Reforms Will Push Some Universities to Edge

Reforms Will Push Some Universities to Edge

Some universities around Australia will be forced to merge - and may even fold - as they struggle to meet new accreditation standards and the protective floor on student numbers is removed, university leaders say.

From 2012, universities will operate under a ``demand-driven system'' that effectively funds universities for as many students as they are able to attract.

The Government has also set aside $61 million over four years to establish a national quality and regulatory agency to audit the sector, as recommended in the Bradley review of higher education.

``Whenever you open the system up and you have competition, you have to be prepared and you have to accept that there may be failures - if you don't, then you're playing some game that doesn't make sense,'' University of Adelaide Vice-Chancellor James McWha said.

Speaking in Adelaide last week, review author Denise Bradley likened the present system of accreditation to a snakes and ladders board - without the snakes: ``Once you were (accredited as) a university, you were a university whatever you did . . . We thought that was not a great thing,'' she said. She expected to see a ``shake-up'' among Australia's 37 public and two private universities as a result of the reforms.

``I think many of us who work in the sector can point to some that are going to find a tighter regulatory regime difficult and I presume that they are engaged in the kind of planning for either merger or affiliation,'' she said.

Professor McWha said overseas examples had shown that mergers could be doomed because ``you turn one successful university and one failure into a much larger university that struggles''.

``I think we have to be prepared at the end of the day to send any of us who fail to the knackers yard,'' he said.

Professor Bradley was unwilling to say which universities she thought were vulnerable.

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