The New Inheritors: Transforming Young Peopleâ€™s Expectations of University

The New Inheritors

The New Inheritors

Transforming Young People’s Expectations of University

Madeleine Mattarozzi Laming Australian Catholic University, Victoria, Australia

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

Part 1: The changing context of Australian university education.

1. Changing assumptions and expectations 3

2. A revolution in policy 13

3. Nurseries of liberal values, nurseries of economic values 41

4. Culture and class 61

5. Inheritors and Newcomers 77

Part 2: Transforming young people’s expectations of university.

6. “Going to university will ...” 89

7. Knowledge and higher education 107

8. Access and payment 121

9. Conclusions 135

PART 1: THE CHANGING CONTEXT OF AUSTRALIAN UNIVERSITY EDUCATION.

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CHAPTER 1

CHANGING ASSUMPTIONS AND EXPECTATIONS

The large number of students enrolling in university for the first time has challenged assumptions and expectations about the nature of the undergraduate university experience – experiences that have their origins in the elite system of higher education some 30 years ago. (McInnis & James, 1995, p. 4).

Around two thirds of Australian school leavers would like to enrol at university, but just what they hope to achieve there or to gain from the experience is unclear. Students who are commencing their university studies are also more diverse than ever before in terms of their age, gender, home location, ethnicity and socioeconomic status than ever before. Until recently, undergraduate university students were drawn from a narrow band of society and shared similar backgrounds, educational experiences, values and expectations of university. They constituted an ideal, but recognisable, student archetype against which aspiring students could be measured to see if they merited a university education. This is no longer the case: since the 1940s when the Commonwealth Government first involved itself in the provision of university education, Australian society has changed almost beyond recognition in terms of demographic composition, employment patterns, the status of women and popular culture. During this period, monetarist economic theory that advocates the deregulation and privatisation of public utilities has become widely accepted at the policymaking level and higher education policy reflects the view that university education is a product to be traded in an open market. Sociologist Michael Pusey has argued that economic policy has a pervasive effect in determining social values, but it is unclear if today’s university students share the traditional model of university as an opportunity for intellectual and personal exploration and development, or whether they subscribe to a new model that regards university as a way of maximising occupational choices and employment prospects (Pusey, 1990). Despite the abundance of research into the factors contributing to academic success and attrition from tertiary study, there has been little attempt until now to ask prospective university students what they believe to be the purpose of university education or why they wish to enrol. The young people who want to go to university are diverse in terms of their family backgrounds, ethnicity, school experiences, academic achievements and ambitions. I wanted to discover whether this diversity would produce markedly different views about the purpose and value of university education. When those young people sat down to complete their tertiary entrance applications, what prompted them to select university ahead of a technical college? And what mental

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image of university motivated their choices – did they see themselves joining a community of scholars or was it a means of entry into a more desirable type of occupation? Were they hoping for a transformative experience at university or anticipating several more years of “school”? This book offers some answers to those questions based on a study, undertaken over several years, which invited young people to articulate their values and aspirations, and to offer their own opinions about nature and purpose of higher education and the role it would play in achieving their goals. Nine schools took part in the study; their status and the socioeconomic background of their students spanned the full range from elite to disadvantaged. The young people who participated in the study were divided into two polar groups for comparison using their father’s educational attainment and occupation as the key selection criteria. Those young people whose fathers are graduates and whose occupations are described as professional or senior manager are described as the Inheritors; they closely match the stereotype of the traditional student. The second group of young people in this study consists of young people whose fathers did not complete secondary school, irrespective of their occupation or income. They are the Newcomers. The responses from the study, which I explore in later chapters, are synthesised with evidence derived from almost sixty years of research into the attitudes of school leavers and undergraduate university students to show the connections between these results and existing social trends. The answers indicate the possible structure of Australian society in the future as today’s students graduate to become influential members of the community. They also go to the heart of the policymaking process since education policies that do not take students’ beliefs and attitudes concerning education (particularly higher education and all of the myths, desires and dreams encompassed in that term) into account are likely to be ineffectual or counterproductive. During the process of analysing and interpreting the answers revealed through the studies, I have engaged with a range of theories about the formation of young people’s identity, values and attitudes. The most significant of these is Bourdieu’s concept of cultural capital. Bourdieu found that economic obstacles were not an adequate explanation of the enormous differences in the rates of school completion or university enrolment between middle class and working class children. If money (economic capital) were not the principal reason why an industrial worker’s son had a less than two in a hundred chance of enrolling at university, (compared with a better than one in two chance for a senior executive’s son) then another force must be at work; he named this force “cultural capital” (Bourdieu & Passeron, 1979). Bourdieu defined three forms of cultural capital: institutional, objectified and embodied. He argued that each of these played a significant role in the process of developing children’s perception of themselves as learners and determines their educational progress. In its institutionalised state, cultural capital refers to academic qualifications: those certificates and prizes that act as proof of cultural competence and confer upon their holders “a conventional, constant legally guaranteed value” (Bourdieu, 1986).


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Academic qualifications are guaranteed by the institutions that issue them, and this allows the community to assess the status and market value of the person holding them. The objectified state of cultural capital refers to material objects that that are valuable not only because they signify various things about their owners, but also because their owners can use them to enrich their stores of cultural capital. A student who has the latest computer equipment at home has an advantage over others who have to depend on public facilities or less sophisticated equipment: ownership also indicates that the student’s family has sufficient money to purchase new equipment and it provides an index of the family’s values that other members of their community find easy to interpret. The family that invests a substantial amount of money on educational equipment has identified itself as a family that endorses a set of values very different from that of one that spends the same amount on a high-tech television or on customising a car. The last form of cultural capital, the embodied state, refers to the habits that lead to success. These “dispositions of the mind and body” include dedication to the long hours of study or practice that are needed to master particular fields of study, but they also include ways of approaching a task or acceptance of the need to sacrifice immediate gratification in favour of long-term rewards (Bourdieu, 1986). This is the form of capital that was of most interest to me in writing this book – it is transmitted at home from early childhood and frequently without conscious effort on the part of the adults or of the child. Cultural capital in its embodied form is a crucial factor in determining academic success; it creates a desire for institutional capital in the form of qualifications such as a degree from a high-status university and for material objects that have cultural capital, but it also enables the student to make use of them. Wanting a degree from a prestigious university is not enough if the young person concerned has not acquired the self-discipline and work ethic necessary to achieve that end. Using Bourdieu’s theory of cultural capital, I asked the young people in this study about their interests and activities, their perception of themselves as students or intellectuals, their reasons for wanting to go to university, the people and things that had influenced their choices and their understanding of the purpose of university education. Previous research suggests that few students have thought deeply or coherently about their plans for tertiary education before enrolment (Archer, Cantwell & Bourke, 1999). But the majority of students completing secondary school prefer university to TAFE (Harvey-Beavis & Ellsworth, 1998; James, 2000; James, 2002; James, Baldwin & McInnis, 1998), regardless of their prospects of success, even though they do not always understand their own reasons for this preference. Class boundaries have blurred to the extent that many young people now take for granted educational and occupational opportunities that their parents struggled to achieve and which their grandparents could have imagined only in dreams. The feminist movement of the 1970s has wrought such profound changes to the expectations and experiences of young Australia women and men that are so great it is difficult to calculate their magnitude. There has also been a vast change in society’s understanding of the purpose of education since the end of the Second World War. In the past, Australian educators have held one of two competing interpretations of the

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purpose of education: it would contribute to the emancipation of the industrial working class and reduce the disparity between classes or it would enable less privileged members of society to join the middle class (Bennett, 1982). I wanted to know how young people’s lives were affected by the outcomes of the changes that had occurred and how they interpreted the purpose of education.

THE SCHOOLS AND THEIR STUDENTS

The study on which this book is based was conducted in nine schools located within one Australian state, Victoria. In Australia, the school education is the responsibility of the state governments which determine policy and curriculum and administer the public system. Catholic secondary schools are administered by a network of Catholic Education Offices located across Victoria. The Association of Independent Schools is the peak body for schools run by other religious denominations and community groups. Independent schools range from elite institutions dating back to the colonial period to newly-established schools run by parents. Victoria’s oldest private schools were intentionally modelled on the nine English “Great Schools”1 and for years their senior staff were recruited from those schools whenever possible, or from lesser public schools (Selby-Smith, 1983). The uniforms, prefects, emphasis on sporting activities, traditions and, until recently, their curricula all reflected their spiritual and ideological, if not actual, origins. These private (mostly Anglican) schools were intended to serve the needs of wealthy middle- and upper-class families. Like their English antecedents, they were designed to promote and transmit an elite form of culture, one based on notions of inherited ability or aptitude for leadership. These schools existed to train society’s leaders, and as a consequence came to be regarded as the standard to which other schools should aspire, and against which other schools would be measured for generations to come. Many of the schools established in the mid to late 19th century by other religious denominations did not seriously challenge the model of education provided by these schools or dispute the values they promoted, but copied their practices in order to claim a share in the tradition for their own constituents (Sherington, Petersen & Brice, 1987). Since the Second World War, many newer private schools have felt obliged to emulate at least some of the aspects of the local “Great Schools” to make themselves acceptable to parents. Newer private schools (and government schools) were also pressured to define themselves according to the standards of academic or artistic excellence set by the established schools: when they are criticised it is for not being like (or as good as) the established, private schools. As a consequence of this history, going to a private school has become much more than a matter of personal choice; it is a public demonstration of allegiance to a specific set of values (Teese, 1981). All nine of the schools which participated in the study (and which have been given pseudonyms) reflect the traditional model of the private or independent school to some degree.


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The Inner Eastern and South-Eastern Schools

Ariel Grammar prides itself on its commitment to academic excellence and creativity; it regards itself as the epitome of a traditional liberal arts education – a little unconventional compared with other independent schools but far more creative. Excellence is what counts regardless of the field in which it is achieved; outstanding results in music and mathematics are celebrated as highly as sporting achievements. The school provides a very wide range of programs in art, music and drama as well as traditional academic subjects: it has a full orchestra and choir, its drama productions are of professional quality and its sporting reputation is excellent. Ariel Grammar students are often selected for state or national teams, but it does not choose to compete in some of the more prestigious school sporting events. Founded in 1895, the school is located in an area that has had a rather bohemian past, but is now very fashionable and expensive. Its central location makes it accessible to families from all over the metropolitan region, but the majority of them are drawn from the affluent, bay-side suburbs close to the school. Ariel Grammar has the highest socioeconomic status score though not the highest General Achievement Test scores of the nine schools.2 St Terrence’s College was founded in 1918 as the matriculation college for Catholic boys living throughout the Melbourne metropolitan region. At a time when sectarian discrimination was common, St Terrence’s provided a pathway into higher education for boys who could not afford to attend the elite Xavier College. The school remains under the governance of a religious order although there are no longer any brothers on the staff. The order which owns the school was established in Ireland in the nineteenth century to make up the educational deficit produced by systemic discrimination against Catholics; their original mission was to educate poor Catholic boys for employment and advancement once the restrictions on Catholics were removed. The school moved to its current location in 1932 in what is now one of Melbourne’s most exclusive suburbs. St Terrence’s College is regarded as the jewel among the order’s Victorian schools. Many of the students come from the local area, but it draws students from all over the eastern suburbs. There is also a small number of students who commute across the city from the northern and western suburbs, occasionally transferring from an affiliated school in the inner west. The school has a reputation for firm discipline and excellent pastoral care, but it is also notable for its extensive sporting facilities and achievements. Over the last few years, St Terence’s College has worked hard to improve its academic reputation and recently topped the state examination results. St Mary’s College was founded in 1883 by an order of Irish nuns that had arrived in Australia in the 1860s. They opened their first Victorian school in 1873 and St Mary’s College followed 10 years later in what was then a semi-rural area on the outskirts of Melbourne. St Mary’s was established to ensure that talented Catholic girls had the opportunity to pursue their education as far as possible and until the late 1990s many of the students came from lower-middle and working class families. It was one of the first girls’ schools to offer Matriculation and it has

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always prided itself on its academic reputation. In the last decade, gentrification has changed the surrounding suburbs and the school is now in one of the wealthiest areas of Melbourne. Now many of the students come from very high socioeconomic status backgrounds. Although a number of past students have considerable prominence in professional fields and its examination results are generally impressive, the school does not choose to publish that information, preferring to congratulate all the students for their efforts. Students from these three schools have the highest socioeconomic status, and they have the most educated parents; their mothers are the most likely to be professionals, and their fathers most likely to own or operate a business or hold a managerial position. The students attending these three schools are very strongly oriented to university and appear to regard it as their natural destination.

