MYANMAR: Former political prisoners denied university access

The Irrawaddy06 July 2013 Issue No:279

 

The university studies of 23-year-old Ye Myat Hein were interrupted in 2007 when he was imprisoned in connection with the pro-democracy Saffron Revolution. Today, more than a year after his release by Myanmar’s government as part of a mass amnesty, he is among more than a dozen would-be students who have been denied re-enrolment at the University of Yangon, write Lawi Weng and May Sitt Paing for The Irrawaddy.

The reason? Because of the time they served as political prisoners, which the government says amounts to truancy. Kyaw Thu Maung, a personal assistant to the deputy education minister, told The Irrawaddy last Tuesday that the 15 students in question were being treated in line with university policy.

“We could not allow daily university attendance to anyone who has skipped school for a long period of time,” he said. “This [rule] is not only for political prisoners, but also for others, according to the system.”

Full report on The Irrawaddy site 

AUSTRALIA: A preferred destination for international students

Geoff Maslen06 July 2013 Issue No:279

 

"The most significant feature of the tertiary education landscape in Australia is the large proportion of international students,” says the OECD report Education at a Glance 2013. The land down under is a key destination for students from around the world, hosting more than 6% of its foreign students.

“This figure places Australia as the third most popular destination after the US (16%) and the UK (13%). One in five of the students enrolled in tertiary education in Australia in 2011 were international students, the highest proportion among all OECD countries, against an OECD average of 7%,” the report states.

“The country receives almost 20 times more international students than the number of Australian students who choose to study in tertiary programmes abroad.”

The report notes that Australia’s total expenditure for all levels of education relative to gross domestic product in 2010 was 6%, the same proportion as the OECD average of 6%. Significant increases in government investment between 2008 and 2010 saw Australia’s spending increase by 24% – or more than four times the OECD average increase of 5%.

“In 2010, Australia devoted about US$10,825 per student each year at all levels from primary to tertiary education, compared with the OECD average of US$ 9.313 per student,” the report says. “In 2010, 74% of Australia’s total expenditure on educational institutions came from public sources, lower than the OECD average of 84%.

“In fact, at 26%, Australia has the sixth largest proportion of private expenditure in the OECD for all levels of education compared with an OECD average of 16%. At the tertiary level, 54% of all spending came from private sources, again much higher than the OECD average of 32%.”

The report says educational attainment is high in Australia, where 74% of 25- to 64-year-olds have at least an upper secondary qualification, compared to the OECD average of 76%. The proportion of adults completing upper secondary education has increased significantly across generations, with 84% of 25- to 34-year-olds holding an upper secondary qualification compared to 61% among 55- to 64-year-olds.

Overall, tertiary attainment rates are well above the OECD average: 38% of the working age population holds a university degree, when the OECD average is 32%. This proportion rises to 45% among 25- to 34-year-olds compared to the OECD average of 39%.

But the OECD statisticians do not take account of the fact that a significant number of university graduates are from overseas and not Australian residents or immigrants. It is their presence that inflates the 45% figure, when the proportion of Australian citizens or migrants is about the OECD average.

But the report does mention that international students have a marked impact on estimated graduation rates and that because of the high proportion graduation rates are artificially inflated.

“For example, when international students are excluded from consideration, Australia’s graduation rates for first-time tertiary-type A (theoretical university-based programmes) courses drop by 17 percentage points, and first-time tertiary-type B (shorter , more vocationally oriented programmes) graduation rates drop by 3 percentage points.”
 

GLOBAL: Rankings and accountability in higher education

29 June 2013 Issue No:278

 

UNESCO has released a new publication, Rankings and Accountability in Higher Education: Uses and misuses, which debates the pros and cons of classifying universities. A UNESCO release says the book brings together “the people behind university rankings and their critics to debate the uses and misuses of existing rankings”.

The book arose from the “Global Forum Rankings and Accountability in Higher Education: Uses and misuses”, the first global consultation on the subject, organised by UNESCO, the OECD and the World Bank in May 2011. This brought together researchers, academics, policy analysts, students and institutional leaders.

The release says the book develops many of the issues addressed during that landmark consultation and is the first in a new UNESCO series, Education on the Move, aimed at bringing the latest thinking in education to specialists worldwide.

