May

28

Academic shortages

May 28, 2008 | 2 Comments | Joshua Gans

In today’s Australian, an article about potential shortages in academic staff. I was quoted:

According to Hugo, the oldest baby boomers will pass 65 in 2011, so the exodus of academic retirees will gather momentum during the second and third decades of the century. But Melbourne Business School economics professor Joshua Gans says “the crunch time will be far sooner”, especially in the sciences, since time taken to do PhD and postdoctoral work – which often requires working overseas – has extended the time to produce an academic by up to 10 to 12 years. Australia is already facing a shortfall of 19,000 scientists, engineers and technical professionals, the Association of Professional Engineers, Scientists and Managers Australia reports.

Gans predicts mass restructuring and courses evaporating from lower-ranked universities as their higher-ranked counterparts poach their staff to counter their own shortfalls.

What we should do about all of this is anyone’s guess. But one suggestion I have is decentralisation:

According to Gans, the problem is that universities don’t get to set and keep their own fees. Further fee deregulation is necessary so universities can compete with the private sector, which offers more lucrative wages, especially in fields such as law and business.

“Also, we are producing graduates based on where there are academics to teach them rather than on where they are needed in the economy,” Gans says.


Comments

2 Responses to “Academic shortages”

  1. Kevin Cox on May 29th, 2008 12:19 am

    The way the Universities are funded must lead to inefficient outcomes. Another improvement is to give the HECS funds directly to students and let them decide which University to choose. There is little incentive for a University to increase the number of places in popular courses or to get rid of courses that are not servicing students well because the number of places is fixed and Universities will fill up all courses by simply lowering the entrance scores. As I understand it the Universities are even allocated the number of places for each course by the Federal government so why would a University even try to innovate.

  2. Andrew Leigh on June 2nd, 2008 1:51 pm

    No quibble with your comments, but it did appear to me that the demographic modelling might have ignored wages.