The Government will be changing aspects to New Zealand’s higher education system, informed by a recently released report by the University Advisory Group.
Changes include a new strategy for all of New Zealand’s tertiary education sector; a strategy group to help improve collaboration between universities, government, and industry; and replacing the way the $315 million Performance-Based Research Fund works with a more simplified way of assessing research performance.
The Science Media Centre asked experts to comment.
Professor Richard Easther, Department of Physics, University of Auckland, comments:
“I certainly want to see universities maximise the contributions they make to the society that supports them and universities are the foundation for the value-chain of a knowledge-based economy. However, after seeing this government weaken the Marsden and Endeavour Funds it seems that they do not understand the linkages between deep research excellence and economic value, so I am concerned about their ability to achieve this in practice.
“It’s great for the sector to have more certainty and we’ve been waiting for this for a long time. However, this is still a plan to get a plan and the devil is always in the details.
“For example, replacing PBRF portfolios with ‘metrics’ will save a lot of academics a lot of time, but the current system involves a human assessment of excellence and impact. All metrics can create perverse incentives to produce large amounts of lower quality work, so quantitative assessments will need to be done with care.”
No conflicts of interest.
Dr Sereana Naepi, Associate Professor Sociology, University of Auckland, and Rutherford Discovery Fellow, comments:
“The signals in today’s release show our government will continue to push forward with their economic agenda no matter the evidence. This government has chosen to follow the same devastating path we’ve watched unfold in Australia and the UK where economic rationale has been used to dismantle the social sciences and humanities. The evidence from both Australia and the UK shows that this approach doesn’t even achieve its stated economic goals, it just creates unsustainable institutions that serve neither students nor communities well. I’m not anti-innovation or anti-economic development, but I am against the false choice that says we must gut social sciences and humanities to fund STEM fields; instead we need to invest in our university systems to enable all of our community to thrive. Our tertiary education strategy needs to ensure that we don’t sacrifice the social sciences and humanities in our search for economic growth as we have seen in the research sector.
“As someone whose research focuses on how universities can better serve all learners and communities, I see a fundamental misunderstanding in these reports about what universities are for. The Draft Tertiary Education Strategy’s objective is “A tertiary education system that enables people to succeed with knowledge and skills that advance an innovative, high-productivity economy, and improve quality of life.” But universities aren’t just about economic productivity. They’re where we preserve cultural knowledge, where we ask difficult questions about justice and equity, where we develop the critical thinking skills needed for democratic participation. When we reduce ourselves and our children to economic outputs, we lose something essential about what makes us human. In my research, I often talk about relational logic versus economic logic. Economic logic asks: what’s the cheapest way to produce job-ready graduates? Relational logic asks: how do we create educational institutions that serve our communities and help people reach their full potential?
“What we need is a tertiary education strategy that recognises universities’ multiple roles: yes, they train graduates for the workforce and contribute to the creation of new technologies, but they also preserve knowledge, challenge injustice, support community development, and help create informed citizens. We need investment that strengthens both economic and social outcomes, not policies that sacrifice one for the other. The government still has time to choose a different path and to learn from international failures rather than repeating them. But this will only be possible if we’re willing to have an honest conversation about what kind of society we want our universities to help create and I’m not sure we have created the environment and pathways to have that conversation.”
No conflicts of interest.
Prof Sir Peter Hunter FRS, KNZM, University of Auckland, comments:
“There are a number of important recommendations in this report. I strongly endorse the call for a Higher Education Council (HEC) to facilitate much greater collaboration between the universities and with the new Public Research Organisations. The research sector would be more effective in generating social, economic and environmental benefits for New Zealand if we had more coordination and less competition between the research providers. We need to strongly guard the role of individual academics to pursue their own research agenda (since this is the seed of new ideas for future outcomes) but broader collaborative facilities and skills are often needed to turn those ideas into outcomes that benefit the taxpayers who have supported that basic research. We are a small (in population), remote country a long way from the research and economic powerhouses in Europe, Asia and the US. We really do need to overcome those disadvantages by being smarter in the way we collaborate. I also support the call for stronger academic governance as the current lack of engagement between university Councils and academic Senates (as opposed to the executive) is a barrier, at least in Auckland, to setting and achieving strategic goals. There are many other excellent recommendations in the report but those are the ones I want to highlight.”
