Content
New goals for higher education in Australia
11 November 2006
Just over a week ago the Australian Universities Quality Agency (AUQA) concluded their academic audit of our University.
A team of six people scrutinised a huge amount of documentation and interviewed dozens of people from within and outside the University.
In January we will have a draft report of their independent assessment of how we are succeeding as a University, judged against our own mission and goals.
These audits occur every five years, and the first cycle of audits of all Australian universities is nearing completion.
In the next five year cycle the audits are likely to follow a different pattern, and be much more strongly influenced by the newly released ‘National Protocols for Higher Education Approval Processes’.
That document, approved by State Ministers in July, foreshadows the emergence of a new higher education sector with the opportunity for other national and international organisations to seek university status.
Six new goals for higher education in Australia have been established, and these goals will likely influence strongly the next round of AUQA audits.
Instead of gauging a university’s performance against its own mission, AUQA will now be more concerned with a university’s performance against these new national goals, leaving open the prospect for more direct comparisons of universities and the likelihood of league tables emerging even more strongly. If this were to eventuate, it would in some ways be at odds with strongly stated intentions of both major parties to see more diverse universities, operating in different ways in different areas.
USC is well placed, in strong growth mode, to become a major national university in this century, but the goals relating to research must now be addressed as a priority, to ensure that after our first decade and establishment phase, we move to a new, higher level with respect to research performance. And there are already encouraging signs from the first Annual Research Conference this week that we are on track to step up to a new level with research.
Professor Paul Thomas is Vice-Chancellor of the University of the Sunshine Coast