The Inner Western Schools

The inner western schools are not quite as close to the traditional model of the private school as the schools in the east/south east metropolitan region, but they look similar in many respects. The uniforms and school organisation are similar. These schools are comfortably middle class, but a long way behind in socioeconomic status and academic achievement. St Brigid’s is similar in age to St Mary’s College and regards itself as having a long tradition of promoting academic excellence combined with “development of the whole person”, nevertheless it did not offer Matriculation until the 1950s and its reputation is not as distinguished. Some of the students come from the surrounding wealthy suburbs, but the majority come from the newer subdivisions up to ten kilometres away in the “McMansion” mortgage belt or from the older, city-fringe suburbs that have been gentrified in recent years. St Cormac’s College opened in 1953 on its present site at what was then the very edge of the metropolitan area in response to the growing demand from the new housing estates nearby. The school offers a wide range of subjects, including an extensive vocational program and also a comprehensive informal curriculum, to approximately 1,100 young men. One of the most striking features of the school is its extensive sports facilities: it is better known for the students’ achievements across a wide range of sports than for its academic reputation. In recent years the school has moved away from this focus on sport and has competed successfully in the National Rock Eisteddfod and in various debating competitions.

The Outer Western School

Western Regional College is the face of contemporary Catholic education. Built in the eighties in the middle of a newly created suburb on the western plains about fifty minutes drive from the city, this school is a senior regional college, administered by the diocesan Catholic Education Office. It accepts students from three junior regional schools. Until the late 1990s, the surrounding area was farmland and some traces of that history were still visible among the recently constructed housing


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developments. The area grew rapidly due to the availability of budget-priced housing, and families with young children skew the population. This is Australia’s new melting pot: 21 per cent of the students were born overseas, more than double the figure for any other school. Of the nine schools included in the survey, Western Regional College was the most culturally and linguistically diverse. Ten languages other than English were in use daily in the home: Italian was the most common (8 per cent) followed by Croatian (5.8 per cent); Arabic tied with Maltese for third place (2.3 per cent). The school had the lowest SES figure and the lowest General Achievement Test score of the nine schools that participated in this study. The students from Western Regional College are more likely to live in a single-parent family and to have parents who are unemployed. Western Regional College is the furthest removed from the model of the traditional private school, but it is populated by families who aspire to a successful future for their children.

The Regional Schools

Catholic schools have played a special role in Victorian education ever since the 1850s gold rush brought prosperity to the state. In many rural areas they were the only secondary schools available until the expansion of the state secondary system in the late 20th century. They drew their pupils from the local Catholic communities, but ambitious families who wanted middle-class accomplishments such as music, elocution and drawing also enrolled their children regardless of their religious affiliation. As a consequence, rural Catholic schools remained close to the model of the traditional private school, but used the fees they charged wealthy families for these accomplishments to subsidise places for needy pupils. As a consequence, Catholic schools – particularly in rural areas – have always been more ethnically and socioculturally diverse than other private schools (Rogan, 2000). The student profile of a country Catholic school continues to depend on the nature of its local catchment areas. Enrolment in a regional Catholic school, particularly a boarding school, can represent a significant investment of a family’s time and money; some students must travel long distances to attend a particular school, and as rural incomes are generally less than metropolitan incomes, even modest fees may be a significant drain on the family economy. Western District College is located 286 kilometres from Melbourne in Victoria’s wheat belt; it is the only boarding school in the sample and of the three country schools in the study it comes closest to the traditional model of the private school. The college is set in 48 hectares of grounds that include extensive sporting fields, stadiums and a swimming pool that reflect its origins as a boys’ boarding school. In the early 2000s it had one of the largest cadet units in Victoria offering adventure-type activities including abseiling, unarmed combat, radio and signal work, first aid, canoeing and orienteering. Senior day students have the option of attending supervised study and dinner: this program was introduced in recognition that transporting children to school over long distances is very disruptive to farming life and that it can be difficult for young people to study effectively at home. Western District College’s prospectus emphasises that it provides “genuine care for the

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individual and a safe and nurturing environment for the young people of our district”. Most students attending Gippsland College live in the regional city where the school is located, but a substantial minority travel by bus from the surrounding small towns and farms. The Gippsland region depends on dairy farming, mining, timber cutting and fishing, and is the poorest region of Victoria. Although the city itself is more prosperous than the surrounding area, opportunities for further education or employment are limited. Gippsland College was formed in 1979 by the amalgamation of 2 existing single sex Catholic schools. Privately, teachers admit that things have not been the same since a major petrochemical company closed its main office in the early nineties. In those days, the student body included the children of engineers, chemists, accountants and skilled technicians; they had positive attitudes to school and high ambitions. After the company withdrew, there was more violence and drug use among young people who struggled to find school relevant. In the early 2000s, the school added vocational subjects to its curriculum and introduced the Victorian Certificate of Applied Learning believing that its practical nature would appeal to many of the students and provide them with sought after skills. North Central College was formed in 1984, also by the amalgamation of two older single sex schools. It is located in a regional city at the heart of Victoria’s fruit-growing district and attracted large numbers of Italian and Greek migrants in the 1950s and ’60s. Since 2001 a large number of Iraqi refugees have also settled there to be followed more recently by Sudanese refugee families. Very few of the newest arrivals have enrolled at North Central College, but the school has joined other community organisations in practical activities designed to help the new arrivals. The economic outlook for this region began to improve in the early 2000s and employment grew, mainly due to tourism, however, opportunities for further education are limited and employment is precarious. A prolonged drought and globalisation of the Australian economy have severely reduced the income of many farming families throughout the whole region. The most striking feature about the students attending all three of the country schools is their monoculturalism. Less than two per cent of their students were born overseas, and just one per cent commonly speak a language other than English at home.

Plan of the Book.

Part One of the book provides a contextual framework for the results from the study. In these chapters, I have traced the history of Australian higher education policy in the post-war period, showing how the policy discourse has changed since the 1940s, traced the ways in which community attitudes to university education have changed throughout the course of the 20th century and examined research into the links between students’ socioeconomic status, attitudes and enrolment/completion levels. In the final chapter in Part One I test the validity of Bourdieu’s concept of a class of Inheritors in the Australian context and conclude that a similar group can be identified within the Australian population.


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Part Two contains three chapters that explore the attitudes of young people who took part in the study detail. It confirms the existence of two distinct groups on the basis of their families’ socioeconomic status, which I have called Newcomers and Inheritors. However, I have identified another division running across these socioeconomic categories. This division is not based on wealth, but on cultural values. Culturists, as journalist and social commentator Andrew West (2006) calls them, value the inherent and intangible benefits of education, while the other group – the Materialists – make no special claims about the unique value of education and regard it as a commodity like any other. There has been a general trend towards the utilitarian end of the spectrum, but this additional dimension to the division indicates that there has been an exchange of values between the Newcomers and Inheritors. Many of the Newcomers have become Culturists; they have acquired an appreciation of the traditional liberal-humanist perspective on education as well which has had a significant effect on their reasons for wanting to go to university. The final chapter in this section examines responses to questions of access to university and who should be responsible for the costs associated with higher education. The conclusion highlights young people’s expectations and outlines the factors that have shaped them. It then identifies areas where the government’s assumptions about what young people want are out of step with reality.

NOTES

1 The term Great Schools refers to nine English schools identified by T. W. Bamford, Rise of the

public schools: a study of boys’ public boarding schools in England and Wales from 1837 to the present day, Nelson, London, 1967 as Eton, Winchester, Westminster, Charterhouse, St. Paul’s, Merchant Taylors, Harrow, Rugby and Shrewsbury. These schools set the standard for private schools throughout the British colonies.

2 The General Achievement Test (GAT) is a test of general knowledge and skills in written

communication, mathematics, science and technology, humanities, the arts and social sciences. The Victorian Curriculum and Assessment Authority use the GAT scores to contribute to the statistical moderation of school assessed tasks and to check the reliability of exam marking.

REFERENCES

Archer, J. Cantwell, R & Bourke, S. (1999). Coping at university: An examination of achievement, motivation, self-regulation, confidence, and method of entry. Higher education research & development. 18 (1) pp. 31–55.

Bennet, D. (1982). Back to the drawing board. Labor essays 1982: Socialist principles and parliamentary government. Richmond: Drummond Publishing.

Bourdieu, P. (1986). Forms of capital. In J. G. Richardson. Handbook of theory and research for the sociology of education. (pp. 241–258) Westport: Greenwood Press.

Bourdieu, P. & Passeron, J. (1979). The inheritors: French students and their relation to culture. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Harvey-Beavis, A. & Elsworth, G. (1998). Individual demand for tertiary education: Interests and fields of study. Canberra: Department of Employment, Education, Training and Youth Affairs.

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James, R. (2000). TAFE, university or work. The early preferences and choices of students in year 10,11 and 12. Parkville: Centre for the Study of Higher Education, The University of Melbourne.

James, R. (2002). Socioeconomic background and higher education participation: An analysis of school students' aspirations and expectations. Parkville: Centre for the Study of Higher Education, The University of Melbourne.

James, R., Baldwin, G. & McInnis, C. (1999). Which university? The factors influencing the choices of prospective undergraduates. Canberra: Department of Employment, Education and Training.

McInnes, C. & James, R. (1995). First year on campus: diversity in the initial experiences of Australian undergraduates. Canberra: Australian Government Publishing Service,

Pusey, M. (1990). The impact of economic ideas on public policy in Canberra. Kensington, N.S.W: Public Sector Research Centre.

Rogan, F. (2000). A short history of Catholic education: Archdiocese of Melbourne 1839–1980. Melbourne: Catholic Education Office.