The book features comments from people on five continents to provide a comprehensive overview of current thinking on the subject and sets out alternative approaches and complementary tools for a new era of transparent and informed use of higher education ranking tables.

It presents two sides to the debate:

1: Rankings purport to measure higher education quality, but:

• There are more than 16,000 higher education institutions in the world, and global rankings focus attention on the performance of less than 100 – or less than 1%. The pervasiveness of focusing on the top institutions obscures the fact that the majority of students attend non-elite institutions.
  
• Rankings throw no light on how a nation’s higher education system educates all its students and citizens.
  
• Rankings encourage nations to focus disproportionately on a handful of elites, which could undermine national or regionally strategic priorities and capacity for the knowledge society.
  
• Focus should be on ensuring the system is world class rather than on the performance of the individual ‘world-class university’.
  
• Aligning national priorities to meet the criteria of rankings is an abdication of national sovereignty.
  
• Because national budgets are a zero-sum-game (spending in one area means taking from somewhere else), governments risk subverting other policy objectives in order to conform to indicators designed by others for other purposes.
  
• Disproportionate emphasis on research can undermine teaching and learning.
  

2: However, rankings can claim achievements in the following areas:

• They have acted as a wake-up call about the value and importance of higher education, especially for nations that may not have been investing sufficiently.
  
• They have placed consideration of higher education quality within a wider comparative and international framework, which has challenged self-perceptions of greatness so there is no more room for self-promotion.
  
• With the onslaught of global rankings, the higher education world has become more competitive but also multi-polar. Many more countries are making a contribution to knowledge creation and dissemination.
  
• While rankings do not measure what is meaningful about the quality of higher education, they have drawn our attention to the importance of good quality comparative information about performance and productivity, value for money and return on public investment.
  
• Good quality, international comparative information is essential for underpinning strategic leadership and decision-making at the national and institutional levels.
  
• Comparable information on institutions, teaching and research makes it easier for students and researchers to make informed choices on where and what to study and where to work.
  
• Improved data-based or evidence-based decision-making can prompt discussions about what constitutes success and encourage benchmarking to identify and share best practices.
  

 

EUROPE: Challenges facing doctoral education

Bianka Siwinska29 June 2013 Issue No:278

 

Some 200 university leaders, senior managers, researchers and policy-makers gathered at the University of Warsaw earlier in June for the sixth annual meeting of the European University Association’s (EUA) Council for Doctoral Education.

These meetings give all stakeholders working with doctoral education platforms to discuss current trends and future developments in European and global doctoral education. The theme of this year’s event was: “From student to researcher; are we on the right track?”

Discussions focused on the extent to which European doctoral education has been on the “right track” after a decade of structural changes. The past decade has seen major changes, with universities introducing doctoral schools and structured programmes.

The schools monitor the progress of doctoral candidates and the quality of supervision and research in doctoral programmes, said Lesley Wilson, EUA secretary general. At the same time, new legislation is being drafted or implemented in many countries, providing new requirements and challenges facing those responsible for doctoral education, while agencies for quality assurance and research assessment are showing more interest in the area.

The need to maintain the quality of doctoral education during a time of massification appears to be one of the most important challenges. In recent years, the number of doctoral students in Poland had almost doubled – to 40,000 – said Professor Marta Kiciska-Habior, vice-rector for student affairs and quality of teaching and learning at the University of Warsaw.

“We are still struggling with the outcomes of the process and are trying to improve the internal system of quality assurances. One of the problems is that there are no rules or guidelines on PhD supervision specified in the university regulations,” Kiciska-Habior said. “We do not have efficient tools to check or encourage the involvement of the supervisor.”

A newly completed Accountable Research Environments for Doctoral Education, or ARDE, project (led by the EUA) was demonstrated during the conference and confirmed that universities across the Europe were not yet fully satisfied with the procedures regarding supervision.

The meeting sought to take stock of the reforms and to determine if national legal frameworks as well as universities were ‘on the right track’ in transforming students into researchers. The participants generally agreed doctoral education was on the ‘right track’, said Thomas Jorgensten, EUA head of the unit responsible for the EUA Council for Doctoral Education.

