Higher Education: How Low Can It Go?
There was a time when saying someone had a university degree told you something reasonably definite. It did not mean the graduate was a genius, morally superior or even particularly sensible, but it generally indicated that he or she had survived several years of demanding intellectual work, acquired specialised knowledge and demonstrated an ability to read, write and think at a level above the ordinary secondary-school graduate. How much of that can still be assumed?
The question is particularly uncomfortable in Australia because our universities have undergone a transformation that is difficult to explain entirely in terms of politics, ideology or changing technology. Beneath all those things lies something more fundamental: commercialisation. Universities became businesses. Of course universities always needed money. Professors were never paid in philosophical satisfaction, laboratories have always been expensive and libraries do not construct themselves. But there is an enormous difference between an institution requiring money in order to pursue its academic mission and an institution progressively reorganising its academic mission around the pursuit of money. Australian higher education crossed too far over that line.
The extraordinary expansion of international education illustrates the problem. The problem is the financial incentive created when universities become heavily dependent upon their fees. By 2023, Australian universities received an average of $41,117 in revenue for each overseas full-time-equivalent student compared with $22,996 for a domestic student. At the University of Sydney, international students constituted 47 per cent of enrolments, while at several other major universities, including Melbourne, ANU, Queensland and Adelaide, the proportion exceeded 35 per cent. Those numbers change the institutional incentives. A student ceases to be merely a student and becomes a revenue stream. Once that happens, failure becomes expensive.
This is where the decline in standards becomes particularly dangerous. If a student paying tens of thousands of dollars fails, the university does not merely confront an academic outcome. It potentially confronts the loss of a customer. If large numbers fail, the financial consequences become substantial. And eventually academics notice which way the wind is blowing.
The remarkable thing is that this criticism can no longer be dismissed as the grumbling of conservative university critics. Guardian Australia, hardly a bastion of Right-wing hostility towards higher education, devoted an entire investigation to what it called "Degrees Devalued." The findings were extraordinary. Academics told the Guardian that Australian universities were awarding degrees to students who could not adequately understand basic English. Some reported teaching classes containing students who struggled to understand the material but nevertheless continued through their degrees. Academics blamed, among other things, the financial dependence of universities upon international-student revenue. That should have caused an earthquake in Australian higher education.
Think about what a university degree certifies. It is not merely a souvenir presented after three years on campus. The university places its name on the document. It is telling employers, professional bodies and the wider society: we certify that this person has reached the academic standard represented by this qualification. If the institution knowingly lowers that standard because failing students damages revenue, the problem is no longer merely educational. It approaches institutional misrepresentation.
The Guardian subsequently reported allegations from academics that they had been pressured to pass students suspected of cheating and that generative AI was making an existing integrity crisis dramatically worse. Academics described students using translation systems, artificial intelligence and other technologies to complete work they might not independently have been capable of producing. Then came perhaps the most devastating description of all. In another Guardian investigation, academics described Australian universities as "degree factories." One academic who had worked at several universities said the standard of student work had never been so low and claimed to have been repeatedly asked to "un-fail" students. When even the Guardian is publishing this material, perhaps the problem can no longer be blamed upon conservative imagination.
Commercialisation also explains something that otherwise seems paradoxical. Universities have become enormously more managerial at precisely the same time academics themselves frequently complain that they lack resources. Where does the money go? Modern Australian universities possess vast administrative structures that previous generations somehow survived without. There are deputy vice-chancellors, pro vice-chancellors, associate deputy vice-chancellors, strategic offices, communications departments, marketing operations, diversity bureaucracies, sustainability divisions, student-experience units, compliance departments and layers of professional managers. The academic increasingly becomes merely one employee within the corporation.
Teaching then becomes something to be delivered efficiently. Large lectures replace smaller teaching environments. Recorded material replaces lectures. Online modules replace personal interaction. Casual academics mark enormous quantities of student work. Tutorials become larger or disappear. Students increasingly encounter the university through a learning-management system rather than through sustained intellectual contact with scholars. The commercial logic is obvious. Once the lecture has been recorded, why pay somebody to deliver it repeatedly? Once a course has been placed online, why restrict enrolments unnecessarily? Once assessment has been standardised, why employ expensive permanent academics when casual employees can mark it? The university begins to resemble a factory. Inputs arrive at one end. Credentials emerge from the other.