Selby Smith, R. (1983). Australian independent schools: Yesterday, today and tomorrow. Australian Education Review. 19, 8–11. Melbourne: Australian Council for Educational Research.

Sherington, G., Petersen, I. D. & Brice, I. D. (1987). Learning to Lead: a history of girls' and boys' corporate secondary schools in Australia. St Leonards, NSW: Allen & Unwin.

Teese, R. (1981). The social function of private schools. Melbourne working papers. (p. 94–141). Parkville: University of Melbourne.

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CHAPTER 2

A REVOLUTION IN POLICY

Where the frontier between the state and the market is to be drawn has never been a matter that could be settled, once and for all, at some grand peace conference. Instead, it has been the subject, over the course of this century, of massive intellectual and political battles as well as constant skirmishes. In its entirety, the struggle constitutes one of the great defining dramas of the twentieth century. Today the clash is so far-reaching and so encompassing that it is remaking our world – and preparing the canvas for the twenty-first century (Yergin & Stanislaw, 1998, p. 11).

Young people’s personal values are deeply affected by the dominant values of the society in which they grow to maturity. Those values continue to shape every aspect of their lives by defining what is normal and by creating expectations of how things ought to be done; while a minority of families discuss changes in public policy and their implications, those changes have a subtle and pervasive effect on the formation of young people’s ambitions and expectations with regard to education and employment. There has been a profound transformation in the values underpinning public policy in Australia which has its roots in an ideological movement that began during the Second World War. From the mid-1940s to the mid-1980s eighties a group of economists worked steadily to convert the governments of most English-speaking nations from a Keynesian approach to economic management to a model described as monetarist or economically rationalist, and to encourage the spread of a political philosophy known as neoliberalism.1 The general effect of their success in this endeavour has been the adoption of a market approach to public policy and the subsequent privatisation of many services formerly provided by government departments coupled with a determination on the part of government to make the remaining public bodies, including universities, function like private companies and corporations. Rather than resisting this trend, or adopting a cautious approach to this new economic philosophy, the Australian government was among the first to embrace it in the mid-1970s (Jaenesch, 1989). Since then neoliberalism has guided successive Australian governments to varying degrees who have applied it across the range of policy areas, including higher education. One specific effect of this ideological approach has been the creation of a university system that not only reflects the generalised paradigm shift in Australian social and cultural values, but is designed to produce a new kind of graduate, “an economic citizen … better attuned to the

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requirements of an enterprise culture” (Marginson 1997, p154). The magnitude of these changes has been so great as to be described as a “counter revolution” (Hambly, 1997) in public policy, but they did not occur suddenly, nor were they inevitable. There have been a number of key events or decisions that represent significant turning points in Australian higher education policy; each of which marks a stage in the gradual move from an understanding of higher education as a way of reducing the disparity between classes, or public benefit, or a matter of national interest, to a conviction that it is a positional good for which the consumer must pay.

The Pre-war Period

Until the Second World War the Commonwealth Government played a very minor role in education of any type and its role in tertiary education was negligible. Commonwealth Governments of all persuasions had been reticent, if not hostile, to the idea of involving themselves in educational matters during the first forty years following Federation. The Second World War altered this situation irrevocably; it not only revealed manpower shortages in many crucial areas such as chemical engineering, but it transformed public opinion about the value of scientific research. The war also brought the Commonwealth Government and the universities into close contact for the first time as they strove to solve wartime problems. This new relationship persuaded the government that investment in scientific and technical education and research was crucial to the nation’s survival and it began to look for ways to become involved. During the state of emergency it was reasonable for the Commonwealth Government to assume responsibility and provide funds for “strategic studies” under the defence power and national security regulations, but the Curtin Government’s real plan was much larger. Despite being composed of working men, many of whom had not completed secondary school, it was the first federal government to realise that education was a matter of national, rather than state or regional, interest and to act on that belief. A more or less coherent education policy swiftly emerged. Under Prime Minister Curtin, the government created the Universities Commission in 1943 and appointed a committee of inquiry to review the Commonwealth’s responsibilities in education with a view to extending its influence. The committee’s recommendations were incorporated into the Education Act (1945), which established the Commonwealth Office of Education. Next, the Australian University Act (1946) established the Australian National University to allow graduates to undertake post-graduate study without having to travel overseas. To put its constitutional power to make laws supporting university students beyond dispute the government included “benefits to students” among the other social services mentioned in the 1946 referendum. As troops returned after the war, enrolments more than doubled rising to almost 32, 000 in 1948 (Coaldrake & Stedman, 1998). Even Curtin’s death could not stop this trend. In September 1949, Prime Minister Chifley approved 3000 university scholarships for veterans and other able students who wished to undertake studies in fields deemed to be relevant to reconstruction; ten thousand secondary scholarships were intended to follow (Whitlam, 1995).


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Just how radical a change in attitude had taken place was revealed by an exchange between Robert Menzies (then Leader of the Opposition) and J. J. Dedman, the Minister for War Organisation of Industry. When Menzies tried to persuade the House of Representatives to express support for the importance of education in post-war reconstruction Dedman asserted that the government was already well aware of its importance and had been making plans for some years. Henceforth, (and in contradiction to the constitution) the federal and state governments, would be equal partners in education (Commonwealth Parliamentary Debates, 26 July 1945, pp. 4616-4617). Shortly before the 1949 election Chifley articulated his party’s motives at its national conference:

I try to think of the Labor movement not as putting an extra sixpence in somebody’s pocket, or making somebody Prime Minister or Premier, but as a movement bringing something better to the people; better standards of living, greater happiness to the mass of the people. We have one great objective – the light on the hill – which we aim to reach by working for the betterment of mankind, not only here but anywhere we may give a helping hand (Chifley, 1949).

Menzies and the Forgotten People

The election brought about a change in government, but the shift in direction of higher education policy was scarcely perceptible during the first few months. Prime Minister Robert Menzies continued many of the programs initiated by the previous government, including the university scholarships, although he declined to fund the secondary ones. He did not abandon the Mills Inquiry, which had been set up by the Chifley Government to investigate the financial and other requirements of the universities, but he redefined the committee’s terms of reference and added his own nominee. Consequently, in 1951 Menzies presented the States Grants (Universities) Bill to parliament. The bill ratified existing commonwealth grants, and at the same time, introduced a new procedure that Menzies himself described as revolutionary, the provision of grants to the states to assist the universities under Section 96 of the Commonwealth Constitution. Menzies declined to provide financial support for the expansion and improvement of the public education system, arguing that it was clearly a state matter, but he was willing to make funding available to the universities because he believed that they had a major role to play in providing the administrative and professional class necessary to govern the nation, and because he understood the mood of the electorate at the time. In 1950 Australia was on the brink of a period of rapid social change resulting from the upheavals caused by the recent war. Many of these changes affected the middle class, to whom Menzies referred as the “forgotten people” of Australia, more dramatically than any other part of society (Menzies, 1943). Throughout the fifties the development of secondary and tertiary industries, corporate and government bureaucracies facilitated the expansion of the middle class. Many newly affluent families probably saw the opportunity for their children to study at

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university as another way of improving their career prospects, rather than a means of developing a cultured personality through participation in an intellectual community. Regardless of the reason, there was an immense and growing desire for university places that Menzies was happy to encourage. Before the Second World War, Australia’s universities were small and impoverished by European and American standards. They had suffered badly during the Depression and the war had reduced their position even further; by the late 1940s they were in poor financial shape and barely coping with the huge influx of students (Davies, 1989). The provision of federal funding in 1951 alleviated the worst effects of the financial difficulties facing Australian universities, but it was only a short-term solution. In 1952 the vice-chancellors sought federal help a second time, and by the mid-fifties it was again apparent that something would need to be done to cope with the steadily rising demand for places. By this time Australia’s economic recovery had progressed to a point where money was available for a coherent, long-term solution to the problem of university finance. With this in mind, Menzies invited Sir Keith Murray, Chair of the British Universities Grants Committee, whom he had met during his 1956 visit to England, to chair a committee of inquiry that would report on the state of Australia’s universities. Released in 1957, the Murray Report found that because the state governments could not afford to finance them, “Australian universities were short-staffed, poorly housed and equipped, with high student failure rates, and weak honours and post-graduate schools” (Davies, 1982, p13). Following the report, funding for new growth was made available by the states, with increased support from the Commonwealth Government. It seemed as if the universities might have to continue growing indefinitely in order to provide sufficient places to satisfy demand; in 1958, 1959 and 1960 the annual increase in enrolments exceeded 13 per cent. Throughout the fifties and sixties several new universities were established in Victoria, New South Wales, Queensland and South Australia by converting university colleges into autonomous universities or building new campuses, but pressure for further Commonwealth support was mounting. Despite Menzies’ resistance to further involvement, the level of Commonwealth support for all forms of education increased. During the same period the economics of education emerged as a popular study worldwide. Economic theory was extrapolated into a conviction that improving the educational standards of the entire population would automatically improve the productivity of the nation. Following this line of reasoning, the purpose of university education was not simply to educate an elite cadre of social and political leaders, but to produce a continuous supply of skilled professionals who would drive the national economy. The mining boom that began in 1963 also strengthened the connection between economics and higher education. Mining and manufacturing companies could not find enough engineers and metallurgists and demanded that university places be increased; increasing job opportunities led to a further increase in applications. Most tertiary institutions could not keep pace and the situation was becoming critical. Business, industry and the government could not avoid the obvious conclusion; tertiary education had a vital role to play in Australia’s national development.


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As Menzies saw it, there were several major problems to be dealt with in relation to the expansion of tertiary education in Australia. Universities were expensive. Business, commerce and industry all needed more qualified professionals, but the tendency of students to specialise in a particular field of study early in their studies meant that the broad liberal education he valued was being undermined. There was also a real possibility that in their haste to graduate more students the universities might lower their standards and destroy the university as a place of intellectual excellence. Menzies was convinced that higher education should be reserved for the select few who could benefit from the “refining and purifying process” (Martin, 1996, p. 22) it entailed. He genuinely dreaded the creation of what he called “second-rate homes of learning” (Bessant, 1977, p. 91). His personal feelings about the value and role of university education and his admiration for the elite British traditions help to explain why he was also reluctant to consider the American model of mass tertiary education institutions. He was not alone in this respect; as early as 1950 some academics foresaw difficulties ahead if the trend towards a mass system was to continue. Faced with these conflicting issues Menzies set up a new inquiry into tertiary education led by the Chairman of the Universities Commission, Sir Leslie Martin. Menzies chose Martin precisely because he was an Anglophile and a traditionalist. Martin had also given the vice-chancellors the impression that he, and the Universities’ Commission, were actively working to expand the university sector (Davies, 1989, p14). Consequently, Menzies was surprised and angered by the Martin Commission’s interim report, published in June 1960. The changes it proposed would have increased the number of universities dramatically and at a cost the government could not afford. The government had been under intense pressure for some years to act on the problems facing the universities, but Menzies was aware that it could be electorally damaging to spend a very large sum of money on something that most voters would not use. He informed the vice chancellors that while his government would do its best to honour any agreements that had already been made, there would be no further large injection of funds; the universities would need to make good use of the money they received. Menzies had made it clear that if large numbers of Australians were to embark on tertiary education then it would be outside the universities. Following the brief given to him, Martin instructed the committee to investigate ways of meeting unmet demand for further education, but he did not allow them to question the philosophical assumptions underpinning the way in which Australian universities were organised and financed, nor did he permit them to speculate if American-style “multi-versities” might be more suited to Australia’s needs. Mindful of Menzies’ desire to preserve the elite model of university education, Martin proposed a compromise. The Commission’s final report (known as the Martin Report) was presented to parliament in 1965. It upheld the view that tertiary education should be available to all applicants who had the capacity to undertake it. However, it also concluded that expanding existing forms of tertiary education was not an appropriate response because universities could not provide the sufficient variety of courses or cater for the range of abilities involved. The report proposed that three distinct

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categories of tertiary institution should be developed – universities, colleges or institutes and teacher-training facilities (Committee on the Future of Tertiary Education in Australia, 1964). Menzies rejected the recommendation that teacher-training boards should be included among its responsibilities and the proposal to establish an Australian Tertiary Education Commission responsible for all forms of tertiary education, but he accepted the plan for a two-tier system. A two-tier, or binary, system of universities and colleges would provide a larger, improved and more diversified higher education sector. Necessary expansion could take place, but under tight government control:

An uncontrolled expansion could lead to the situation, as in the United States, where many universities had deviated radically from these traditions. He realized that there could be no longer any justification for an elite based on privilege alone having a virtual monopoly of university places. The elite had to be expanded, but he was determined this would be done within predetermined limits (Bessant, 1977, p. 90).

