments have brought calls for greater assistance to students. In January the annual report of the National Association of College and University Business Officers revealed the magnitude of endowments. Harvard's (US)$34.6 billion heads a list of 785 institutions. Seventy-six of them have endowments of more than $1 billion, and 141 exceed $500 million; but the holdings drop away to a long tail - the median is $90 million.
The wealthiest have begun to respond to the pressure to provide greater access. Harvard started the process. It already waives tuition fees for students with family incomes of less than $60,000 per annum and now will cap charges at ten percent of family income up to $180,000. Then Yale extended its financial assistance for undergraduates with family incomes of up to $200,000. Stanford lifted its income limit free tuition from $60,000 to $100,000, and a number of Ivy League colleges have made similar changes.
The need for fee relief is indisputable. Tuition and accommodation charges for leading private institutions come close to $50,000 a year, and the rate of increase is several points ahead of inflation.
The problem facing less well-endowed institutions is that they cannot match these concessions. As some of their presidents have remarked, all their assistance goes to students with much lower family incomes. The commitment to assist them is impressive: 31 per cent of first-year students at four-year colleges come from families with annual income of less than $50,000, according to a recent survey. But 38 per cent come from families with an income of over $100,000.
The consequences of such inequality of access are illuminated in another recent study conducted by the Brookings Institution and the Pew Foundation. They found that 45 per cent of children of parents with an income in the bottom quintile would themselves earn incomes in the bottom quintile without a college education; but only 16 per cent of those who earned college degrees remained in that income quintile. Moreover, they found that Hispanic and Black Americans are falling further behind whites and Asians in obtaining degrees.
Australia's method of charging for higher education differs significantly. Our capped fees for Commonwealth Supported Places and income-contingent loans leave a much smaller burden of debt on graduates. Yet Australia needs to increase its higher education participation rate, which is especially marked among lower-income families. It also needs to improve the quality of its universities, and the constraints on public funding have seen a shift towards fee income and endowments as means to make good the shortfall.
The new government has signalled its intention to boost research, and the current Review of the National Innovation System is an important first step. The Academy is keenly interested in the review. A recent forum of the National Academies Forum signalled that interest and our 2008 Symposium will be devoted to the subject. There are undoubtedly improvements to be made in the effective utilisation of research and innovation, and we look forward to the outcomes of the review. But while the Commonwealth government highlights the importance of research and innovation, we should not lose sight of the importance of education.
We need highly educated Australians to undertake the research that drives innovation. We need them to take up and work with the fruits of that research. We need more graduates in the core disciplines in the humanities and social sciences, as well as the physical and life sciences, which generate the advances in specialised fields. And we need to ensure that none of the country's intellectual talent is lost for lack of opportunity to realise its potential.
Stuart Macintyre
2008
Last modified: 2 November 2009.