Indeed, Guardian Australia reported in 2025 that academics were increasingly teaching to empty lecture theatres while students consumed material online, if they consumed it at all. Adelaide University itself attracted national controversy over the future of traditional face-to-face lectures, although the university subsequently clarified that much learning would remain in person where appropriate. The larger trend nevertheless extends well beyond Adelaide.
Something profound is being lost. Education is not merely content transmission. If it were, universities would have become obsolete when the public library was invented. The value of genuine university education lies partly in intellectual friction. The student encounters somebody who knows vastly more about a subject than he does. He makes an argument and discovers that it is terrible. He is forced to defend it. He reads something difficult rather than watching a summary. He encounters classmates who disagree with him. He learns that enthusiasm is not evidence and confidence is not knowledge. That process is inefficient. It is also education. Commercial systems dislike inefficiency.
The pressure towards high pass rates is especially destructive because standards tend to decline quietly. No vice-chancellor announces that the university will reduce academic standards by 20 per cent next Monday. Instead, another supplementary assessment is offered. Another extension is granted. Another failing mark is reconsidered. Entry standards are adjusted. Assessment becomes more flexible. Attendance becomes optional. Students complain that a subject is too difficult and the subject is redesigned. Every individual decision can be defended as compassionate, inclusive or student-centred. Twenty years later everybody wonders why the degree does not mean what it once meant.
Credential inflation then compounds the problem. Once large proportions of the population possess bachelor's degrees, employers begin demanding postgraduate qualifications for jobs that once required undergraduate qualifications. Universities respond enthusiastically by creating more postgraduate courses. The educational arms race continues. Young Australians therefore spend more time obtaining credentials whose signalling value declines precisely because so many people possess them. This is a magnificent business model. Whether it is a magnificent educational model is another question.
There are obvious solutions. Bring back more supervised examinations. Use oral examinations. Require students to defend their arguments. Assess practical competence. Ask follow-up questions about submitted work. Put students in rooms with academics and make them demonstrate what they know. These methods have one great disadvantage. They are expensive. And there we return to commercialisation.
A university genuinely organised around academic standards would sometimes make financially irrational decisions. It would fail a full-fee student who had not reached the required standard. It would maintain small classes because some subjects are better taught that way. It would employ scholars whose work had enormous intellectual value but little immediate commercial application. It would preserve obscure disciplines because civilisation needs repositories of knowledge that markets may not reward this financial year. Above all, it would accept that some students should fail. Failure is not a malfunction of an educational system. If everybody passes regardless of performance, the system has malfunctioned.
None of this means Australian universities are worthless. They continue to contain outstanding researchers, dedicated teachers and brilliant students. Australian academics make internationally important discoveries, and many graduates leave university exceptionally well educated. That is precisely why declining standards matter. The good student is cheated when the poor student receives the same credential without demonstrating comparable competence. The conscientious academic is undermined when management pressures him to maximise retention rather than maintain standards. The employer is cheated when the degree ceases reliably to indicate competence. Ultimately the university itself is damaged because reputation, once destroyed, is extraordinarily difficult to rebuild.
The solution is not complicated conceptually, although implementing it would be painful. Universities must decide what they are. If they are corporations selling credentials, then they should stop pretending otherwise. Students are customers, degrees are products and academic standards will inevitably bend towards commercial imperatives. But if universities remain institutions devoted to knowledge, the hierarchy must be reversed. Academic standards come first. Revenue comes second. Students who cannot meet the required English-language standard should not be admitted until they can. Students who cannot demonstrate mastery of the material should fail. Students who cheat should face meaningful consequences. Academics should never be pressured, explicitly or implicitly, to change legitimate failures because those failures are financially inconvenient. And a degree should once again mean something.
Perhaps the most alarming aspect of the Australian university crisis is that these propositions now sound radical. Once they were simply what a university was. Australian higher education has expanded enormously, internationalised spectacularly and become a multibillion-dollar industry. It has more managers, more technology, more marketing, more buildings and more students than the universities of earlier generations could possibly have imagined. Yet the question remains brutally simple. Are the standards higher? If the answer is no, then all that expansion has not necessarily represented educational progress.
Higher education can survive ideological fashions. It can survive funding disputes and political interference. What it cannot indefinitely survive is the destruction of confidence in the qualification itself. Once employers and the public begin asking whether a university graduate can actually read, write, reason and demonstrate the knowledge supposedly represented by the degree, the university has reached the edge of the cliff.
How low can Australian higher education go? As low as commercial imperatives are permitted to drag academic standards.
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/decline-higher-education-continues