No conflicts of interest.
Dr Troy Baisden, Co-President, New Zealand Association of Scientists, comments:
Note: Dr Baisden is also Principal Investigator in Te Pūnaha Matatini Centre of Research Excellence, Affiliate at Motu Research and two universities, but is speaking in his role as NZAS Co-President.
“The Government has announced what it will do with the University Advisory Group’s (UAG) recommendations, which when combined with a separate group looking at the research system, the original cabinet paper declared it would be ‘surprising if the advisory groups did not recommend fundamental change.’
“Alas, despite recommendations made, there will be little change in universities.
“The problem is that the success of our universities is the product of the many successes of individual researchers and fields of study. This reality has been buried in efforts not to disrupt the ministry and institutions, so actions being taken up by the government will bury the strategic recommendations that would have led to major improvements.
“The strategic intent was clear in the Interim Report, initially produced a year ago, which is more valuable and should be more enduring than the operational recommendations in the final report.
“So, what can we expect not to change?
“Perhaps most poignantly, we will be happy that all our universities rank in the top 30% globally in the most favourable ranking. We’ll dismiss concerns that our best university is struggling to rank among Australia’s 8 top universities in this survey, and falls behind in the two other widely used rankings. [The Minister’s press release will also place us in the 3% (sic) globally, presumably a typo showing a lack of attention to facts that matter.]
“We’ll offer kind words to collaborations between universities and the rest of our research system, as well as the tech and innovation sector, but continue to study whether any actual action or funding might be needed.
“We’ll acknowledge the sector is struggling with funding but kick any actions into the competition for next year’s Budget initiatives. We’ll continue to embrace international students as a source of revenue.
“We’ll continue to launch teams to study many of the trickier challenges in the system, particularly those emanating from two of the 11 recommendations in the Interim UAG Report that pointed to the need to reduce growing managerialism and bureaucracy.
“We’ll continue to acknowledge that excessive competition between universities is unhelpful, while taking little or no action to encourage collaboration to retain scholarship and teaching in areas becoming less popular or needed to maintain post-graduate learning important for areas unique to New Zealand.
“We’ll rebrand the Performance-Based Research Fund as the Tertiary Research Excellence Fund, replacing the controversial quality evaluation component and with citation metrics. What remains to be seen is if the recommendation for off-the shelf institutional metrics is adopted, what will ensure individual academics remain valued and employed? Will a meaningful suite of metrics be adopted and prove durable and attractive?
“We’ll continue to embrace the ideas of institutional autonomy and academic freedom, while at the same time doing too little to protect them as the space for healthy debate and innovation. Just for example, that would help us find win-win solutions to our recurring hand-wringing about the economy versus the environment, particularly around agriculture and forestry where universities appear to be losing critical mass.
“In some cases UAG is also at fault for failing to carry its strategic case through to operational recommendations. Two odd instances stand out. In the first case, it found no workable solution to New Zealand’s anomalously high overheads, where levying the full costs of running institutions means that at least $1.10 goes to the institution for every dollar that goes directly to research. Europe has capped this at 25 cents and Donald Trump wants it cut to 15 cents in the US.
“In addition, funding for Centres of Research Excellence (CoREs) has become the only way to support enduring capacity around areas of national significance after National Science Challenges were decommissioned. Yet, like National Science Challenges, UAG recommends CoREs be defunded and left behind in name only after 12 years, nominally so funding can support new areas. This is remarkable given that most great developments require support for about 2 decades to succeed.
“One question remains from the Science System Advisory Report still being considered by Cabinet. Will we see any significant changes to funding or the interactions between the PROs and Universities, particularly in the area of Advanced Technology?
“That remains the last hope that there could be fulfilment of expectation for fundamental changes quoted from Cabinet in the Preamble to the year-old Interim UAG report. The Preamble’s quote reads, ‘Our public research system, Crown Research Institutes and universities, face enduring structural challenges that get in the way of it delivering value to New Zealand. The system is fragmented, with poor visibility of the effectiveness of current investments, and suffers from duplication, inefficiency, and poor use of resources.'”
Conflict of interest statement: “Troy receives funds from Centres of Research Excellence funding, has been a university professor, and could contribute to the citation impact of affiliated universities in the replacement for PBRF.”