Bling, Bump and Blank: A winning 20-year vision for making Australian universities enable student brilliance
Summary
Proposing a vision for student-centered higher education: Over the next 20 years, Australian universities should prioritize intellectual vibrancy (bling), reduce unnecessary bureaucratic obstacles (bump), and resist corporatisation (blank) to foster environments where students can thrive.
Systemic misalignment: Current financial and regulatory structures prioritise revenue and rankings over genuine student engagement and success, leading to a transactional - rather than transformative - university experience.
Reimagining teaching and learning: The under-valuation of teaching needs correction through professional recognition, support for teaching-focused careers, and involvement of industry experts in education delivery.
Streamlining and humanising university operations: Excessive administrative processes hinder meaningful learning. A shift toward simpler, more human-centric approaches would support better educational outcomes.
Preserving the soul of universities: To serve students and society, universities must regain their cultural and ethical integrity, placing human development above profit and performance metrics.
An ode to making HE wiggle
Over the next two decades - to build a better system for students - Australian higher education needs heaps more intellectual bling, far less hassle and bump and no corporate blank. Let’s unpack to see how this winning vision plays out for the students. Because they are the ones who matter.
To do so, we draw from insights at an open dialogue with around 50 people in Melbourne last March. Convened colleagues were pressed with a provocative but essential question: What if we truly rebuilt higher education for students? What if, instead of contorting institutions to fit funding rules and regulatory frameworks, we reimagined a system that worked for the people it purports to serve?
Accidental compromise which serves no-one well
It is easy to see that the current system does not work in the best interests of students. While access to higher education has expanded, the student experience itself is too often a secondary consideration for institutional decision-makers. It’s not that people don’t care, but when it comes to resource allocation, prioritisation and urgent attention, students are usually lower down the list. At the same time, the emphasis on recruitment, revenue, and rankings has created a transactional model that leaves little room for students to flourish and develop partnerships which work for a diverse 21st century cohort. The pressure of the system means that students are increasingly positioned as customers in a supplier-centric system.
Universities are caught in a web of financial and regulatory imperatives that distort behaviour. Institutions are incentivised to enrol as many students as possible, charge the maximum allowable fees, and shuffle students for as long as they can.
Staff, too, are caught in this system. Academic careers are built on research, not teaching. Those who care deeply about teaching often do so despite institutional structures and promotions processes, not because of them. The combination of casualised contracts, high workloads, and bureaucratic performance metrics leaves little room for meaningful engagement with students. In many ways, the system functions in direct opposition to what could be a much more rewarding mission: fostering deep learning and student success.
Each to their own
If we were genuinely to build a system for students, the first step would be recognising the diversity of student needs. Too often, the traditional university model assumes a homogenous cohort of school leavers moving through three- or four-year degrees before entering the workforce. But today’s learners are far more varied.
A truly student-centred higher education system would be designed around equity, access, quality, and lifelong learning. It would create incentives that reward good teaching, support students holistically, and foster a diversity of educational models. Most importantly, it would place students at the heart of decision-making - moving beyond the rhetoric of student-centred learning to genuinely reshape the structures and policies that define the sector.
This vision clearly plays out in different ways for different people. Sounds complex, but not really given an trust- and human-centred approach where people have skin in the game. With a changed approach, incentive structure and regulatory architecture, we can serve our school-leavers, mature learners, researchers-to-be, lifelong learners, the re-skilling and everyone in between.
Let’s make a 20-year student-centric vision
Heaps more bling
Intellectual bling makes education higher. Students learn and grow most when they are challenged and supported to engage in enriching learning ventures. Fun means social and cultural activities, co-curricular opportunities, taking learning into the beyond-campus wilds, prototyping ideas in labs, and practising professional personae. Flexibility means high-quality online learning environments, timetabling that clusters synchronous sessions on the minimum number of days, excellent internet connections, and, ideally, local opportunities to engage with fellow learners.
