Australia and the UK - Policy on tuition and access in the mediation of state transformation and changes to higher education

• In Event: State transformation and higher education in comparative perspective

Proposal

The UK and former British colony Australia exhibit close similarities and continued mutual influence in state agencies, political cultures and higher education (e.g. 1960s binary systems and their later abolition, free domestic tuition and later marketisation and high tuition, commercial international education, quasi-markets and new public management, income-contingent tuition loans, deregulation of funded student numbers. The paper discusses the relationship between state transformation and higher education at four key points in the modern history of Australia and the UK:

(1) In Australia in 1942-1949, after a shift to social democratic Labor government amid national emergency, the wartime and post-war reconstruction state (Macintyre, 2015) translated its generic legitimacy into reforms in universities, technical education and research, establishing the basis of a modernised higher education system. In the UK parallel changes began with the Beveridge report (1942) and were realised in the Labour Party-led postwar welfare state.

(2) The educational massification era of the 1960s/1970s saw social mobility through education become a primary strategy of state legitimisation, though only in Australia was this catalysed by a change of power. The Labor Party’s promise of free tuition and further growth in places when it took government in 1972 cemented access to higher education as central to social policy on both sides of politics (Robbins, 1963; Martin, 1964; Marginson, 1997; Hocking, 2014).

(3) In the major change in state rule constituted by neo-liberal ‘responsibilisation’ (Rose, 1999) and state-defined global competition, massification was regrounded in mixed public/private funding, in Australia in 1988 and the UK in 1999/2004; while public universities were remade as global entrepreneurs, in the UK in 1979 and Australia 1987 (Marginson, 1997; 2018). In neither was the neoliberal turn triggered by political contest. It began with the Conservative Party in UK and with Labor in Australia.

(4) In the current politics of access and tuition neoliberal austerity regimes are increasingly unpopular and political contestation has returned. In the UK the state is pulled between the competing logics of Conservative Party quasi-marketisation, which established a standard £9000 student charge in 2012 but also deregulated places, facilitating access; and Labour’s unfunded 2017 election promise to abolish all tuition charges. Labor Australia deregulated domestic student places in 2010 but the Conservatives re-regulated in 2018. Conservative attempts to fully deregulate tuition prices proved unpopular and were dropped.

In all four episodes major changes in higher education can be sourced in the larger set of state conditions, strategies and contests. The politics/policy of access and tuition have been central in state-driven restructuring and legitimation, while for much but not all the time, electoral processes have been a primary medium in successive waves of re-legitimisation. The key strategic role of higher education, plus the contradictions of state legitimation in capitalist societies, feed the politicisation of higher education and shortening fluctuations in tuition and access policy. The political economy of higher education is increasingly unstable over time.

Author

• Simon Marginson, Institute of Education, University of London