The Tertiary Education Imbroglio
A Short History
Back in the seventies the Whitlam government, concerned at the persistence of privilege across generations and believing in the emancipatory power of education, ditched university fees. Which had the effect of opening up tertiary education to demographies (chiefly the working and middle classes) for whom it had previously been out of reach. While this seemed a worthwhile project, it was in fact the latest in a line of tertiary education reforms that began in 1940 when the Curtin Labor Government made the then radical move of offering university scholarships to women, while at the same time dramatically increasing their availability. By the 1960s the conservative Menzies government had established a number of new universities and introduced incentives for students to undertake postgraduate research studies. And then, some fifteen years after the abolition of university fees by Whitlam, the Hawke government re-introduced them. And perhaps more dramatically, opened up university places to fee paying international students.
Whether by design or accident, universities quickly became exemplars of the best and worst of capitalism. Double-digit annual international enrolment growth rates exploded through the 1990s. By 2019 more than half a million international students comprised almost a third of all higher education enrolments, and universities benefited to the tune of almost $10 billion in revenue. And by 2023/4 education had become, at a value exceeding $51 billion, Australia’s fourth largest export industry, behind iron ore, coal and gas.
As both domestic and international enrolments have soared over the last three decades so too have the number of recognised public universities, now standing at forty. It’s a large number for a small (by population) country. And courses that might be described as more vocational in nature now carry the “degree” label. At the same time universities have been increasingly managed as economic enterprises and less as institutions of advanced learning. The orientation of research work has become redirected towards commercial or practical outcomes at the expense of knowledge for its own sake (sometimes called “basic research”). Pressure to ameliorate standards to ensure that fee paying customers actually get awarded degrees has led to questionable course design and assessment procedures. The cachet historically associated with being a university graduate has gradually faded and discerning recruiters are now taking degrees at something less than face value. Using new filters like university quality tiering and case study analyses (sans devices) to identify the best recruits.
The Rise of AI
It’s pretty evident now that as communities, societies and nations we have very little understanding of either the potential advantages or the pitfalls (or worse, like existential risk) of artificial intelligence. In fact we’re little more than the hapless guinea pigs of the tech bros who are intent, as they always are, to extract as much economic gain as possible from their new toys. Toys which may well end up devouring them. And us, of course. Prototypes and beta testing have largely been abandoned in the indecent haste to get “product” to market. And with the likes of Musk and Altman at the helm of emerging AI behemoths, never has the exhortation “buyer beware” been more apposite.
With the first semester of the university year now behind us, the memory of the flurry of assessment marking has started to fade. But one instance remains embedded in my memory. The particular assessment involved students responding to a leadership “stimulus” (a photo of a well known “leader”) and providing a critique by video. Marking these sorts of assessments is an ordeal with which most academics are well familiar nowadays. There’s the fatuous nonsense, the plagiarized nonsense, the unintelligible and the unrecognizable. But, of course, there are always submissions that are well researched, well articulated and insightful. Marking at either end of this spectrum is relatively easy. But for the bulk of the middle ranking students, grading against “objective” rubrics demands concentration and diligence. And all students deserve our assiduity. And so I came to grade this particular submission, one of a multitude. I’d read the video transcript and been impressed with the reasoning, the evidence adduced and the sophisticated use of nuanced language. I clicked on the video with something approaching enthusiasm. To my dismay, it soon became clear the student was having huge difficulty reading his own transcript. He stumbled over his own words as though he’d never encountered them before. Which of course, I soon realised, he hadn’t.
AI is developing at a rapid rate and learning how to use “prompts” is increasingly a skill many of us consider worth acquiring. I started to speculate that this particular student may well have issued prompts to the effect of instructing his digital assistant to not only write the leadership critique, but to do so in a style that would likely appeal to John English. There would be no shortage of training material. The bot would not even need to penetrate the marking archives of previous semesters, but would simply access my nearly 400 blog posts on SubStack. That’s well over half a million words. It’s theft of course, by any moral assessment. A contravention of basic intellectual property rights. But none of OpenAI, Amazon, Anthropic and Alphabet seem to care. They’re barnstorming across the internet, brazenly crashing through firewalls and openly stealing proprietary content to feed the insatiable appetites of their Large Language Models (LLMs). The auguries are not good. A class action law suit brought by three authors in the US late last year alleged that Anthropic accessed millions of copyrighted digitized books to train their chatbot. Without permission and without compensation. What appears – to my mind at least – to be a straightforward case of theft on a grand scale was, according to the presiding US District Judge, “fair use” of copyright material. Thankfully the question of whether pirated copies can be used as training copies for LLMs will proceed to trial.
Universities seem hugely confused about what to do with AI. Fight it, or teach it. Or do both. If dire predictions of the imminent loss of white collar jobs to more efficient automated bots are taken seriously, then much of what is currently being taught at the tertiary level will be of limited vocational benefit. But learning how to best instruct or direct bots will become a vital skill. Right now they “hallucinate” and “cheat” (me fears another blog on these themes!), but they are improving rapidly. Still, uncertainty abounds. And those with the loudest voices are those with the greatest vested interests. And in the meantime, students seem to be doing a fair bit of their own cheating. Perhaps we’ll end up in some sort of arms race as learning institutions develop software to identify AI generated assessments and AI becomes more sophisticated at concealing itself. Maybe there’ll be a reversion to pen and paper exams in auditoriums in which digital devices are prohibited. But with high invigilation costs that would not seem a path down which universities would be happy to tread.
A Business Model for Education
Encouraging universities to act as profit maximizing organisations is a questionable decision at best. The old idea of intellectual enquiry for its own sake is being sacrificed in the interests of commercial outcomes. The proliferation of degree courses under the aegis of university education is degrading the status of university degrees. Foreign students with limited English language capability are being enrolled in courses for which they are patently ill equipped. Language testing has lost credibility as universities compete in maniacal fashion for high fee paying international students. Course integrity is being compromised to ensure that pass rates are maintained, quality be damned. Contract cheating websites have proliferated and now the use, and misuse, of AI is rampant. Universities have variablised their labour costs by outsourcing much of their teaching load to part time sessional lecturers and tutors (like me) - on a purely head count basis, most university teachers now are casual. And they have prioritised “research” (highly contrived and of limited value in many of the social sciences) over teaching in the competition for international ratings (which heavily weight “publications”).
It is pretty easy to catastrophise the plight of the university sector in this country. Though it must be said in painting a rather grim picture, I haven’t mentioned esoteric and misfiring government funding models or the state of student debt. The current imbroglio has been a long time coming and quick fixes are unlikely. But a vibrant education sector is arguably one of the most important elements in a well functioning polity. We simply have to repair it. And that will inevitably require additional resourcing. Which governments (well apart from the Trump Republicans spending like the proverbial drunken sailors in the US) hate. Wealth taxes, anyone?
“Education is the most powerful weapon which you can use to change the world.”
- Nelson Mandela