Australian Greens Senator and Education Spokesperson, Dr Mehreen Faruqi, has commented on reported details of university performance-based funding measures. Senator Faruqi is a former academic with the University of New South Wales.
Senator Faruqi said:
"The Government's plan to tie measly funding increases to misguided performance measures is just the latest episode in their storied history of undermining higher education in Australia. It is just another excuse to not fund higher education properly.
"The Government has completely ignored the university sector and experts' advice that their plan won't deliver the amount of funding needed while having unintended consequences that may include incentivising universities to enrol fewer students.
"In particular, the narrow-minded use of graduate employment as a measure of success for universities betrays the purpose of our public universities. We cannot allow their collegial, public-focussed mission to be displaced by the Liberal's vision of unis as just factories for the workforce. Universities should be much more than this. They are places of learning.
"Universities are desperate for a real funding increase. The Greens have a plan to fund free undergraduate university and TAFE, and boost university funding by 10 per cent to improve learning and teaching conditions, reduce class sizes and enable researchers to pursue solutions to the big problems of our time," she concluded.
