Innovate and prosper: ensuring Australia's future competitiveness through university-industry collaboration

Executive summary The continuation of Australia’s economic growth is under threat. In order to sustain the levels of prosperity we have previously experienced, we have to build on our competitive edge in key industries to remain globally competitive. Alongside these developments, Australia’s higher education system is under increased pressure to become more productive and develop courses that address employability. Innovation represents the most reliable and sustainable solution to transition into a high value, high wage economy. Yet Australia ranks 29th out of 30 in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) in terms of the proportion of large businesses and small to medium enterprises (SMEs) collaborating with higher education and public research institutions on innovation.   This report acts as the next level of detail to publications such as the Department of Industry’s Boosting the Commercial Returns from Research report and the Business Council of Australia’s Building Australia’s Comparative Advantages, which have highlighted Australia’s poor performance in collaborative innovation. We present five recommendations that are a call to action to universities, industry and Government to take the necessary steps to build an innovation economy. They are not a call for additional funding from Government, rather a more effective way of using our existing resources. PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) have engaged with leading figures from industry, including the Australian Industry Group (Ai Group), and partnered with the ATN to develop this five point action plan for Government, the university sector and industry 5 that will provide incentives and impetus for collaboration. Our recommendations include: Rebalance the national research agenda to underpin Australia\u27s economy and future prosperity Create incentives for university-industry collaboration Train researchers for diverse careers Enhance career mobility between industry, academia and government Provide incentives for co-investment in research infrastructure between universities, industry and state and federal government Each recommendation contains a number of practical strategies for consideration by Government, universities and industry. The hope is that the report will encourage dialogue between the three groups and prompt bold policy changes in the coming 12 months and beyond. &nbsp

Public perceptions of Australia’s universities

This report finds that universities are well regarded by the Australian public and business community.During 2012 Universities Australia reached out to the public and stakeholders to elicit their views and understanding of universities to assist in formulating its first ever policy statement. This included conducting a series of university community forums, engaging directly with decision makers and interested groups such as business. It involved qualitative and quantitative research, including focus groups and a survey of 1000 members of the Australian public and 300 business employers.The data was weighted to be representative of the Australian population and the whole business community. The research was intended to assist Universities Australia to better understand the levels of knowledge about the role Australia\u27s universities play in Australian life.The research has found that while universities are held in high regard and are strongly valued for their contribution to the economy and society, there is a desire to know more. It is also clear that Australians feel there is a need for the university sector to more actively participate in debates about issues important to our national interest.&nbsp

A webometric analysis of Australian Universities using staff and size dependent web impact factors (WIF)

This study describes how search engines (SE) can be employed for automated, efficient data gathering for Webometric studies using predictable URLs. It then compares the usage of staffrelated Web Impact Factors (WIFs) to sizerelated impact factors for a ranking of Australian universities, showing that rankings based on staffrelated WIFs correlate much better with an established ranking from the Melbourne Institute than commonly used sizedependent WIFs. In fact sizedependent WIFs do not correlate with the Melbourne ranking at all. It also compares WIF data for Australian Universities provided by Smith (1999) for a longitudinal comparison of the WIF of Australian Universities over the last decade. It shows that sizedependent WIF values declined for most Australian universities over the last ten years, while staffdependent WIFs rose