Differences between universities and the new Colleges of Advanced Education (CAEs) were not clearly articulated and concerns about the Martin Report began to surface in academic circles even before it was released. In an unpublished paper, written in 1965, prominent academic P. H. Partridge criticised the committee for failing to address the “fundamental education theory, the central principles it purports to be following in the proposals it makes concerning the future role of the universities and the and the nature and functions of the new colleges … we are not told at all accurately in what ways the teaching should differ …” (Richardson, 1972, p. 4).

It’s Time: The Whitlam Years

In 1972 the Labor Party swept into power under the slogan “It’s Time”. The slogan promised a young and vigorous government that would enable Australia to take its place in the modern world (Barrett, 2001). It was understood that education would play a major role in the revitalisation of society. Prime Minister Gough Whitlam had held very strong beliefs about the role of education since the start of his political career; his first major speech in the House of Representatives in 1953 set the tone for the next 20 years:

Education is absorbing an increasingly larger part of the Budget of each of the States. At present, education is the largest item in each of those Budgets. I have no doubt that, as with every activity in respect of which the Australian government makes finance available, the Commonwealth will gradually be obliged to take over that function from the States. Everybody in Australia is entitled without cost to the individual, to the same kind of educational facilities, whether it be in respect of education at the kindergarten or tertiary stage or the post-graduate stage (Commonwealth Parliamentary Debates, 1 October 1953, p. 941).


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He returned to the same theme at the end of the parliamentary year:

It is impossible any longer to regard education … as a State matter …. education has expanding frontiers …. and the Commonwealth is the only authority that has expanding financial frontiers. Education is a national and not a State matter (Commonwealth Parliamentary Debates, 2/3 December 1953, p. 836).

Whitlam’s political philosophy centered on the promotion of social equality and his attitude to education was shaped by his belief in social democracy, his strong sense of nationalism and his hatred of inefficiency. He was convinced it was the responsibility of government to intervene in society and to manage the economy in such a way that people were not disadvantaged by what he termed “inequality of luck” (Whitlam, 1977, p. 268). He rejected totally the values implicit in Menzies’ Forgotten People speech that, in his opinion, argued that fear and self-interest were the basis for social progress. As Whitlam saw it, education was the means of equipping citizens with the necessary knowledge and skills to become democratic political citizens; only education could equip people for full participation in society. If the constraints of poverty and ignorance could be removed, and a sense of community developed, many of Australia’s social and economic problems would disappear. Soon after coming to power in 1972, Whitlam set the process of reform in motion. Determined to put his ideas about education into practice he created the Schools Commission to oversee primary and secondary education. Having done that, he asked the Chair, Professor Peter Karmel to examine the position of government and non-government primary and secondary schools throughout Australia and to make recommendations on ways of meeting their immediate financial. The Karmel Report, tabled in parliament in May 1973, described a school system riven by inequality and suffering from inadequate funding, and drew attention to the inequalities of educational opportunity in Australian schools remarking that:

The test of whether equality of opportunity existed would be that those going to on to higher education were drawn from all groups in the same proportion as each group was represented in the population … (Karmel, 1973, p. 17).

The Schools Commission proposed a long-term plan to ensure that all Australian schools met a minimum acceptable standard by the end of the seventies; the government welcomed the report and announced that it would implement its recommendations as a matter of urgency. Further evidence of the Whitlam Government’s understanding of education as a means of achieving social justice followed: abolition of tuition fees at all universities, CAEs, technical colleges and teachers’ colleges, establishment of the Tertiary Education Assistance Scheme, a stringently means-tested living allowance that replaced the Commonwealth Scholarships paid to some 17 per cent of students and creation of range of educational programs designed to promote equality of opportunity. By devoting extra resources to all stages of education from pre-school to university, and by ensuring that the bulk of available funding went to public, not private, institutions Whitlam intended to reduce the traditional educational advantage of high socioeconomic status students over their poorer neighbours.

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The Whitlam Government considered these reforms to be long overdue, but they were also expensive, and by mid-1975 they were costing more than six billion dollars. The cost would not have been a problem but for the oil crisis in 1974 and the worldwide recession that began in 1975. The Department of Treasury was unhappy at high levels of expenditure on what it regarded as non-essential services, and this unease spread quickly to the public. The 1975-76 Budget contained no further increases in tertiary education funding, but it also protected some areas. Had the Whitlam Government been returned to office in 1975 it is likely that the need for financial restraint would have prevented further expansion of the universities, but it is unlikely that the impact of any cuts to funding would have been as severe as the ones which followed the election of the Fraser Liberal Government in 1975 (Spaull, 1979).

A New Economic Policy

In 1944 Austrian economist Friedrich Hayek published The Road to Serfdom in which he argued that the trend towards government intervention in the economy (the eponymous economic philosophy championed by John Maynard Keynes) would stifle private enterprise and ultimately lead to a loss of individual freedom as various national governments attempted to manage both demand and supply for goods and services. Hayek was regarded as a maverick by mainstream economists, but his ideas found favour with a small group of academics at the University of Chicago and with members of the Mont Pélerin Society, a group of intellectuals (mainly economists) who met regularly in Switzerland. American economist Milton Friedman was also a founding member of the Mont Pélerin Society; together they embarked on a mission to reformulate thinking on economics and the role of government around the world. For more than two decades, Hayek argued that the social order should be based on individuals linked by contract and exchange, that individuals should take full responsibility for their own fate and the government should not interfere with the individual’s freedom of choice; liberalism should be stripped of its social democratic aspects to re-emerge in a fundamental form – neoliberalism. Until the economic crisis of 1974, Hayek, Friedman and the other Chicago School economists had found few supporters for their ideas among politicians or heads of state. Most Western governments had accepted the Keynesian dictum that governments had an obligation to regulate growth, to provide services and generally manage the economy, but the first worldwide recession since the 1930s changed that view, at least in the English-speaking world. Production, development, investment and employment dropped sharply in most developed nations under the combined impact of economic uncertainty and the second OPEC crisis, but in defiance of all previously known economic laws, unemployment rose while inflation continued to grow. In Australia, the Whitlam government’s first response to the worsening economic situation was to employ the conventional Keynesian strategies and increase government spending, but this did not have the expected effect: inflation


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continued to rise while growth slowed. Instead of injecting further funds in the 1975 Budget, Treasurer Bill Hayden, spoke of a need for the government to restrain spending in order to give the private sector the opportunity to invest. In doing so he became the first Australian Treasurer to abandon Keynesian economics in favour of the newer monetarist model: his 1975-76 Budget, which declared that 1976 would be treated as a special year outside the normal triennial funding model would come to represent a crucial turning point in Australian higher education policy since the Second World War. Notwithstanding Hayden’s flirtation with monetarism, the Fraser Government which took office in 1975, was the first Australian government to implement policy based on this approach to economics (Marginson, 1997).

The Anti-Father Christmas

It would be an exaggeration to describe Malcolm Fraser as a New Right politician; nevertheless, the influence of neoliberal philosophy is discernible in many of the decisions taken by his government. On the surface it appeared that the Liberal Party’s understanding of the role of education had not changed significantly since the 1960s when the Menzies Government emphasised personal advancement within the context of national development, but in reality the new government’s approach was very different:

In its approach to social policy, the Fraser Government has taken a position strongly opposed to the style and substance of the Whitlam administration which preceded it. The differences are not confined to the philosophy of social policy itself, but also flow from a radically different view of the roles of the public sector in the economic system and of the Commonwealth Government in Australian federalism (Scotton, 1980, p. 1).

Fraser, who was once described as “the anti-Father Christmas” (Henderson, 1998) possessed a vision of government that was extraordinarily narrow. It rested on his conviction that people are natural adversaries and relied on fear as its motivating force; life was not meant to be easy, but restrained, self-reliant and fiscally responsible. Providing benefits to those who had not earned them or governing through consensus were dangerous because people would lose their vigilance and society would become soft (Little, 1989). Moreover, the Liberal Party under Fraser was ill-prepared for government when it took office in 1975. It had no real domestic policy except to reduce inflation; its broad objective was to reduce the size of the public sector while leaving the largest possible proportion of total resources in the hands of the private sector. Education was singled out for special attention because it had been the vehicle for Whitlam’s social reforms (Spaull, 1979). Where Whitlam had intended to use education to enable citizens to exercise their democratic political rights, Fraser’s intention was to create social conditions that would produce individualist, economic anti-citizens and his education policy emphasised meeting the needs of business and industry, and the importance of individual responsibility.