Keynote speaker Francesc Xavier Grau, rector of Universitat Rovira i Virgili in Spain, highlighted how the establishment of doctoral schools had enabled universities to increase their capacity in terms of research output and outreach to other sectors. Doctoral candidates were particularly good at bridging the gap between basic research and innovation, Xavier said.

But several speakers warned that the large expansion in the number of doctoral candidates in many countries could potentially lead to overall lower quality. They called for safeguarding research excellence.

The conference discussions revealed that considerable differences existed across Europe in terms of approaches and challenges facing doctoral education. “There is a good common European dialogue on doctoral education, but there is also an opportunity to do more in terms of creating a shared vision on good practices in the future,” Jorgensten said.

* The EUA Council for Doctoral Education is an integral part of the EUA and was established in 2008. Its mission is to contribute to the development, advancement and improvement of doctoral education and research training in Europe.

FRANCE: High spending, low fees – And lower salaries

Jane Marshall06 July 2013 Issue No:279

 

France scores well in its expenditure on higher education students, in the proportion of its population who are graduates and in the number of international students who choose to study there, according to the OECD’s Education at a Glance 2013. But the financial advantages a degree confers on employees are lower for French graduates than for their peers across the OECD, especially women.

From 2005 to 2010, the amount France spent on each primary, secondary and non-tertiary post-secondary pupil increased by only 5% compared to an OECD average of 10%. Spending on each higher education student, however, rose by 15% to an average of US$15,067, says the OECD country note on France.

This was more than the overall OECD average of US$13,528, but less than Canada, Denmark, the US, Sweden and Switzerland, which all spent more than US$18,000 per student.

French higher education receives relatively little funding from the private sector, which contributes 18% of finance compared to 32% in the OECD as a whole. In spite of France’s relatively high spending on higher education, student fees remain low compared to many other OECD countries.

For the 2012-13 year, university fees in France are €181 (US$236) for a licence (bachelor degree equivalent) and €250 for a masters course. In a third of the other countries surveyed, annual student fees were more than US$1,500.

The proportion of the French population with degrees has risen significantly during the past 30 years, where they represent 43% of 25- to 34-year-olds, compared to 19% of 55- to 64-year-olds. OECD averages are 39% and 24% respectively, but France scores below Korea, Japan, Canada and the Russian Federation, where more than 55% of today’s young adults are graduates of higher education.

More than 75% of French students who start a first degree course finish it, on a par with Australia, Denmark, Finland, Japan and Spain; and better than Hungary, New Zealand, Norway, Sweden and the US, where fewer than 60% of students succeed, says the note.

And while the French drop-out rate overall is lower than the OECD average, 14% of French students who abandon their university studies successfully switch to more technical courses.

The proportion of young people with doctorates in France equals the OECD average: 1.6% in 2011. As in Chile and Israel, more than 35% of doctorate holders in France specialise in a ‘hard’ science, compared to 23% across OECD countries. Furthermore, says the note, about a third of doctorate holders in France are from abroad, “which can indicate both the attractiveness of its courses for foreign students and a fear among national students to commit themselves”.

It also means a low rate of young postgraduates studying after the age of 25. While on average in OECD countries the percentage of young postgraduates aged 25-29 and still in education is 18%, in France it is only 7%. This compares badly with Austria, Denmark, Italy and Sweden, where the proportion is more than 25%.

A higher education qualification means higher salaries in the job market, and French graduates earn on average 47% more than non-graduates. But this is less than their peers in other OECD countries, whose degrees give them a financial advantage averaging 57%.

The situation is worse for French women graduates, who can expect a net advantage during their career of only 8.9%, against an OECD average of 11.5%, while French men gain 10.1%, compared to 13% across the OECD.

One profession where French graduates fare financially poorly is teaching. Primary and secondary schoolteachers’ statutory salaries are lower than the OECD average whether they are beginners or have up to 15 years’ experience. Only those at the top of the salary scale earn more than the OECD average – and teachers need to have 34 years of service to reach this level, compared to 24 years on average in other OECD countries.

During the past 30 years the number of students studying in a country other than their own has risen from 800,000 in 1975 to 4.3 million in 2011, notes the report. France remains an attractive country for foreign students and they represent nearly 12% of all students in France.

Indeed, France is among the top five destinations for international students, equal third with Australia and Germany, each with 6%, after the US at 17% and Britain at 13%.

UNITED STATES: What’s driving the new professional doctorates?

