REGIONAL and outer-suburban universities have expressed concern over proposed reforms to push students to complete a general degree before entering elite graduate schools at the nation's sandstone universities.
Federal Education Minister Brendan Nelson yesterday outlined in The Australian a second wave of reforms that would encourage universities to specialise in research graduate schools or teaching only.
Predicting that under the US-style graduate school model, taxpayer-funded places would be shifted from the prestige research-intensive universities to teaching-only campuses, Dr Nelson said the changes were required to ensure Australia's universities could compete internationally.
Vice-chancellors of Melbourne, Queensland and Monash universities welcomed the plan for a radical shift to a two-tiered degree system. But University of Western Sydney vice-chancellor Janice Reid said the proposal would be opposed by many students. "The people of greater western Sydney would find it regressive indeed to return to a situation where they had to travel for up to four hours a day for any part of their university education," she said.
"Western Sydney is the third-largest economy behind Sydney and Melbourne with ... a ninth of Australia's total population. The notion that a CBD-based university is the natural location for postgraduate education flies in the face of the economic and demographic trends in Australia."
Australian National University vice-chancellor Ian Chubb said his institution welcomed the plan, but warned it could hurt disadvantaged students.
"Brendan Nelson is dead right in realising the reality that there are already some universities where so little research is being done that the're really teaching only," he said.
"My concern is if you turn professional entry such as law and medicine into graduate degrees from the big universities you might be keeping very able people from those professions because they can't afford the fees or they are concerned about large debts."
And La Trobe University vice-chancellor Michael Osbourne said most students wanted to see the amount of time they spent at universities reduced, not increased.
"I would also be concerned if universities with a research record are forced into teaching only," he said.
Opposition Leader Kim Beazley said the "Americanisation" of the Australian system was a product of funding starvation.
"What the Howard Government has done is trash a great Australian export. They have trashed a great Australian export and now they're trying to get out of their trashing of it, and trashing of that opportunity for thousands of young Australians, by Americanising it." Campion College, a private Catholic institution offering undergraduate courses in western Sydney from next year, said it was already planning to embrace the graduate school model. "We are in the business of offering liberal arts degree from which students can then build a vocational postgraduate degree in either business, education, media, medicine or law at Notre Dame or one of the other universities," said college president John Fleming.
