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The ACTLERNE Building - Education Investment Fund
26 December 2009
Competition for resources drives much of the activity of universities and USC is no exception. All university income, including that provided by government, must be secured competitively, commencing with the contest for students. This applies to buildings as well. Universities compete for grants to build and maintain their campuses, but the funding is not necessarily allocated to the institutions demonstrating the greatest need for space and infrastructure, or indeed the greatest financial need. Most of the resources currently available for campus development are won on the quality of the teaching and research programs for which they are required, as well as the matching funds available from the university and its partners.
The previous government established an endowment fund, not unlike the Future Fund, as a method of addressing the huge backlog of campus maintenance requirements in Australia’s ageing universities, and to build new campus infrastructure to accommodate growth in the sector. Under the current government, this has become the Education Investment Fund (EIF) and now includes TAFE as well as universities. The key criteria for success in bids for EIF resources include the demonstrated transformational impacts of the teaching and research to be conducted via the described infrastructure, and the iconic nature of the buildings to be constructed, including their environmental sustainability ratings. This puts USC in direct competition for new buildings with Australia’s most established and prestigious universities, as well as large metropolitan TAFE institutes and other rapidly growing university campuses throughout Australia. To date, the bulk of EIF funding has gone to the well established “sandstone universities”.
The most recent EIF round, in the last quarter of 2009, had a total funding pool of $550 million. It was conducted as a two-stage process, involving an initial case establishing the quality of the proposal, followed by an invitation for the few left in the game after the initial cull to submit a full application. It is understood more than 180 applications were received, about 50 were considered worthy of being developed into full applications, and ultimately about 10 of these will probably be funded.
The EIF Board invited USC to submit a full application for one of its two proposals, the ACTLERNE Building (Australian Centre for Transformational Learning, Evaluation and Research in Nursing Education). This is an application for $28 million to establish a new building on the spine of the campus at Sippy Downs to accommodate the University’s Nursing and Midwifery programs. Sunshine Coast TAFE will be a partner and joint tenant.
In Queensland, only two other proposals, one from the University of Queensland and one from Griffith University, were successful in reaching the second stage. This means that not only was the quality of the infrastructure proposed by USC considered to be sufficiently iconic, but also that the teaching and research in Nursing that USC is developing have been assessed as having the potential to make a major contribution to innovation in Nursing education across Australia.
The second stage bid was submitted to Canberra on the 8th of December and we await confirmation of a possible interview with the EIF Board in February. The final outcomes of the process will likely be announced around the time of the Commonwealth budget in May. In the meantime, apart from continuing to press our case, it’s business as usual at USC. This means pursuing all avenues to secure the resources necessary to implement our plans for the development of Nursing education, and the other discipline areas where we didn’t get to the second stage of the EIF process – this time.
Professor Greg Hill is Acting Vice-Chancellor and President at the University of the Sunshine Coast.