Ami Zusman06 July 2013 Issue No:279

 

In the past 10 to 15 years, new kinds of doctorate degrees – in fields that had never had doctorates before – have burst onto the higher education scene in the United States. These new ‘professional practice doctorate’, or PPD, degrees have emerged in at least a dozen fields, ranging from physical therapy to bioethics.

Some of these newly created doctorate degrees are now required for a person to enter a professional practice. In other fields, although they are not (or not yet) required, these doctorates have become the normative degree.

Nor is this just a US phenomenon: new professional doctorate degrees have been created and programmes for them are growing rapidly in Canada, the United Kingdom, Ireland, Australia and elsewhere.

Professional practice doctorates differ from PhDs in several ways; most are shorter than PhDs – in some cases, only slightly longer than the masters programmes they replace. In the US, most do not require original research, but they do include a clinical component.

Beyond this, there is little agreement on what they are or should be. Yet, like PhDs, they use the title ‘doctorate’, require at least some study beyond the masters level and are intended to confirm the highest level of achievement.

Phenomenal growth

The growth of newly created professional practice doctorates in the US has been phenomenal.

Programmes for them skyrocketed from nearly zero a decade ago to more than 500 programmes in at least a dozen fields today, with over 10,000 degrees awarded just in 2012. For example, doctor of nursing practice programmes increased from just two in 2002 to 217 in 2012; nearly 100 more programmes are in the planning stage. What’s driving this growth?

Supporters of the new doctorates state that they are needed to respond to the growing complexity of professionals’ work environments, rapid expansion of knowledge underlying practice, and increases in technological interventions. While there are some indications of these factors, in most fields the evidence is limited.

For example, the difference between masters and doctoral programmes in physical therapy is on average just 12 weeks, and doctorate holders do not have higher licensure pass rates; if increased labour market complexity were the main reason to require doctorates, one would expect greater differentiation between masters and doctoral degrees and greater student success.

Overall, it is not evident that these doctorates have led to higher salaries or career advancement for professionals or significantly better outcomes for clients, although it may be too soon to determine outcomes. Rather, based on my research, I conclude that in most fields professional associations’ and practitioners’ pursuit of greater status, autonomy and control has been the main factor driving the creation of new doctorate credentials.

Once these doctorate degrees are established, institutions have felt pressured to offer doctoral programmes either because accreditation mandated it or because they felt they would be less competitive otherwise. For many formerly non-doctoral institutions, these new doctorates also provided an opportunity to take a long-desired step into doctoral work.

It is important to note that situations do differ among fields, programmes and institutions. Nevertheless, much of the adoption of these doctorate degrees seems driven by credential creep, followed in many cases by mission creep.

Why the growth of PPD degrees matters

The resource implications of the professional practice doctorates are substantial.

First, there seems to be a domino effect in health fields, with the PPD becoming the required or normative degree for entering practice in one field after another. Second, while most new growth in the US has been in health fields, new types of PPDs have been started in a variety of fields.

Third, many of the new programmes are expensive, so even limited expansion requires more resources. At a time when most institutions face shrinking resources, this means either redistribution of resources from other programmes or institutions, a higher workload burden on faculty, or higher tuition fees and higher foregone income burdens on students.

Indeed, partly because of public disinvestment in higher education, students are bearing the brunt of increased programme costs. For example, median total tuition and fee costs for doctor of physical therapy programmes in US public institutions were 63% higher than for masters programmes in 2010; in private institutions, they were 14% higher.

Higher tuition and longer periods of study will likely increase student debt and may reduce access into the profession, especially since financial support for these programmes is meagre in most cases.

PPDs also raise unresolved questions.

For example, what should a ‘doctorate’ mean? Should profession-specific accrediting bodies – which play important roles in setting standards for programme effectiveness – also determine which degrees institutions offer in these fields? Finally, the fundamental issue for public policy is the ultimate impact of new PPDs on clients, organisations and communities. New requirements could lead to fewer professionals, especially in already under-served communities.

On the other hand, if PPD training enables professionals to serve their clients more effectively, meet new and more complex needs and, in the words of advocates, transform the organisations and settings in which they work – and do so without reducing access to services – the added resource costs to individuals and the public may well be worthwhile.

Those outcomes are still unknown.

