Is Australia’s highest paid college boss actually without spending a dime schooling?
If the Australian Monetary Overview’s Julie Hare is to be believed, College of Melbourne Vice-Chancellor Duncan Maskell has “joined an alliance of Greens, socialists and pupil unions calling for the reintroduction of free college”.
It is a shocking alliance, to say the least. Maskell receives an annual wage of $1.5 million, making him the very best paid of any Australian vice-chancellor. He sits on the board of the ASX-listed biotech firm CSL. In his 5 years as vice-chancellor, he has overseen a number of restructures and wage theft scandals and the sacking of a whole bunch of employees. In 2020, he publicly acknowledged his scepticism of lifesaving lockdowns, questioning whether or not the price of retaining the aged alive was within the total public curiosity.
At his annual deal with to the college in June, Maskell proclaimed his assist without spending a dime schooling, arguing to shift away from “the concept that college schooling is barely of personal profit to people—not public profit to societies”.
However any such pronouncements concerning the “public good” from bosses like Maskell should be scrutinised. Larger schooling is, in any case, now a multibillion-dollar trade that has relentlessly imposed cost-cutting measures. It’s an unlikely coincidence that these headline-grabbing feedback had been made simply hours earlier than a whole bunch of College of Melbourne employees started a 24-hour strike in opposition to Maskell’s refusal to grant fundamental job safety and an actual pay rise to his 12,000 workers.
If Maskell is so eager on equalising entry to schooling, what precisely has he accomplished to make tertiary schooling extra reasonably priced and accessible?
The college’s US-style “Melbourne Mannequin”, during which college students full common undergraduate programs after which extra particular postgraduate levels to achieve {qualifications}, has massively elevated pupil charges. A typical five-year undergraduate medication diploma, for instance, prices round $59,000 at different universities and could be lined by a HECS-HELP mortgage. On the College of Melbourne, a full-fee place within the Physician of Medication program prices $366,000, on high of the price of an undergraduate diploma. This exceeds the cap for presidency loans, which means college students pay a good portion out of pocket.
Maskell drew on his personal ascension from a working-class background to high college government in his speech. But the college he runs has a horrible file of serving to poor potential college students: between 2013 and 2019, the variety of college students enrolled from low-SES backgrounds elevated by simply 23, in keeping with information from the Nationwide Centre for the Examine of Fairness in Larger Schooling. Offering scholarships primarily based on want somewhat than efficiency or making pupil lodging extra reasonably priced might simply make the college extra accessible.
Maskell’s name without spending a dime schooling has an essential qualifier: it could be restricted to home college students. Earnings within the larger schooling sector are primarily based largely on fleecing worldwide college students for overpriced levels. The College of Melbourne at the moment prices worldwide college students $100,000 to $180,000 for a bachelor’s diploma. In 2020, it made $845 million from worldwide pupil charges.
Underneath Makell’s imaginative and prescient for a extra “equitable” larger schooling system, the sector would proceed to make huge income from exporting schooling on the worldwide market, whereas receiving extra authorities funding for home college students to offset the discount in pupil charges. And the place ought to this extra authorities income come from, in keeping with Maskell? Not further taxes on the companies and billionaires who profit from the availability of expert graduates, however from elevated taxes on graduates themselves.
The college’s submission to the Labor authorities’s Australian Universities Accord notes that free schooling “appears extraordinarily unlikely to achieve authorities assist”. That is appropriate—the ALP deserted free schooling within the Eighties and has since elevated pupil charges repeatedly. But when Maskell actually is a believer in free (or much more reasonably priced) schooling, he might simply slash pupil charges himself. To pay for it, maybe he might promote among the college’s 200 inner-city actual property property, or money in a few of its multibillion-dollar funding portfolio. Tapping into 2021’s $584 million surplus could possibly be a begin.
However he won’t ever contemplate doing any of that, as a result of he’s the boss of a company college. He’ll at all times put income above the pursuits of employees and college students.