Good quality things cost money. After years running deficits, many Aussie unis have turned their financials around, some handsomely. Maintaining such surpluses, however, requires a search for increasing forms of revenue. Asian families have helped fund the system in recent decades, which is not medium- or even short-term sustainable. Deferred income-linked payment schemes with muted price/value signals are only one way to fund education, and with such large-scale participation there is a need for a broader suite of options for traditional domestic study cohorts.
There is also a need to look for earner/learner study patterns which stimulate employer engagement. And as advanced economies around the world are seeing, hitting-up middle-aged professionals for more learning and career-switching study is not only much needed, but also lucrative. Seeing these proposals as ‘radical’ in what has become a change-scared national system will see Australia shrink behind the pack rather than innovate in ways which help students flourish.
One of the most striking failures of the current system is the way it undervalues teaching. This is not surprising given the paucity of data, a focus on minimum regulatory standards, and the zest for research metrics. In Australia, professors teach less than their counterparts in many other countries. And despite moves to make more continuing roles, we still have a massively casualised workforce. Research excellence drives promotions and prestige, while teaching remains an afterthought. This imbalance is not just an internal issue: it directly affects students. A student-centred system would ensure that those responsible for teaching are incentivised to do it well and are recognised for their contributions.
We need to professionalise teaching in higher education. That doesn’t mean diminishing the importance of research, but it does mean giving teaching-focused academics equal status, career progression, and financial rewards. If we want academics to invest in student success, we must create structures that support and value that investment. Professional teacher training should be mandatory, as should a code of teachers ethics. A professional recognition system should be automatic, presumably even nation-wide. Innovative, popular (people’s choice) and superb practice should be rewarded publicly and financially.
Industry experts should also be engaged in teaching. Given that university academics are not accredited teachers, there is no reason at all to not engage ‘outsiders’ in teaching. Australia has boomed with ‘enterprise professors’, yet where outsiders teach they are plugged in via lower-level precarious employment or subcontracting arrangements. Engaging outsiders will keep curriculum alive, which gets hard if the teaching academics main point of engagement is a dated doctorate and decades inside the academy.
Less bump
Universities are huge bureau-crazy institutions where students, staff and even leaders bump into needless things the whole time. As we all know, bumping into senseless administrative process can hurt more and create longer pain than even physical hiccups.
Great education needs people working together. The formula for wonderful education used to be quite simple: success comes from good teachers assessing engaged students against sound curriculum. Unfortunately, wrapping all kinds of administrative and technological process around the magical act of teachers and students co-creating together locks in dated routines, straightjackets change, and requires expensive ‘outsiders’ to fix. Time to de-clutter, run a ‘Marie Kondo’ campaign. Less process, fewer emails, and fewer and clearer rules. Make things enjoyable and human again.
Less industry, more soul. Huge corporate machines designed to churn graduates have lost key human bits along the way. Working back to inject the vibes automatic in more local arrangements will help students flourish. If it takes a hefty team six months to make a timetable, then it’s likely the place is too big and clompy. Human-scale is great.
If we are serious about building a higher education system that serves students, we must design institutions that cater to today’s complexity. Are we overloading the idea of ‘the university’ and making it too complex so that, in the end, it will only be able to deliver on the smallest common denominator of its diverse student cohort? Would we be better off aiming for innovation and allowing for, and enabling, real diversification of the sector? A genuinely student-centred system would also rethink the very structure of universities. Instead of forcing all institutions into the same mould, we should encourage mission-driven differentiation. Some universities should focus (even) more on research, others on high-quality teaching and skills development, and others still on lifelong learning and professional retraining. Not a new idea, by any stretch of the imagination, but one Australia now needs to explore.
The policy landscape, institutional structures, and financial incentives that shape Australia’s universities are wildly misaligned with what students actually need. Instead of a system designed to serve learners, we have one shaped by funding models that prioritise institutional survival. Universities over-service students not to support learner success, but because institutional financial sustainability depends on it. And when the model works well (for some) because of the margin from international students, the system is driven in even more financially-focused ways.