* Ami Zusman is a visiting scholar at the Center for Studies in Higher Education (CSHE) at the University of California, Berkeley. She formerly directed graduate and professional education planning and student outcomes assessment for the University of California system. This commentary is based on her paper, “Degrees of Change: How new kinds of professional doctorates are changing higher education institutions”, published online as part of UC Berkeley CSHE’s Research and Occasional Paper Series.

CHINA: Media coverage of higher education – From propaganda to watchdog

Qiang Zha and Xiaoyang Wang06 July 2013 Issue No:279

 

In many senses, the media is still state controlled in China and does not enjoy genuine freedom of speech. Yet the relationship between the media and higher education is multi-faceted, highlighting changing roles, focuses and approaches.

Roughly, three stages can be discerned.

In the first stage, from the 1950s through to the early 1980s, media coverage of higher education basically served the state propaganda agenda, showcasing government directives and opinions and how success was achieved by following government policy.

When China adopted its reform policy in the early 1980s, a market economy emerged as well as divergent interests. The media was then gradually used for communicating ideas and opinions in order to build a normative base on which further reform initiatives could be carried out efficiently and effectively.

This function of media coverage of higher education could be observed, for example, when the Chinese government was set to charge tuition fees to university students, to dramatically expand higher education enrolment and to invest in a small number of selected universities with the aim of heightening their status around the world.

Since the dawn of the 21st century, with a market economy in place and an increasingly democratised Chinese society, the media has been playing the role of a watchdog of higher education. Notably, this last stage runs more or less parallel to the process of higher education expansion.

Different focuses and approaches

These three stages feature different focuses on higher education and different approaches to covering it.

Media coverage of higher education used to be always descriptive and positive, portraying how successfully universities and colleges served the human resource needs of the socialist government within the framework of a planned economy – perhaps with a few exceptions during such political movements as the Hundred Flowers Campaign and Cultural Revolution, when there were leadership tensions.

In the reform era, the media started to be analytical and critical when a divergence of interests became the norm. Thus, over time, the media has played a changing role, moving from a purely government propaganda vehicle to a social voice and a position as watchdog of the higher education sector.

In this process, the media has shifted its focus on higher education, from telling the stories of its achievements, to focusing on debates and controversies as well as mistakes that have been made and failures.

The media is now equipped to raise the hot issues concerning higher education – for instance, those relating to the national university entrance examination (gaokao) and university graduate unemployment, combining them with other problems linked to the recent expansion of higher education (for instance, a deterioration in quality and equity) and analysing them in an increasingly critical manner.

Most recently a Hunan television programme – literally titled “Questioning gaokao in God’s name”, available here, applied an extremely critical approach to the brutal reality of the gaokao, and even challenged the necessity of its existence.

In this programme, the gaokao was portrayed as inhuman – in a couple of cases entrants were not even informed of the death of their parents so that they could do the exam without distractions, because it is deemed to be so important and to make such a difference to their future – and as a vehicle for exacerbating social inequity – entrants in Beijing and Shanghai are 40 to 50 times more likely to have access to China’s top universities compared to their peers in Anhui and Hunan, with the former two places representing China’s developed regions and the latter two more underdeveloped regions.

The media’s critical coverage extends to many other issues and problems pertaining to higher education, including the mental health of university students (an increasing number are committing suicide), the commercialisation of higher education (financial pressure is more and more shifted onto students' families), widespread plagiarism and misconduct among faculty and students, and the ‘diploma mill’ scenario in an environment of increasing private and transnational institutions and programmes.

Academic fraud

The media can take credit for its coverage of the growing problem of academic misconduct among faculty and students. Only a decade or so ago, the Chinese public and even academic communities were not fully aware that such misconduct needed to be dealt with seriously.

Viewed as a bourgeois characteristic, intellectual property did not take root in China in the revolutionary period so it was not really respected.

Some scholars thought copying the ideas and work of someone else showed they agreed with and approved of his or her perspective, and growing numbers became opportunists, taking advantage of such ‘shortcuts’ to achieve better productivity.

A turning point came in the early 2000s, when a US-trained Chinese scholar Fang Shimin – better known by his pen name Fang Zhouzi – launched his fraud-busting website New Threads, established in 2001. The website detects and discloses cases of plagiarism and other academic misconduct by Chinese researchers, and it increased interest in academic integrity.

