This week, both the Sydney Morning Herald and the Australian Financial Review have revealed that most Australian universities have dropped in global rankings according to the Centre for World University Rankings. This will likely spur on the typical ritual when such an event occurs: vice-chancellors, peak bodies such as peak university bodies, and education commentators immediately arrive at the same diagnosis: government funding is inadequate. The solution, we are told, is more taxpayer money.
Yet before Canberra reaches for its chequebook, Australians should ask a more fundamental question. Are our universities suffering from a lack of resources, or from a profound inability to use the resources they already have efficiently? As a former academic myself, the last thing I want to see is a blank cheque for more unconditional money given to these institutions.
Australia’s universities are not impoverished. They collectively receive billions of dollars annually from taxpayers, international student fees, research grants, philanthropic donations, and commercial activities. Many possess property portfolios worth hundreds of millions of dollars. Senior administrators in these public entities registered as charities routinely command salaries that would make many corporate leaders blush. Some of these vice-chancellors are paid multiples of what the Prime Minister is paid. Despite this, university leaders insist that further public funding is the only way to arrest decline.
The evidence suggests otherwise.
The real crisis facing Australian higher education is not one of funding but of priorities. Universities have become bloated bureaucracies increasingly detached from their core missions of teaching, research, and intellectual inquiry.
Over the past two decades, administrative staffing has expanded dramatically across much of the sector. While academics continue to teach larger classes (some in excess of 250 students), supervise growing numbers of students and compete for increasingly scarce research funding, armies of professional staff have emerged to oversee compliance frameworks, strategic initiatives, diversity programs, marketing campaigns, stakeholder engagement portfolios, and institutional transformation projects.
Few would deny that universities require administrative support. Modern institutions are complex organisations operating within demanding regulatory environments. However, there comes a point at which administration ceases to support the academic enterprise and instead becomes the enterprise itself.
Many academics would argue that Australian universities crossed that threshold years ago.
Across campuses, stories abound of scholars spending increasing amounts of time navigating bureaucratic procedures, reporting requirements, and management systems. Teaching staff find themselves buried beneath layers of documentation designed not to improve educational outcomes but to satisfy internal processes. Researchers spend countless hours completing forms, attending mandatory workshops, and participating in strategic planning exercises that bear little relationship to the production of knowledge.
The result is a paradox. Universities employ more administrators than ever (sometimes the ratio of administrators to academics is over three to one), yet many academics report having less time available for the activities universities supposedly exist to promote. This leads to lower quality teaching, dissatisfied students whom the administrators just look at as piggy banks to be shaken, and dissatisfied and stressed academic staff.
The problem extends beyond administrative growth. Australian higher education has increasingly embraced a business model centred on volume rather than excellence. Quantity over quality if you will. For years, universities aggressively expanded enrolments, particularly among international students whom they can charge excessive fees from. International education became one of Australia’s largest export industries, generating enormous revenues for institutions. In many cases, growth itself became the objective.
The consequences were predictable. Lecture theatres became larger. Student-to-staff ratios increased. Casualisation accelerated. Academics found themselves responsible for teaching growing numbers of students while receiving fewer resources and less support. Universities frequently celebrate rising enrolments as evidence of success. Yet a university’s purpose is not simply to maximise student numbers. It is to educate students well. Additionally, we simply do not need the majority of graduates being turned out, especially in Australia where we have a trades skills shortage.
A system obsessed with quantity inevitably risks sacrificing quality.
The incentives created by this model have also reshaped academic employment. Increasing numbers of teaching and research functions are performed by casual and fixed-term staff. Some of Australia’s brightest young scholars spend years moving between short-term contracts with little job security and limited opportunities for advancement.
Meanwhile, the executive class flourishes. An Australian parliamentary committee found that there are around 306 university staff across the nation unethically ‘earning’ more than the premier or chief minister of their state or territory.
In fact, many vice-chancellors routinely receive remuneration packages exceeding one million dollars annually. Deputy vice-chancellors, provosts, and senior executives command salaries that place them among the highest-paid public sector employees in the country (and sometimes in the world). These packages are often justified by comparisons with corporate leadership positions.
But universities are not corporations. They are not a private enterprise where shareholders can decide if they are or are not happy with excessive company capital being deployed to individual salaries. The equivalent in the university sector for shareholders are the stakeholders, namely we the people, John Q taxpayer. And at a time of a mass cost of living crisis driven by excessive and inefficient Labor government spending, is this really the best deployment of resources?
The core purpose of a university is not to maximise shareholder value but to advance knowledge and educate future generations for the well-being of the nation and its people. If institutions genuinely face financial pressures, one might reasonably expect restraint at the top before calls for additional taxpayer support. Instead, the pattern often appears reversed. Executive salaries remain substantial while teaching staff face casualisation, departments are consolidated and research programs struggle for resources.
This disconnect contributes to a growing sense that university governance has become detached from academic realities. It can be the case that more than half of every dollar from student fees is spent on central administration instead of the program that student is enrolled in. Now of course, there are shared overheads across departments and the university ecosystem. But in my view, there is not always a justification. Regarding the student fees, this creates a problem where successful programs have to then beg upwards from their administrative masters for scraps of money they themselves brought in. This is why the break-even points for some classes are incredibly high; unethical administrative inefficiency.