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Throughout 1976 the Minister for Education, Senator Carrick, fought a rearguard action to defend his portfolio from the Treasury, but by early 1977 it was clear that the Treasurer, Phillip Lynch, had succeeded in persuading the government that education funding must be cut. Fraser’s pre-election commitment to two per cent real growth in Commonwealth funding was abandoned, the eight funding categories for secondary schools established by Karmel were reduced to three and financial support for the wealthiest schools was restored. In the same year Carrick ordered the Schools Commission to transfer $13.8m from government schools and joint programmes to non-government schools on the grounds that the states’ improved financial position would enable them to direct more funds to public schools and that the poorest schools would have reached the minimum standard suggested by the Schools Commission and therefore did not need further support (Connell, 1993). The greater part of these redirected funds went to needy Catholic schools, but a substantial amount went to wealthy private schools on the grounds that they provided choice and diversity in education (Spaull, 1979). In 1981 the government set up a cabinet sub-committee to examine ways of reducing government expenditure. The “Razor Gang”, as it became known, initiated a complete restructure of the CAE sector into a much smaller number of large institutions, suggesting that these would be more efficient in the management of their resources and offer greater opportunities to students. The net effect of these policies was to reverse the trend towards a system of mass tertiary education that had been in progress for 20 years. During this period the number of secondary students completing a matriculation year continued to rise, making competition for tertiary education places more acute (Connell, 1993). By cutting funding to public schools, and to the universities, Fraser effectively stopped university expansion, and in doing so he preserved much of its elite nature. Funding for universities and CAEs was cut to the point where it could barely keep pace with inflation; only the recently established Technical and Further Education (TAFE) sector received an increase in support. Getting a degree was a privilege largely restricted to the upper middle class – as it had been in the 1950s and early ‘60s. At the same time, business and industry would be supplied with skilled technical workers by an expanded TAFE sector in the role that Menzies had envisaged for the CAEs. By 1982 it was apparent that a change of government was imminent and support for monetary economic theory presented the Labor Party with a dilemma. Keynesian economics did not seem able to provide a solution to Australia’s economic problems, but a neoliberal approach to economics was at odds with the ALP’s traditional values (Barrett, 2001). It would be five years before this conflict was resolved. Those who expected or hoped that a return of a Labor government in 1983 would mean a return to the idealistic education policies of the Whitlam years were sadly disappointed. Desperate to win, the party had replaced Bill Hayden with Bob Hawke in the lead-up to the election. Unlike previous Labor leaders, Hawke had friends among wealthy business leaders as well as trade unionists giving him a more corporatist outlook than his predecessors. Hawke was also the first Prime


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Minister in almost a decade who had not been Minister for Education at some stage in his career: in his opinion, education was simply not a priority issue, but it was expensive and therefore in need of attention.

Cabinet in general had decided that Whitlam’s education largesse had not been electorally rewarded and that education was a 1970s issue that should be dropped a long way down the reform agenda (Ryan, 1999).

The Hawke Government was faced with three possible choices: (i) endorse Whitlam’s vision of higher education as a means of transforming society and fund expansion, inviting accusations that it was ignoring election promises about fiscal responsibility; (ii) concentrate on the economy, limit the growth of the tertiary sector and ignore the problem of youth unemployment and the demands of business and industry for more trained personnel; (iii) provide a small funding increase for tertiary education while developing new sources of funding, and allow student demand to set the limits of growth. In an attempt to balance competing demands, the government opted for the third alternative. The Labor Party was elected for three successive terms of government between 1983 and 1996. During that period, it became progressively more enamoured of the monetarist approach to economic policy. Policy produced between 1983 and 1985 conformed to the party policy articulated before the election and its first two Budgets relied on a (more or less) Keynesian approach in combination with a variety of policy adjustments and an agreement between the government, business and the unions to control wage and price increases intended to control inflation, known as the Accord. Rising youth unemployment led to a focus on schools and on increasing the number of students remaining at school until Year 12, but the government also created 3000 additional tertiary places in 1984 and promised a further 10,190 between 1985 and 1988. A substantial number of these were to be allocated to non-traditional students including Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders, women, migrants, low-income groups and people with disabilities. However, as the process of opening Australia’s economy to international markets continued, the Keynesian approach became difficult to sustain in the face of deteriorating economic conditions. Evidence of how this new attitude would affect education emerged when the Minister for Finance, Peter Walsh, attempted to persuade the government to reintroduce tuition fees of around $1400 for university students and $900 for CAE students. Walsh argued that free tertiary education could not be justified in the tight economic circumstances facing the nation, and that it amounted to a subsidy for the wealthy (Power & Robertson, 1988). Caucus rejected Walsh’s proposal, but the Budget included a Higher Education Administrative Charge (HEAC) to cover part of the administrative costs of university degrees. Although the amount was small – $250 per full-time student – imposition of the charge appeared to make a mockery of the statement delivered two weeks earlier by the Minister for Education, Senator Susan Ryan, that the government would not impose tuition fees in accordance with party policy. The government was able to claim that the administrative charge was not a tuition fee in the true sense of the word.

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The transition from the traditional Labor commitment to social justice to a monetarist approach took place between 1985 and 1987; Ryan remained Minister, but efficiency and economy became the new catchwords of the period. Greater emphasis on economic management led the government to prompt the Commonwealth Tertiary Education Commission’s 1986 Review of Efficiency and Effectiveness in Higher Education. CTEC noted that while funding had remained unchanged in real terms for more than a decade, student numbers had increased by 25 per cent and recommended that tertiary institutions should derive as much income from the private sector as possible (Commonwealth Tertiary Education Commission, 1986). By its third term the Hawke Government was talking about the need to restructure the whole economy to ensure it remained globally competitive. Higher education was to be made to contribute directly to the national economy. When the Hawke Government came to power in 1983, 91 per cent of university funding derived from the Commonwealth Government and three per cent from fees, charges and research: since then the proportion of government funding had declined steadily, but by 1987 members of the government were beginning to question its role in funding university education at any level (Smart & Dudley, 1990). This change in the interpretation of the purpose of higher education was due to equal parts of economics and ideology. Between 1985 and 1987, the funding crisis in universities had deepened, but appeals for help were largely ignored and the universities were told to make do with existing funds or seek alternative sources. A number of key ministers who were strong advocates of deregulation and privatisation gained ascendancy; these included Paul Keating, John Dawkins and Peter Walsh. It was Walsh and Dawkins who had insisted on the Higher Education Administrative Charge, a radical overturning of the Labor Party’s commitment to free university education that had been accepted as the one of the key achievements of the Whitlam Government. Key advisers (such as Professor Michael Porter from the Centre for Policy Studies at Monash, an advocate of private universities and the reintroduction of fees) were recruited to assist with policy development. Within a short period, there would be no public support for an alternative point of view among Labor parliamentarians. In 1987 Hawke appointed John Dawkins, one of the strongest advocates of monetarist economics, as the Minister for Education with the express aim of remodeling it along ideologically acceptable lines. Dawkins already had an impressive reputation for his efforts in the Department of Trade, and he was determined to use those skills to deal with what he saw as the problems in education. His appointment, and the consolidation of the Department of Education into the meta-Department of Employment, Education and Training (DEET), symbolised the completion of the transformation in progress since 1983 (Maslen & Slattery, 1994). The unprecedented union of education and employment signaled that education’s primary, if not sole, purpose was to serve the economy. Dawkins wanted a bigger system with bigger institutions that would offer more opportunities and produce more graduates, possessing qualifications in areas deemed necessary to national development, but he also wanted to avoid paying for it out of the public purse. As a neoliberal (but not a hard-line one), Dawkins


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believed that the universities should raise a substantial part of their own funds and students should contribute directly to the cost of their education. More than economics motivated Dawkins: he had toured the university campuses as a member of the Labor Shadow Cabinet prior to the 1983 election, and had come away with the view that they were not only elitist, but “fat, lazy, complacent institutions” unprepared to face reality and to make hard decisions (Maslen & Slattery, 1994). In comparison, the CAEs worked longer hours, spent less per student, engaged in applied research and had no-nonsense, top-down management systems. He was impatient with the universities’ attempts to deal with the restraints resulting from the 1982/83 economic downturn, and made it clear that he believed they needed to take more responsibility for dealing with the difficulties facing them. Dawkins implemented his planned changes very rapidly to prevent critics in the university sector from organising against him. The first step came in September 1987 when he issued a statement, The Challenge for Higher Education in Australia foreshadowing the government’s intention to undertake a major review (Dawkins, 1987b). A month later, the various education commissions set up by Whitlam were rolled into the newly created Department of Employment, Education and Training (DEET); ironically, the Minister who owed most to Whitlam’s style was the one to destroy his legacy. Ministerial power was strengthened and sources of possible opposition removed; power was centralised in his control in an unprecedented manner. Dawkins could intervene directly in the affairs of tertiary institutions to ensure that they were obedient to government policy. At the same time as he released his statement on higher education, Dawkins announced the commissioning of a Green Paper to be released in December 1988 (Dawkins, 1987a). Overturning 30 years of tradition by refusing to appoint a committee of inquiry, Dawkins wrote the Green Paper in consultation with a core group of advisers from the public service and a group of 12 publicly unnamed advisers, nick-named the “Purple Circle”. Like Menzies and Whitlam before him, Dawkins had a clear vision of the type of education he wanted and was deeply involved at every stage of the policymaking process. Unlike previous reports on the state of Australian education Dawkins’ Green Paper lacked assumptions about the cultural and moral value of tertiary (especially university) education. The Martin Report was written in response to a similar crisis in the late 1950s, but it had still acknowledged that education had more than an economic dimension. In contrast, the language used in the Green Paper suggested that remarks about the intrinsic value of university education had been included to mollify critics. They were not explained, and since there was very little mention of them elsewhere in the document, they did not dilute criticism. Dawkins was not perturbed: speaking at the University of New England in February 1998 he defended his position by repeating the familiar refrain that the Hawke Government had been elected to provide sound financial management. Before the end of 1988 the proposal to introduce a graduate tax had been endorsed and the legislation passed. From January 1989 almost all university students were required to pay tax under the Higher Education Contribution Scheme (HECS). The HECS was a complex system with discounts for up-front payment

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and provisions for deferred payment through taxation once the graduate’s salary reached a certain level. Although it was unpopular with some sections of the Labor Party, (and with students) the new tax was successfully presented to the electorate as economically prudent and a step towards equity. Dawkins placated the majority of voters by describing the HECS payments as a tax on the middle class who could afford to send their children to university. He also assured the Labor Party’s traditional supporters that it would use the funds it had “saved” on tuition for the wealthy to provide programs for disadvantaged students. In September 1988 the binary system of tertiary education was dissolved: 19 universities and the 54 CAEs ceased to exist and 39 new universities were created through a series of hastily arranged mergers. Each new institution was required to develop an educational profile, defining its mission and goals, following negotiations with the Department of Employment, Education and Training relating to national priorities. The years 1989-1996 were a period of consolidation as Dawkins’ reforms to university organisation and funding were implemented and the focus shifted to training and TAFE reform; the universities were told that they should expect “considerably less involvement by the Commonwealth than in the recent past” (Department of Education, Employment & Training, 1993). Policies made during these years emphasised quality enhancement and accountability; Higher Education: Quality and Diversity in the 1990s introduced external audits by the Committee for Quality Assurance in Higher Education which were intended to ensure that the universities did not use the growing diversity of the student population as an excuse for reducing the quality of teaching or research programs. University administrations made decisions on capital funding and salary increases that had long-term implications for the internal structure and organisation of their institutions, but the overall impact of these changes was not visible to the general population because the entire sector continued to grow rapidly. The total number of students in the system increased by a huge 82 per cent creating a mass system of tertiary education for the first time in Australian history. Yet unmet demand continued to grow in the wake of policy initiatives intended to keep young people at school until Year 12 and declining employment opportunities for teenagers. In 1991 over 30, 000 qualified people could not get a place at university: by 1992 this figure had increased to 50,000 (Sharpham & Harman, 1997). Dawkins’ plan to create a system of mass tertiary education had been successful. Tertiary education had never been so popular, but demand was uneven. There was huge demand for business and other vocational courses, but a decline in the humanities and sciences.