As of 2010, Fang’s website had listed over 900 instances of academic fraud, including fraud by presidents of universities and nationally known researchers. His crusade to expose fraud in China’s scientific and academic communities soon received widespread media coverage.

At that time, there was no official body or procedure for handling complaints or examining allegations of fraud in China, and Fang started the website as an unofficial platform to expose the problem.

In 2006, a series of accusations and counter-accusations on Fang’s website led to significant media attention, criticism of the investigations conducted by Chinese universities and greater involvement by such government authorities as the Ministry of Education, Ministry of Science and Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences and the National Natural Science Foundation of China in investigating allegations.

Thanks to intense media attention, in 2012 Fang was named one of the two inaugural winners of the John Maddox Prize, given by Nature and the Kohn Foundation, which said: “[H]e has opened a forum for criticism and debate in a community that is otherwise devoid of it”. Indeed, Fang fights his crusade with the full involvement of the media.

Critical coverage

Despite continuing state control, the Chinese media increasingly plays the role of watchdog and assists in holding the higher education sector accountable.

There are various reasons for this interest. One is the tremendous social attention and value attached to higher education. It is simply too important. The other is the fact that, although public universities and colleges in China always suffered from bureaucracy, they are not as authoritarian as government departments and are unlikely to block the media from exposing their problems, mistakes and failures.

Nevertheless, media coverage of higher education is still trammelled to some extent, for instance by a consumerist approach that uses criticism as a strategy to increase sales. Often such critical coverage appears to be shallow and superficial, even if the problems are real, and turns out to be a less constructive way of addressing issues. Most recently, some university leaders complained about the media’s tendency to demonise universities.

Another example is that media coverage of issues and problems is mostly limited to the higher education sector, as if the problems do not relate to the rest of society.

In contrast, when covering the issues and constraints facing Chinese higher education, international media – for instance The New York Times, The Chronicle of Higher Education, University World News and Inside Higher Education – often embed them in the socioeconomic and political contexts in which the universities and colleges operate, stressing that only when higher education genuinely plays a leading role in China’s social development will it break through its institutionalised constraints and transform itself.

* Qiang Zha is an associate professor in the faculty of education at York University. His research interests include Chinese and East Asian higher education, international academic relations, global brain circulation, internationalisation of higher education, globalisation and education, differentiation and diversity in higher education, knowledge transfer and commercialisation, and international migration and development. His most recent books include the co-authored Portraits of 21st Century Chinese Universities: In the move to mass higher education (with Ruth Hayhoe et al. 2011), and two edited volumes Education and Global Cultural Dialogue (with Karen Mundy 2012) and Education in China: Educational history, models, and initiatives (2013). In 2012-13, Qiang Zha is also a Wei Lun Scholar at Tsinghua University.

* Xiaoyang Wang is an associate professor and director of the Higher Educational Research Institute at Tsinghua University in Beijing. He was a visiting scholar to the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2004. From 2005-09, he was appointed as a second secretary in the education office at the Chinese Embassy in Washington DC.
 

AUSTRALIA: Political upheaval holds hope for universities

Geoff Maslen04 July 2013 Issue No:279

 

When Julia Gillard, Australia’s first female prime minister, was deposed as head of government last month by the man she had forced from office three years previously almost to the day, it not only gave Kevin Rudd a second shot as PM but also raised the hopes of the nation’s vice-chancellors.

One of Rudd’s first decisions, following the palace coup and the resignations of half of Gillard’s former cabinet, was to reappoint Senator Kim Carr as minister for innovation, industry, science and research – a role he had formerly held but resigned from when Rudd lost office.

Rudd also elevated him to minister for higher education, which gives Carr almost unlimited power over the sector.

The new minister gained some plaudits when he intimated to Rupert Murdoch’s The Australian newspaper that Gillard’s plan to slash A$3.8 billion (US$3.5 billion) from spending on universities and student support might be reviewed and that the student demand-based system she had introduced could be re-capped.

Under this system, any student applying for university is admitted if the institution believes she or he is capable. This has led to a sharp fall in the marks a school-leaver requires to gain admittance and allowed an additional 190,000 students to undertake higher education courses.

Carr expressed concern that many of the newcomers were probably unprepared for university study.