Critics also point to another trend: the increasing prominence of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives. Supporters argue that such programs help create fairer and more representative institutions. Critics contend that universities have devoted excessive resources to ideological projects while neglecting academic excellence. I am one of these critics. Diversity and inclusion at universities is also quite a misnomer, with those who are not left-leaning typically excluded from jobs, and zero being done to address the minimal representation of Jews in academia in Australia. In fact, on the latter point, the current Royal Commission into antisemitism is showing that many Australian Jews in academia were forced out of their roles. Indeed, I was one of these Jews due to speaking out against the October 7 atrocities. DEI programs also create further inefficiencies at universities by then having to hire people to oversee them, jobs that should never need to exist in the first place.
The issue is not whether universities should oppose discrimination. They should. Nor is it whether talented scholars come from diverse backgrounds. They unquestionably do. Rather, the concern is that some institutions appear increasingly focused on demographic characteristics, symbolic commitments, and administrative targets rather than scholarly achievement and intellectual merit. When hiring, promotion and institutional priorities become heavily influenced by bureaucratic frameworks unrelated to teaching or research performance, universities risk undermining the meritocratic principles that underpin academic excellence.
The cumulative effect of these trends is an institution increasingly characterised by managerialism. Systems become too top-heavy, and too wasteful. Now if this was a private enterprise, that’s on them. But universities are a public institution reliant on our money. They should be more accountable.
Universities once operated according to a relatively simple principle: academics taught students, conducted research, and participated in institutional governance where need be. Today, many campuses resemble large bureaucratic corporations governed by layers of managers, strategic plans, key performance indicators, and compliance systems far in excess of what is needed. And even then, one might think that compliance pertaining to safety would be fine if expanded. However, this is not often the case.
Unsuited and outdated management theory has displaced academic judgment.
Professional administrators increasingly exercise influence over decisions that were once the domain of scholars. Success is measured through metrics, rankings, and reporting frameworks rather than intellectual achievement. The language of higher education has become saturated with references to stakeholders, deliverables, transformation agendas, and strategic objectives.
Little wonder that many academics feel alienated from the institutions they serve.
Defenders of the status quo frequently respond that international rankings demonstrate the need for greater investment. Yet rankings themselves often reveal the shortcomings of current priorities.
Many ranking systems reward research output, citations, and ‘reputation’; not actual teaching quality. To note, I don’t even think we should put much stock in rankings systems as numerous top European universities are no longer participating in them. (including the prestigious Sorbonne in Paris). Universities seeking to improve performance should therefore focus on attracting outstanding researchers, supporting productive scholarship, and fostering intellectual excellence. I say for those with a ratio of three-to-one administrators to academics; fire one, keep one, and potentially reassign one on lower pay to be as admin assistant to top research professors to allow them more efficient time to work towards the discoveries that will power out future economy.
Instead, resources are frequently diverted towards administrative growth, branding exercises, and managerial initiatives whose contribution to academic performance is far from obvious.
The question is not whether universities need funding. They do. High-quality research and teaching are expensive endeavours. The question is whether additional taxpayer funding should be provided without demanding meaningful structural reform.
Australians would rightly reject a corporation that responded to declining performance by requesting more government assistance while simultaneously expanding executive remuneration and administrative overheads. Universities should not be exempt from similar scrutiny. Taxpayer funding should be tied to things such as caps in administrator pay, top-level efficiency savings, whilst enhancing support (including better contracts) for the actually important people – which include the educators and researchers.
Government has a responsibility not merely to fund higher education but to ensure public funds are used effectively. That means demanding greater transparency regarding administrative expenditure. It means requiring institutions to justify executive salaries. It means examining the balance between academic and non-academic staffing. And it means asking whether current governance structures genuinely support teaching and research.
Such scrutiny should not be viewed as hostility towards universities. Quite the opposite. Australian universities remain among the nation’s most important institutions. They educate future professionals, generate scientific breakthroughs, and contribute significantly to public debate and economic development. Precisely because they matter, they should be held to high standards.
The same principle applies to government. Canberra cannot credibly demand efficiency from universities while continuing its own habits of wasteful spending, bureaucratic expansion and fiscal indiscipline. Public money is not an infinite resource. Every dollar directed towards higher education is a dollar unavailable for hospitals, infrastructure, defence, or tax relief.
If universities seek additional taxpayer support, they must first demonstrate that existing resources are being directed towards their core mission. That mission is not marketing. It is not institutional branding. It is not bureaucratic empire-building. It is not producing ever-more elaborate administrative frameworks.
It is teaching the absolute top students and creating knowledge.
Until Australian universities recommit themselves to those priorities, demands for additional funding should ring hollow. The challenge confronting the sector is not primarily financial. It is organisational, cultural and managerial.
The path back to international competitiveness does not begin with a larger government cheque. It begins with restoring universities as institutions led by scholars rather than bureaucrats, focused on excellence rather than expansion, and dedicated to academic achievement rather than administrative growth.
Only then will Australian higher education address the causes of its decline rather than merely treating the symptoms.
The author would like to give thanks to all the academic, research, and support staff who contributed to private discussions. Due to fear for their livelihoods, they wished to remain anonymous, but they know who they are.