University fees: what students pay in deregulated markets

Overview For more than a year Australia has debated deregulating university fees for domestic undergraduates. The issue is controversial, but for many years fees have been deregulated for international students and domestic postgraduate coursework students. This report looks at how much these students pay for their courses, and analyses differences between these fees. Australian universities responded enthusiastically to the deregulation of the international and domestic postgraduate coursework markets. Although the fees charged are often high, strong enrolment growth shows students are willing to pay them. Last year, for example, 312,500 international students were enrolled in Australian universities, nearly twice as many as in 2001. They comprise nearly a quarter of all enrolments. Student fees from deregulated places are important to university finances. They provided a fifth of public university funding, or nearly $6 billion, in 2013. Public universities earned at least$4.3 billion from international students in 2013, while most of the remaining amount came from fee-paying domestic postgraduates. For both international and domestic students, fees vary by discipline and especially by university. International students usually pay significantly more, and never less, than domestic students in the same course. Their fees are set in a global, commercially-oriented market in which prestigious universities charge international students a substantial fee premium over less well known universities. In some disciplines, students at the most expensive university pay more than twice as much than students at the cheapest university. Despite the cost, many international students prefer expensive universities. In most disciplines high-fee universities enrol more international students than low-fee universities. Australian students are less willing than international students to pay a large prestige premium. They and their prospective employers understand the strengths of local universities. They know that research-driven international university rankings are an imperfect guide to the quality of graduates. Many Australian postgraduate students already have a foothold in the labour market. They have less need to impress employers with university prestige. Even so, in several disciplines domestic students, like international students, prefer the more expensive universities. In some postgraduate courses, the market is affected by price-controlled government-supported places. This is especially true of education and nursing degrees. These places help keep fees down for domestic students without a government-supported place. Many universities offer full-fee places at less than what they receive for a government-supported student. A future Grattan report will explore what profits universities make on fee-paying students and the policy implications of what happens to the money

The Stairway to the Top: The Remuneration of Academic Executives

Australian universities have in recent times been undergoing a substantial transformation in the way in which they are managed. They have moved away from the (British-based) traditional collegiate model to one in which professional managers play a centre-stage role. This paper investigates an important element of the managerialism at Australian universities, the market for what we call “academic executives” (AEs). We analyse the remuneration of the top AEs at Australian universities over the past six years and show that institutional size is a dominant driving factor of remuneration, as has been found with compensation of CEOs in the private sector. We also find the pay-size elasticity to be about 0.25 and is the same for both the university and private sectors; and remarkably, this value has also been found in previous studies on executive remuneration for the US and the UK. The remuneration schedule for the university sector is about half as steep as that for the private sector, suggesting that it is a much harder climb to the top of the corporate ladder. We analyse the structure of remuneration among AEs and the Group of Eight universities are found to have a pay parity structure that is closest to that for the private sector.

An Analysis of the Questions on University Teaching Surveys and the Universities that Use Them: The Australian Experience

This paper is the first attempt to perform an analysis of the internal Quality of Teaching Surveys (QTS) used in all Australian Universities by investigating how they compare across Universities. We categorize the questions on each university’s QTS into one of 18 types and then define a proximity measure between the surveys. We then use an agglomerative cluster analysis to establish groupings of these institutions on the basis of the similarity of their QTSs as well as groupings of question types by their frequency of use. In addition, we also determine if the form of the survey is related to the responses recorded by the Course Evaluation Questionnaire (CEQ) that is administered to all graduates of Australian Universities. This was done by the use of regression analysis to establish if the form of the questionnaire is related to the overall good teaching scores earned by the universities from the CEQ.Tertiary Education; University Rankings; CEQ

How Australian and Indonesian Universities Treat Plagiarism: a Comparative Study

This article is a part of a larger study comparing various aspects of policies on plagiarism in two university contexts. It compares policies on plagiarism in universities in Australia and Indonesia. The results of this comparative study showed that Australian and Indonesian universities treat plagiarism differently. Australian universities treat plagiarism explicitly in their university policies. In Australian universities, plagiarism is defined clearly and forms of plagiarism are explained thoroughly, policies on plagiarism are informed to all university academic members, and there are mechanisms to manage cases related to plagiarism. In contrast, not all Indonesian universities treat plagiarism directly. Some universities depend on religious morality and academic ethics in dealing with plagiarism. Accordingly, this article recommends the explicit treatment of plagiarism in Indonesian universities

The Teaching of First Year Economics in Australian Universities*

This paper surveys current pedagogical practice in the teaching of introductory macroeconomics and microeconomics in Australian universities. Survey results are presented detailing lecturers’ approaches to their teaching over 2001 and other aspects of their teaching environment. A comparison of the content and methodology of the main textbooks used in Australian introductory economic courses is also presented.