In an editorial last week, The Australian endorsed the idea of re-capping enrolments and claimed that the demand-based system had compromised “academic rigour” – this from a paper that had agitated continually against the Gillard government using its leader and news pages unashamedly to disparage her and almost every decision she made.

Murdoch’s News Corporation owns 70% of Australia’s metropolitan newspapers and he uses them constantly to further his own interests. With an election due sometime in the next few months, all of his papers had been backing the conservative Opposition and attacking Gillard.

They have mostly adopted a muted response to Rudd taking over, while Australia’s main higher education lobby groups have welcomed his and especially Carr’s return. Universities Australia Chief Executive Belinda Robinson applauded Carr’s track record on supporting science and research.

Referring to the A$3.8 billion “worth of higher education savings” announced by the Gillard government over the past eight months – and the failure of the Opposition to reject them – Robinson called for a review of the budget measures that have yet to be legislated.

“The eight out of 10 Australians who believe that budget cuts to higher education threaten Australia’s future will be looking to Mr Rudd and Senator Carr to reconsider these short-sighted decisions,” she said.

“We look forward to Senator Carr revisiting and renewing his visionary agenda.” And, in a reference to the influx of students from poorer families: “We also look forward to working with him to make sure that all children who aspire to a world-class university education will have the opportunity to do so, regardless of their background, post code, or socioeconomic circumstances.”

The National Tertiary Education Union (NTEU) likewise warmly greeted Carr’s appointment, with its president, Jeannie Rea, noting he had “a demonstrated track record of deep knowledge and commitment to the key role of universities in education, research and innovation”.

Rea said the government had justified the planned cuts to university spending by claiming that the budget faced a A$480 million shortfall as a result of the unexpected rise in enrolments under the demand-driven system. She said it was unreasonable for already heavily overworked university staff to be asked to bear the costs because of inefficient budget forecasting.

“What NTEU members find even more unfair is that some of the most disadvantaged students have been targeted by the latest cuts. The government will save A$1.2 billion by abolishing the student start-up scholarships, which provided support for the most financially disadvantaged students in receipt of income support.”

The chair of the Group of Eight research-intensive universities, Professor Fred Hilmer, similarly praised Carr for his previous work in boosting indirect funding for research and for establishing the research quality assessment framework.

“The senator’s efforts in the past have also been largely credited with fostering investments in bigger and better state-of-the-art research facilities,” Hilmer said. “We are confident that he understands the imperative for Australia to keep pace with the world leaders...[and are] also encouraged by his indication to revisit the May cuts to higher education.”

Other vice-chancellors backed retention of the demand-driven system.

The chair of the Innovative Research Universities group, Professor Barney Glover, said the challenge of effective funding of Australia’s universities would not to be tackled by “retreating to a system of allocating universities a limited numbers of university places.

“Demand-driven funding works. Let’s not ruin it. The system was a major reform of the government and one of the few accepted by both sides of politics. There is no sense undermining it to address a funding pressure that is now almost past,” Glover said.

Most universities had already started drawing up plans to cope with the proposed funding cuts.

The Australian National University (ANU) caused dismay among its staff and students by announcing last week that it faced a A$51 million fall in income over the next two years and would have to slash the number of professional staff by at least 10%, with up to 250 jobs to go before the end of the year.

The education union said staff over the age of 55, “the longest-serving members of the university”, would be among the first to be targeted. “The loss of corporate knowledge will be devastating,” said Deborah Veness, the union’s branch president.

But ANU Vice-chancellor Professor Ian Young said the package of cuts had been “shaped by staff and student input” and would deal with the immediate financial challenge while also setting the university on a path to renewal and growth.

“This budget package will return the university to a balanced budget position by 2015,” Young said.

Veness said the cuts would mean a reduced workforce, staff members compelled to take accumulated leave, an increase in student numbers and the implementation of new systems that would put unreasonable pressure on remaining staff.

“The union deplores the cuts to funding for the higher education sector that have forced the ANU to make these drastic decisions,” she said.

“The consequences for students and staff are ominous. The ANU prepares graduates to be future custodians of disciplinary knowledge within the academy, where they go on to become researchers or university teachers, or to take their disciplinary knowledge into the workplace to solve the problems of industry, government, and society.”