From:	Tanya Serisier [tanyaserisier@hotmail.com]
Sent:	Friday, 30 March 2001 5:09 PM
To:	eet.sen@aph.gov.au
Subject:	UNSW Student Guild Submission Part III
Hello,
 
This is the third part of the Student Guild submission. This should follow the second part from this address which explains the situation more fully.
 
The wriiters of this submission are Tanya Serisier and Sergio Fiedler. Sergio can be contacted at the UNSW Student Guild on (02) 9385 5454 or at s.fiedler@guild.unsw.edu.au <mailto:s.fiedler@guild.unsw.edu.au>
 
Yours Sincerely
Tanya Serisier (On behalf of the UNSW Student Guild)
 
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Funding

The simple issue for funding is that the federal government’s refusal to provide adequate funding to the tertiary education sector is simply incompatible with quality and equitable education.

UNSW is one of the universities that has most ‘successfully’ adapted to the changing environment of the tertiary education sector. This has meant an increasing reliance on fee-paying students, both local and international, course closures, staff cuts and increasingly looking to business to fill the funding gap.

In some ways it is difficult to fully comment on the effects of the UNSW 2000 strategy and similar initiatives because the university itself tells us that the full effect of these changes will only be felt this year. 

However, the partial effects have been drastic enough for many students. 

The entire St George campus of UNSW was closed at the same time as many courses were cut, a situation that many for many performing arts students and others, their degrees disappeared while they were only midway through them. These students were compensated by being automatically enrolled in other degrees, degrees that they themselves had never wanted to enrol in or study.

The university has also announced that over the next few years it will be cutting more ‘low demand’ courses. However, if you look a little bit deeper, demand is not measured solely in numbers of students who wish to study a degree, but in how much revenue that course or department can generate through industrial interest and fee-paying students. At UNSW, subjects are allocated teaching staff, resources and even office space on this basis. So while many science or engineering courses are ‘low demand’ in that they do not attract as many undergraduate students as comparable courses in Humanities, they are in less danger of being cut as a low demand subject becasue they bring more money into the university.

In fact, entire subjects are currently funded completely by industry. An example that has become infamous on the campus is that of Shell financing subjects in Mining Engineering on Environmental Impacts of Mining. These subjects were first introduced by the university in order to give students a sense of social responsibility and critical ethics. These skills were meant to assist them after entering the workforce to ensure that they would not simply believe what they were told by their eventual employers. Now these subjects have become almost meaningless.

In fact, universities such as UNSW have almost given up looking to the federal government for funding. As part of funding cutbacks, marketing and administration departments designed to obtain money from private sources have become an ever more integral part of the university functioning, to the detriment of teaching and research. At UNSW, as well as several other universities around the country the perfect example of that is Universitas 21, a multi-national corporate merger between different universities for marketing purposes to receive funding and remain competitive on the international market.

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