Fair Competition, Fair Admissions
Australian universities are competitive. This is a common observation by overseas university visitors, and they mean it as a compliment.
Competition is seen as driving innovation and productivity, better service towards students and staff, and perhaps even market pricing. Competition is seen as driving our movement up to being the third largest export behind coal and iron ore, and the nation’s largest services export.
Noone expects this competition to be easy, but they might expect it to be fair.
Questions about fair and unfair competition play out in the university sector as much as they do in other parts of the economy, as the University at which I work has discovered about admissions.
It all started with a simple statistic: 49% of admissions preferences for the University at which I work come from students who do not live in the tiny Australian Capital Territory. That is fair enough given that our institutional title includes the word ‘National’, and we are the only Australian university established by a federal act of parliament.
We wondered how easily those students found us, and how many more might find us, given that Australia has five tertiary admissions centres (sometimes called ‘TACs’). Applications for most undergraduate programs are ‘in state’: students apply to their local tertiary admission centre because that is the only place where their local university lists their offerings. If they want to apply to a university out of state, they have to pay a second application fee to another tertiary admission centre.
Some adventurous students want to look further afield. Students from disadvantaged backgrounds might like to know about programs and scholarship options beyond their local area. Local universities might not offer programs students are interested in, and students might also want to study at an institution with the highest research ranking in a discipline. Just because Australia has a much smaller tradition of students moving away from home to study at university doesn’t mean they aren’t interested in moving at all.
Thinking through these options, we thought it would make sense to apply for membership of all the tertiary admissions centres. So we wrote to the four that we did not belong to in August 2015.
Three others—constituted as all tertiary admissions centres are, by ‘participating institutions’ which are our competitors—said no. One told us we needed a campus in their state, even though we teach programs like the Diploma of Languages online to students around Australia. Another told us we could not belong to two centres; the third simply told us that our application ‘could not be supported at this time’.
No invitation to discuss the outcome, no right of appeal. A student wouldn’t settle for that, and we didn’t either.
So we turned to the consumer enforcement division of the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC), raising our concerns about practices that appear to amount to anti-competitor behaviour under the Australian Consumer and Competition Act (2010).
Australian competition law, like that of many other countries, aims to protect consumers and businesses from misleading claims, from unfair competition, and from misuse of market power. The Harper Review of competition policy suggested 56 recommendations for reform, and in March of this year, the Australian government agreed that it would accept all of them. This includes the notable recommendation that the legislation aimed at protecting businesses and consumers from initiatives or conduct that would lesson competition—‘misuse of market power’—should be strengthened.
The ACCC wondered why the admissions centres were able to accept the membership of vocational and private providers who operated out of state, but not us. We wondered about that too. The more we thought about it, the more strange it seemed that we would have to ask permission of our competitors to belong to ‘their’ admission centre. It’s akin to asking a supermarket to ask permission of its competitor to set up shop in the same suburb.
Last week, the ACCC wrote to all of the admissions centres, asking them to explain their procedures for membership and schedule of fees.
Today we received our first reply: a reluctant invitation for my University to ‘resubmit’ our application for membership to one of the centres. The invitation was as warm as a July Canberra morning.
That’s OK for us, but does it make it any easier for all universities to join all of the centres, and for students to have the right to see program listings from across the nation? I think not.
Here we encounter the seemingly strange idea that a national admissions centre might be the fairest solution for universities and for students. After all, nationalisation is commonly seen as a move that suppresses competition. But nationalisation does not necessarily mean operation by the state, and thus that Australia will lose its competitive edge in higher education.
Australia need not leap to a UCAS (University and Colleges Admissions Service), which is the UK solution for admissions, and there is no reason to believe that it will fall short, as is the case with the incomplete listings in the US-based Common Application Form.
What a national applications system for Australia might mean is better efficiency through the scaling up of what are often small, siloed operations at state level, and the development of a more rounded suite of services to cover operations such as international student admissions and accommodation preferences.
The Australian Government might have got more than it bargained for when it announced a review into the transparency of university admissions. We certainly got more than we bargained for when we first wrote to the tertiary admission centres. But we know that what we are seeking on behalf of students and all universities is fair, and that’s worth fighting for.