In the Shadow of Menzies

The Dawkins reforms were completed in time for the 1996 election. The quality assurance review process had been operating since 1991, the new funding mechanisms, including triennial funding, were in place and funds for research and capital works were had been allocated. Most universities were concentrating on internal reforms. Higher education was not regarded as a high priority in the


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pre-election period. The Keating Government did not signal its intention to make further changes to higher education policy. The Liberal Party’s policies were not alarming; they contained no mention of vouchers or upfront fees and no hint of reductions to operating grants. The 1996 election returned the conservative Liberal-National Party Coalition to government after 13 years in opposition. To begin with, the change of government did not appear significant to the higher education sector. It was no secret that Howard regarded Menzies as one of his heroes and admired him to the extent of having one of his old desks installed in his office during the election campaign. Howard appeared to want to model his education policy on Menzies’ example as well, but unlike Menzies, he had no strong, personal interest in education. Howard’s university years were a means to an end rather than an experience to be enjoyed. He had become interested in politics at an early age and planned his career with the intention of entering parliament. He studied law at Sydney University during the period in which the law school was located in Phillip Street in the city and he never experienced a traditional student’s life on campus. Nor did he use university activities as a way of sharpening his political skills as Menzies had done (Henderson, 1995). In the lead-up to the election, the universities were lulled into complacency by promises of less government interference and more funding for Austudy. Their attitude did not change after the new government was sworn in; the Ministry’s new name – Employment, Education, Training and Youth Affairs – did not point to any special status for higher education, but was not exceptional. Howard’s choice of Senator Amanda Vanstone as the Minister for Tertiary Education also suggested that he did not regard it as a major priority; Vanstone had hoped to be Attorney-General and was unfamiliar with the portfolio (Hambly, 1997). All the signs supported the Australian Vice Chancellors Committee’s assumption that the universities’ privileged position would be restored, and that the binary system would be recreated with TAFE replacing the CAEs. The “discovery” of an apparent $8 billion deficit in May 1996 put an end to any possibility of a return to the pre-Dawkins days by enabling the new government to renege on its pre-election promises and abdicate a large part of its responsibility for higher education (Quiggin 1996). The 1996 Budget delivered a cut to the universities operating grants of 4.9 per cent over three years – the first cut since the 1940s. HECS repayments were increased substantially and differential charges based on the cost of delivering courses were introduced, the rate of repayment increased and the threshold for repayment was reduced. Students and their families were required to absorb a substantially larger proportion of the costs. The real significance of these changes is the insight they provide into the government’s ideological perspective. All transactions were an exchange of commodities: ergo university education is a service available to those individuals who can afford it. The government’s refusal to fund salary increases for university staff, despite conceding that they were justified, had even greater impact than cuts to recurrent grants: between 1997-1999 the universities were obliged to find savings of more than half a billion dollars in order to fund salary increases and compensate for

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cuts to programs. Courses were cut and staff made redundant on a scale not seen since the Fraser Government’s “Razor Gang” set to work in the late 1970s. Universities were told to seek private funding, or to increase postgraduate fees to make up the shortfall that amounted to 12-15 per cent in real terms, but undergraduate degrees were quarantined in a shrewd move that deflected a possible backlash from voters. Initially, more undergraduate places became available as the universities were permitted to enrol fee-paying Australian undergraduates once their target of HECS-funded places had been exceeded, but the rate of growth in domestic enrolments soon slowed. The number of secondary students completing Year 12 began to decline as less effort was made to keep them at school. Universities put more effort into attracting fee-paying international students and postgraduate students. Increases in postgraduate fees also changed the composition of the student population: women, mature-age students, rural students and low socioeconomic background students avoided fee-paying courses or abandoned plans for study altogether. In 1997, the Minister for Education appointed a new committee, chaired by Roderick West, to review higher education financing and policy. In contrast to Murray and Martin, West was not a high-profile academic, but the recently retired headmaster of Trinity Grammar School in Sydney. Committee members were divided between education and business or industry and their terms of reference spoke of the role that higher education would play in improving the nations’ economy by equipping people with the skills and knowledge to meet the social and economic challenges of the twenty-first century and through the development of a vigorous wealth-generating educational industry. The West Committee recommended that the government continue to fund university education and research, but shifted the balance further towards a market approach by allowing institutions to set fees and by providing limited support for private providers. It argued that government funding should be driven by market demand and universities should consider the viability of unpopular courses regardless of their content or value to the community (Higher Education Financing and Policy Review, 1998). In a departure from tradition, it used the term “higher education” to refer to all forms of post-secondary education, redefined the universities as “providers” and the students as “customers” and strengthened consumer protection arrangements for students in recognition of their new role. University education had lost the special role that it had held under Menzies. Dr David Kemp replaced Senator Vanstone as Minister for Employment, Education Training and Youth Affairs in October 1997. Prime Minister Howard had chosen him to implement the planned restructure of tertiary education even before the final draft of the West Report was written. Kemp was an ardent neoliberal. In the 1980s he and Treasurer Peter Costello had been instrumental in founding the H. R. Nicholls Society (Chan, 2000). He also had a long history of involvement in educational policymaking: he had helped to draft the Fraser Government’s education policy in 1975 and his interest in university education was


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passionate and personal. Kemp had been a professor of politics at both Monash and Melbourne Universities where his views were not always popular with students and colleagues. With Kemp in charge of education, Prime Minister Howard could concentrate on policy areas he considered to be more deserving of his personal attention – the economy and industrial restructuring – secure in the knowledge that his wishes would be carried out. Kemp did not disappoint his leader. In 1990, two years after the Hawke Government had introduced mixed public/private funding, the government contributed 68.4 per cent of tertiary funding; by 1999 under the control of Dr Kemp, this had fallen to 49.1 per cent: total funding per student fell by 6.1 per cent, despite substantial increases in revenue from HECS revenue and student fees (Considine, 2001). By progressively withdrawing funding, the government forced the universities to operate like large corporations rather than collegiate or public service organizations, or face the possibility of bankruptcy. Further evidence of the Howard government’s adoption of a neoliberal approach to education appeared rapidly and in quick succession. Universities were encouraged to market themselves globally and most of them established interstate and overseas campuses or offices. (The Catholic University of Notre Dame, a self-accrediting private institution, was included in the list of higher education institutions eligible to receive the full range of Higher Education Funding Authority services despite being free of the restrictions imposed on other listed institutions.) The government also issued a White Paper on research and training, Knowledge and Innovation which introduced performance-based funding for research-student places and research infrastructure to encourage research in potentially lucrative areas (Kemp, 1999). A plan to introduce student vouchers and to institute real interest rates on student loans was developed, but dropped when the submission to Cabinet was leaked to the media. The following year, the loans scheme reappeared in an amended form, the Postgraduate Education Loans Scheme (PELS) that permitted postgraduate students access to loans of up to $50,000 to assist with tuition fees just prior to the election. In the 2000s, attention turned to teaching and research. Under yet another minister, Dr Brendan Nelson, funds for research were increased and an independent council established to administer them. Additional university places were also created, but universities were obliged to tender for them and to meet stringent conditions in order to retain them. The Australian Universities Quality Agency (AUQA) was established to audit university standards and the National Protocols for Higher Education Approval Processes were approved. In 2002 Dr Nelson launched a new discussion paper, Higher Education at the Crossroads which posed questions on a wide range of issues relating to the structuring and finance of universities (Nelson, 2002). These proposals were intended to complete the process of corporatisation; universities were to raise their own funding through fee-paying students and the commercialisation of research, discourage unproductive courses and reduce their costs across the board. The final report, released in May 2003 confirmed what many academics had feared: while most OECD nations spent 2 per cent of gross domestic product on higher

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education, the Australian government was spending 1.5 per cent and Crossroads indicated that it would spend even less in real terms in the future. Any additional funding would come from students. In May 2003, the government introduced a new ten year plan for Australian higher education called Our Universities: Backing Australia’s Future. It was a comprehensive and ambitious plan that increased funding in some areas and for some students, but imposed stringent requirements as well. Relatively small increases to base funding were made and some additional money was made available for specific areas of research and for undergraduate places in nursing and education; targeted funds were also provided for regional centres and for equity groups including the disabled. However, the real increases would come through performance-based funds: discretionary funding was available to reward institutions that achieved excellence in learning and teaching and those which were successful in persuading staff to abandon union-negotiated collective workplace agreements for individual contracts (Nelson, 2003). The underlying focus remained on reducing the government’s overall outlay and shifting the cost to individual students wherever possible. The government had already introduced the Postgraduate Education Loans Scheme in 2002 to extend the original Higher Education Contribution Scheme, and in 2003/2004 it made further changes to the whole loans program which increased the annual student contribution at an average compounding rate of in excess of five per cent per annum over the period 1996-2005. Commonwealth direct support (not counting HECS) per Commonwealth Supported Place declined by almost 20 per cent over the same period (ACUMA, 2007a). During this period, the Howard Government introduced a number of policies that encouraged the proliferation of private schools. The effect was to increase funds to low- and medium-fee paying private schools, most of which were located in new growth suburbs in marginal electorates, but many of the elite schools also received extra funding. The scheme delivered funding according to the socioeconomic profile of the census district in which the students lived, but did not consider individual families’ incomes or take into account the schools’ assets or capacity to raise funds. In an echo of policy introduced by the Fraser government in the late 1970s, the position of the elite private schools that provided the bulk of students entering high-status courses at high-status universities was protected. At the same time, students from “aspirational” families who made up the bulk of enrolment at low- and medium-fee private schools were encouraged to remain focused on higher education. In the medium-term these changes increased unmet demand for university places, but in an interview with The Age newspaper Minister Nelson responded to a suggestion that more university places were needed by saying that many school leavers had unrealistic expectations and should be directed into TAFE or apprenticeships:

… I’ve had far too much experience dealing now with industry, with employers and with parents who feel that the advice that their children have been given has either been ill-informed or deliberately misleading.


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I’ve also had teachers who’ve told me that they’ve actually been criticised by principals for actually advising kids to think about going to do an apprenticeship at the end of year 11, rather than going on to university (Green, 2002).