Heaps more creative enthusiasm over the next 20 years will ensure that campuses thrive. The world’s great universities are amazing spaces where people come to create, experiment, prototype, and deliver. It is imperative to protect spaces where people can play, fail, and win. This means less managerial intrusion in teaching and learning. It means fewer rules around experimentation and playing. Misconduct must be sanctioned, rather than pre-smothering ideas as they sprout. This will make cultures where smart teachers make better contributions to students.
No blank
Corporatisation of universities has killed the cultural special sauce from which universities derive discretionary effort. It might be good for the reported KPIs: ‘more money, more students, more shiny buildings’. But academic staff, particularly those passionate about teaching, face few incentives to invest in anything beyond the minimum requirements. The result? A system that serves no one particularly well. Not students, not staff, and not broader society at large.
Big money put a target on higher education. Everyone had more fun before the tech guys, consultants, and bankers noticed higher education, before it became ‘big money’. Now it is ungainly serious business. But money does not good learning experiences make. Mandate the first question in leadership meetings to be about students, not money. People will show up to learn, not for profit. Top-heavy universities won’t cry poor as a prevailing social narrative. And trust will return through integrity.
Regulatory reform, perhaps paradoxically, will be required to cut the mounds of administrative from higher education in Australia. Higher education is not about lawyerly process, but about human excitement. Without reform to regulation and funding, good change will live on only as words, not to actual shifts in lived-practice.
A framework of qualifications provides modest regulatory clarity, yet is often a huge brick wall that hinders people’s growth. Enabling people to learn what they and communities want and need would be nature in a less regulated space, and lead much better results. Reasonably, Australia aligns its ‘qualifications framework’ with internal benchmarks, but in doing so it puts in place legislated structures which are gamed, convey a hierarchy of values which preferences universities, and constrict how highly funded public institutions can help people learn.
How about qualifications which mix vocational and higher education, which help middle aged people learn across a dozen years, or which are offer shorter or modular options to engage more exploratory and contingent forms of learning. Such qualifications might indeed be post-institutional inasmuch as they involve learning across several places and times. They are scary for institutional apparatchiks who see diluted financial return and look at financial reports rather than circular learning. Specialist first-year colleges could target such groups, as could lifelong growth institutions for the millions of Australians who need to up- and re-skill.
Research rankings have fluffed up university reputations at the expense of education and ethical research conduct. Maybe only a few Aussie unis should stay in the game, an active conversation among governments around the world. There is an urgent need for cogent education indicators. It’s time to innovate beyond zero-sum distractions.
Perhaps most fundamentally, we need to restore trust in universities. Public trust in higher education has eroded, in part because universities have been seen as (and been) self-interested institutions rather than focusing on the public good. To rebuild that trust, universities must make a meaningful and public commitment to the principles and values of education. That means advocating for policy settings that genuinely serve students, not just institutional interests.
What’s next?
Students go to universities in their droves. So there must be something good about higher education, right? Sure thing. But for those of us working in and around the system, we know that there’s a problem. There’s waste, not least of student time. A massive deadweight loss where the potential from the system is unrealised.
It’s no individual’s fault. Not the academic at the coalface, not the dean or director, not the vice-chancellor, or even the consultants and the board members with corporate backgrounds. There’s a rot within the whole system of Australian higher education that is so pervasive that, for any one person or a single institution, calling it out from within the system is almost impossible.
Rebuilding higher education for students is not just a thought experiment, it’s an urgent necessity. The current system is misaligned with the realities of student needs, workforce demands, and society's expectations. Universities, policymakers, and educators must collectively push for bold, structural change to realign the sector with its core purpose.
This requires more than incremental tweaks. It demands a fundamental reimagining of whom the system serves, how it operates, and what incentives drive decision-making. It calls for a commitment - not just in words, but in action - to the values that higher education should embody.
Contributors
This collaborative article was written by Ant Bagshaw, Angel Calderon, Hamish Coates, Gwilym Croucher, and Nadine Zacharias. This group also hosted the event in Melbourne which stimulated the debate.
Get in touch if you’d like to contribute to the dialogue and/or contribute to a future piece: info@thehighergood.net