Policies on apprenticeships, training and vocational training released prior to the election in October 2004 gave new prominence to alternatives to university education and underscored the change in emphasis form university education to vocational training. Whether or not these policies were intended for the traditional middle class and new aspirational families who supported the government is doubtful, but young people from those families ignored the Minister’s advice to consider a trade qualification and continued to apply for university places in increasing numbers. By 2005 the universities were in a very difficult situation financially. They were grateful for funding increases, but meeting the targets that would allow them to receive additional payments from the performance-based funds difficult and expensive to manage. several vice chancellors and the Group of Eight (Go8) – an association representing some of Australia’s oldest and most prestigious universities – argued that insufficient government funding was causing average student-to-teacher ratios to rise and putting great pressure on staff and students alike. The universities argued that complying with the new regulatory regime was expensive and diverted money away from teaching and research; the government countered with accusations of waste and inefficiency (Rout, 2007). The universities financial situation had become more vulnerable following the passing of the Higher Education Support Amendment (Abolition of Compulsory Up-front Student Union Fees) Bill in March 2005. Australian universities had levied compulsory fees to provide student amenities and services as far back as 1906: initially these fees paid for sporting and social clubs, but in time other services including subsidised health care, careers counselling and employment services and childcare were added. As the range of services grew, the power to collect fees and administer services had devolved to the student associations (more commonly known in the English tradition as student unions or guilds). The Howard Government regarded the compulsory collection of amenities’ fees as identical to compulsory membership of an industrial or trade union and set about making membership voluntary. But making membership of the student associations voluntary presented the university administrators with a dilemma: they were reluctant to discontinue providing services to the students who relied on them – particularly in regional areas where alternatives were difficult to find or prohibitively expensive – knowing that it would lead to an increase in the attrition rate, or they could divert funds from core areas such as teaching facilities and library services. There was a net loss of services across the sector and the greatest losses were in the areas that did not have the capacity to generate fees such as legal advice, advocacy and emergency financial loans although a number of sporting programs were also discontinued due to a lack of funds. In all cases, Australian universities continued to provide support services, although in a reduced form, but

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the added financial pressure left some of the smaller, less well-endowed universities in a parlous situation (ACUMA, 2007b). In many respects, the vigour with which the government pursued the case against compulsory amenities fees illustrates its entire philosophy of education. The Howard Government made three separate attempts to introduce voluntary membership of student associations in 1999, 2003 and finally in 2005. The most remarkable aspect of this campaign is its underlying objection to the principle of compulsory membership rather than the use to which the money was put. There had been several cases between 1972 and 1989 in which individual students had challenged how student association fees could be spent – contributions to international political campaigns including the struggle against apartheid in South Africa attracted particular disquiet. None of these had been successful and there was little objection to the idea that universities had the authority to require a student to pay the fee as a condition of enrolment. This situation changed in 1994 when Liberal governments in the states of Victoria and Western Australian each passed legislation outlawing compulsory membership of student unions and guilds. The Victorian legislation permitted universities to collect compulsory amenities fees from students but defined activities of restricted the activities on which they could be spent to those which were of direct benefit to the students at the institution. The Western Australian version was more severe. It amended the universities’ establishing acts to prohibit them from requiring students to join a student guild as a condition of enrolment. It also prohibited them from imposing any fee not directly related to a course of study to prevent them from creating new forms of service fee not defined in law. The federal Labor government under the leadership of Prime Minister Paul Keating amended the State Grants (General Purposes) Act 1993 to counteract the Western Australian form of voluntary student union membership and a protracted legal struggle ensued until the Keating Government was defeated in March 1996. In June of that year the Howard government introduced legislation to repeal sections of the Higher Education Funding Act 1988 which had been used to compensate Western Australian universities for the loss of revenue from the amenities fee. In 1999 it introduced a Bill modelled on the Western Australian legislation, but the Bill failed to pass the Senate. The next attempt came in 2003 as part of the reform package, Our Universities: Backing Australia’s Future. This move appears to have been influenced to some degree by an attempt in 2001 to persuade the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) that James Cook University in Queensland had breached trade practices law by making the student amenity fee compulsory. The Higher Education Support Amendment (Abolition of Compulsory Up-front Student Union Fees) Bill 2003 was presented approximately four and a half months after the ACCC’s final ruling that it would permit James Cook University to continue collecting the amenity fee from all students as a condition of their enrolment. In response, a subcommittee of the Senate Employment, Workplace Relations and Education Committee set up an inquiry into the proposed changes to higher education. After considering 486 submissions, the subcommittee


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presented its report entitled Hacking Australia’s Future (Commonwealth of Australia, 2003) to the full committee in November recommending that the Bill be rejected: it did not pass the second reading in the House of Representatives (ACUMA, 2007b). In June 2005 the Liberal-Coalition government gained control of the Senate: its third attempt at banning compulsory membership of student unions and preventing the universities from collecting fees for any purpose other than tuition was successful. Although it is likely that the Howard Government was influenced by similar campaigns against compulsory membership of student associations in Canada, the United States and Britain, the legislation it eventually succeeded in passing was more extreme than anything passed in those countries, all of which were prepared to compromise on the principle involved in the face of evidence that such a move would undermine the higher education sector. Announcing the 1999 proposal, Minister for Education, Training and Youth Affairs, Dr David Kemp stated:

All citizens, including students, should be free to choose whether or not they belong to an association. The government will legislate to ensure that all students have the same freedoms on campus that they have off campus… The legislation will give students more freedom to choose how they use their money. Some students may decide that they are better off investing more in their education than spending compulsorily on the student association (Kemp, 1998).

Kemp’s remarks embody the neoliberal conviction that personal freedom of choice outweighs any damage that may be inflicted on the other members of the community as result. Individual students should pay only for the services they wanted and if other students suffered when services such as childcare became unavailable or the cost rose it was not their concern. Remarks made by Dr Nelson after he succeeded Dr Kemp continued the same line of argument when asked by journalist Kerry O’Brien about the reduction in campus based services:

… if they (the Vice Chancellors) can afford to pay their academics nine months’ maternity leave and if child care needs subsidising on campus I would be most surprised if they weren’t prepared to subsidise that in some way … the average Australian taxpayer, including tax paying students on campus fund and support billions of dollars in support of child care every year in Australia. Why is it when suddenly you walk into a university, it needs to be subsidised by people who are going to university to get an education who don’t have children and may not want to have them? Why should the everyday student be forced to buy a product that they may not want, when what they actually want is an education? (O’Brien, 2005).

In all probability, the campaign against student associations was driven by a desire to silence opposition from the one group that presented an easy target, but it may also have been motivated in part by personal antipathy: David Kemp, the minister who first announced the legislation, was a former academic who had not always enjoyed a good relationship with student groups and the Treasurer, Peter

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Costello, had also been active on the conservative side of student politics before making a name for himself in an anti-union court case that enabled his transition to a political career. However, this campaign also highlights the neoliberal interpretation of university education. Rather than providing a well-rounded educational experience, going to university was a fee-paying transaction that should be completed as quickly as possible so that both parties could move on to the next transaction. Throughout 2005 and 2006 the universities continued to struggle with insufficient funds and a rising demand for services, but as the election approached in late 2007 it became clear that the community was ready for a change of government once again.

KEVIN 07 AND THE EDUCATION REVOLUTION

In November 2007, the Rudd Government came to power with the promise of a new approach to government. Kevin Rudd, who held the position of Prime Minister until ousted by his deputy Julia Gillard in June 2010, is both a committed Christian and a social democrat. He has expressed a deep, sympathy for the dispossessed and powerless members of society that stems from both his personal beliefs and his childhood experiences: the sudden death of his father in a vehicle accident left the family in financial difficulties and they were homeless for a brief period (Fraser, 2006). An outspoken critic of neoliberalism, Rudd described his government as part of the “reforming centre” – indicating that it understood the importance of market forces in the economy, but it also insisted that those forces be controlled and used for community benefit. In terms of macroeconomic policy Rudd is a conservative who deliberately suggested that he would continue the Howard Government’s approach - prior to the global financial crisis he intended to return a budget surplus of $22 million in his first year, but his perspective was very different at the microeconomic level. To Rudd, the eleven years of the Howard Government were the “wasted years” – a period in which the ideal of a just society was replaced by greed and sectional interests, when policy focused on a narrow and often punitive agenda, relations with Australia’s nearest neighbours were damaged by unquestioning support for US foreign policy and the economic benefits of the natural resources boom were squandered. In a return to traditional Labor values, Rudd, determined to embark on a sustained program of nation building of the kind initiated by Chifley in the 1940s and Whitlam in the 1970s (Manne, 2009). Roads, transport, energy, broadband communications, water and health were all targeted for attention, but the most talked about aspect of this plan was the “education revolution” (Rudd & Smith, 2007). The Labor Party had campaigned strongly on a co-ordinated education policy across all areas from early childhood to adulthood and implementation began within days of the election. In an indication of the priority given to the portfolio when Rudd came to power, education remained under the control of Julia Gillard, (who was then also the Deputy Prime Minister) despite strong interest from Stephen Smith, who had been the shadow education minister from 2006. In keeping with Rudd’s reforming central approach, the new policy changed the discourse on


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education away from an emphasis on individual choice and competition by highlighting the importance of equity (Reid, 2009). Rudd’s policy was a significant turning point, but in many respects it was a return to the language and ideas of the early 1980s. The purpose of education continued to be couched in terms of economic imperatives while major government documents and statements emphasised the importance of education to the development of human capital, but the language of competition was softened (although not abolished). Detailed information about schools, including the results of nationwide standardised testing, was published on the My School website using the rhetoric of accountability and parental choice. Nevertheless, the hard neoliberal edge evident in the policies of the previous government was conspicuously absent and there was more emphasis on the public purposes of education, including community building. One small example provides an interesting insight into the differences: the Howard Government had established a project to develop values education in schools (Department of Education, Science & Training, 2003). One outcome of the project was a statement of values which schools were required to display in poster form in order to qualify for Special Purpose Grants. One interpretation of this exercise is that the Howard Government was concerned to ensure that all Australian schools, particularly public schools, provided education in ethics and morals in an increasingly diverse and mutable society; a more cynical interpretation suggests that it was an attempt to curry favour with the Christian Right in vulnerable electorates. The statement of values for schools (which was very similar to the statement all immigrants were required to sign as part of the process of obtaining a residency visa or achieving citizenship) ensured that everyone, migrants and others, understood the nature of Australian society and its expectations. The original poster listed the nine key Australian values superimposed over an image of the World War I hero Private John Simpson leading a donkey that is carrying a wounded soldier to safety: “Simpson and his donkey” is a patriotic image, well-known to older Australians and was often used in curriculum materials until the 1960s. The Rudd Government retained the values education program, but created a poster using photographs of people from many ethnic and cultural backgrounds to illustrate the same list of values. Measured by the magnitude of the changes it initiated, the 2007 election was a major turning point in tertiary education: four months after taking office Julia Gillard, in her role as Minister for Education, initiated a Review of Higher Education to examine the future direction of the higher education sector, its capacity to meet the needs of the Australian community and economy and options for ongoing reform. The review panel was chaired by Emeritus Professor Denise Bradley AC (Department of Education, Employment & Workplace Relations, 2008). The Rudd Government’s concerns over the state of Australian higher education were justified. Years of chronic underfunding had taken their toll: the academic workforce was ageing and the most talented postgraduates were more interested in positions overseas where the salaries were higher and the prospects of engaging in high status research were greater. Across the sector, student–staff ratios had risen from 13:1 in 1990 to 20:1 in 2006. The proportion of Australian 25-34 year-olds graduating with a three year degree had declined during the previous

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10 years to the extent that the country had slipped from seventh to ninth place in international rankings. At the same time, a second review of innovation and research, chaired by Dr Terry Cutler, a director of CSIRO and Chair of the Advisory Board for the Centre for Excellence for Creative Industries was also established (Department of Innovation, Industry, Science & Research, 2008). Together, these reports were intended to achieve the interlinking goals of Rudd’s tertiary education policy. He wanted to expand within the whole tertiary education sector, research and innovation that would lead to greater economic productivity in all areas and he wanted to improve social equity by widening access to higher education.

So whether it is through focusing on literacy levels, improving retention rates, or increasing the average number of years spent in education the evidence suggests that more educated economies are wealthier economies. Countries that invest in education do better in achieving their potential economic growth rate.

Beyond economic goals, educational analysts also highlight that education creates other social benefits. It helps build social capital – societies with a strong commitment to education can also enjoy higher levels of civic participation in community and religious groups, greater social cohesion and integration, lower levels of crime and social disadvantage, and a more trusting, equitable and just society (Rudd & Smith, 2007).

Recommendations from the Bradley and Cutler reviews argued that the government could achieve both goals through increasing the proportion of 18-35 year olds enrolled at university and by supporting partnerships between universities and industry. As in the 1960s, the national economy would benefit from the additional supply of skilled professionals, but thousands of young Australians would use their education to secure more satisfying and better-paid employment. More funds for research would lead to scientific and technical innovation and development that would further boost Australia’s prosperity. A key element of the policy was an examination of procedures that would make the transition from TAFE to university easier for older students or those seeking to upgrade their qualifications. The Rudd Government was prepared to invest heavily to achieve this goal. Even before they were completed in late 2008, the budget committed $5.4 billion for the period 2009-2010 to fund the anticipated recommendations from the Bradley and Cutler reviews, and to develop education infrastructure including capital works. This approach presented a stark contrast to the Howard Government’s attitude to education: between 1995 and 2005, the Australian higher education sector recorded no growth in terms of government outlays; the OECD average for the same period was 49 per cent (Coaldrake, 2010). Drawing on the recommendations of the Bradley and Cutler reviews the government released Transforming Australia’s Higher Education System in May 2009 which set out its plan in detail: higher education would move to a


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demand-driven funding system for domestic students to be phased in through a gradual easing of the cap on places in 2010 and 2011. The universities would be permitted to enroll as many students as they wished, but there was a national target - 40 per cent of 25-34 year-olds should hold bachelor-level degree or above by 2025. Twenty per cent of higher education students were to come from low socioeconomic backgrounds by 2020 and to assist with achieving this target, equity funding was to constitute about 2 per cent of teaching and learning grants, increasing to 3 per cent in 2011, with 4 per cent directed to outreach and retention by 2012 (Kayrooz & Parker, 2010). Like many revolutions, Rudd’s education revolution did not please everyone and resulted in unexpected casualties. One casualty was Prime Minister Rudd himself. Following the election in 2007 the government had been extremely popular. Rudd’s personal approval rating as prime minister reached 68 per cent in February 2008, but by May 2010 it has plummeted to 39 per cent despite his success in averting disaster during the Global Financial Crisis. The government had over-promised in a number of areas including the environment, social reform and education and had difficulty delivering. It also struggled to communicate its successes to the electorate. The school infrastructure redevelopment program, dubbed “Building the Education Revolution” (BER) was used as a means of averting the worst impact of the global financial crisis that developed during 2007-2008. Over $19 million was poured into grants for school halls, classrooms and libraries, but the speed with which the money was spent led to logistical problems The “Digital Education Revolution” (DER) promised a computer for every child in the last four years of secondary school as well as improved access for all schools, but this program also experienced delays and difficulties because of the sheer size of the project. There were accusations of waste and a failure to oversee the implementation of various programs in education and other areas. Many school communities were happy with the outcomes, but a small number were frustrated and angry, and these were the images on which the media chose to concentrate. Other schemes to assist students from low socioeconomic status families and improve the supply of teachers fared better, possibly because they were developed more slowly and with more opportunities to check on their effectiveness. Fearing a loss at the 2010 election after only one term in office, the Labor Party replaced Kevin Rudd with his deputy, Julia Gillard. Simon Crean became Minister for Education. Looking back over the years it is possible to see that governments have held widely divergent views of the nature and purpose of education in general, and university education in particular. Despite some variations in degree, there has been a steady move at the policymaking level towards a utilitarian perception of education. By the 1990s education was neither the “custodian of mental liberty” (Menzies, 1939, p. 12) nor (as Kim Beazley Snr once described it) “the instrument of every child’s and young person’s dignity and competence” (W.F. Connell, 1993, p. 259). and there had been little mention of the university as a cultural experience in policy documents since the mid-seventies. The Hawke Government started the drive towards a mass system of tertiary education but in the process embraced an

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ideology that was markedly different from the one proclaimed by its predecessors. In doing so, Hawke, and his successor Keating, redefined the purpose of university in economic lines. The election of the Howard Government in 1996 was not a major turning point in higher education policy, but it did result in an intensification of that ideology and a more ruthless approach to policy implementation. By reducing funding and by imposing a range of restrictions on university autonomy, the Howard Government reshaped the universities into something vastly different from the traditional communities of scholars beloved by the Menzies. The universities are now major corporations engaged in the business of selling educational services. Current higher education policies assume that this is what young Australians want, and there has been little serious discussion of education as a cultural experience since 1975, but there is evidence that it continues to have a powerful influence on the imaginations of young people.

NOTE

1 Monetarism is an economic theory based on the use of the money supply to control inflation and direct the national economy; neoliberalism is a social movement which seeks to break down all other social relationships, all principles of association and replace them with the market principle. See A. Blunden, “All that is Solid Melts into Air…”. Proceedings of the Hegel Summer School 2006. www.werple.net.au/~andt/seminars/neoliberalism.html

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Menzies, R. G. (1943). The forgotten people. Melbourne: Angus & Robertson. Menzies, R. G. (1916). The place of the university in the life of the state. Melbourne University

Magazine, X (2), 37–38. Nelson, B. (2002). Higher education at the crossroads: An overview paper. Canberra: Department of

Education, Science and Training. Nelson, B. (2003). Our universities: Backing Australia’s future. Canberra: Department of Education,

Employment and Workplace Relations. O’Brien, K. (2005, 16 March). “Nelson defends voluntary student union fee legislation.” 7:30 Report.

Australian Broadcasting Corporation. Power, C & Robertson, F. (1988). Participation in higher education: Effects of the administrative

charge. National Institute of Labour Studies Incorporated. Flinders University. Bedford Park. Quiggin, J. (1996, June 26). Rubbery figures shape black hole. Australian Financial Review. p 3. Reid, A. (2009). Is this a revolution? A critical analysis of the Rudd government’s national education

agenda. Garth Boomer Memorial Lecture. Australian Curriculum Studies Association Biennial Conference.

Richardson, S. S. (1972). A role and purpose for colleges of advanced education. In G. Harman & G. Selby Smith. (Eds.). Australian higher education. Problems of a developing system. (pp. 1–14). Sydney: Angus & Robertson.

Rout, M. (2007, 29 October). “Top unis attack coalition over cuts.” The Australian. p. 26 Rudd, K. & Smith, S. (2007). The Australian economy needs an education revolution. Barton, ACT:

Australian Labor Party. Ryan, S. (1999). Catching the waves. Life in and out of politics. Sydney: Harper Collins. Scotton, R. B., (1980). The Fraser government and social expenditures. In R. B. Scotton, & H. Ferber,

Public expenditures and social policy in Australia. Volume II. The first Fraser Years, 1976–78. (pp. 1–27). Melbourne: Longman Cheshire.

Sharpham, J. & Harman, G. (1997). Australia’s future universities. Armidale: University of New England Press.

Smart, D. & Dudley, J. (1990). Education policy. In C. Jennett, & R. G. Stewart. (Eds.). Hawke and Australian public policy. Consensus and restructuring (pp. 204–222). South Melbourne: Macmillan.

Spaull, A. (1979). Education. In A. Patience, & B. W. Head, (Eds.), From Whitlam to Fraser. Reform and reaction in Australian politics. (pp. 125–139). Melbourne: Oxford University Press.

Whitlam, E. G. (1985). The Whitlam government 1972-1975 Ringwood: Viking/Penguin. Yergin, D. & Stanislaw, J. (1998). The commanding heights. New York: Simon & Schuster.

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CHAPTER 3

NURSERIES OF LIBERAL VALUES, NURSERIES OF ECONOMIC VALUES

This is the first stone of the University of Melbourne, instituted in the honour of God for establishing young men in philosophy, literature and piety; cultivating the talent of youth, fostering the arts, extending the bounds of science.

Inscription on the foundation stone, University of Melbourne, 3 July, 1854.

The idea that the main purpose of education is the cultivation of the intellect and development of the character continues to exert a powerful influence on community perceptions of university education. The origins of this idea can be traced back to Ancient Greece, but Cardinal Newman, Rector of the Catholic University of Ireland, is probably its best-known proponent within the last two hundred years. In a series of discourses published in 1852 Newman cited Cicero’s comment that humans are drawn to the pursuit of knowledge and argued that the purpose of university education was “to employ itself in the education of the intellect … to reason well in all matters, to reach out towards the truth, and to grasp it” (Newman, 1852).

Liberal Values in the Antipodes

Around the same time that Newman was delivering his discourses on the scope and purpose of the university, men who shared many of his views set about establishing Australia’s first universities in Sydney (1850) and Melbourne (1853). These universities were intended to provide an appropriate education for members of the colonial elite who were prevented from attending university in the United Kingdom by distance or lack of money, but they also signified that the colonies had achieved a certain level of sophistication. They were a visible demonstration that the colonies were no longer pioneering communities with no time for the cultivation of the intellect and the moral improvement of society. In Victoria, this last point was of special concern given the huge numbers of migrants attracted by the discovery of gold in 1851 at Ballarat and Bendigo (Selleck, 2003). In the same year that Newman’s collected discourses were published, Hugh Childers, who would become the first Vice-Chancellor, wrote in a draft Bill for the establishment of The University of Melbourne:

The University for the education of her youth will, under Divine Providence, go far to redeem their adopted country from the social and moral evils with

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which she is threatened: to improve the character of her people: to raise her in the respect and admiration of civilised nations (Leihy, 2002, p. 8).

Australia’s first universities were – and were clearly intended to be – elite institutions concerned with higher, rather than further education; they existed in opposition to the Ballarat Mechanics Institute (1859), the Bendigo School of Mines (1873) and the Melbourne Working Men’s College (1887) – all of which were concerned with training men and women in work-related skills. The first professors at the University of Melbourne were recruited from England and were to have “such habits and manners as to stamp on their future pupils the character of loyal, well-bred English gentlemen” (McIntyre, 2002, p.8). The universities were also intended to improve the quality of life beyond campus boundaries: the founders of Adelaide University (1874) assumed that their professors would take the lead in the cultural life of the state by supporting literary and scientific associations, and took these activities into account when determining their employment conditions (Auchmuty & Jeffares, 1959). In their early years, Australian universities were happy to promote what Bourdieu would later call an “aristocratic” view of university education. Initially, the universities of Sydney and Melbourne required applicants to have matriculated in Latin and Ancient Greek and to continue them as compulsory subjects. Eventually Ancient Greek dropped, but Latin remained a prerequisite for law and medicine until the 1950s at several universities. Philosophy and natural science were also compulsory at most Australian universities during the first decade of the 20th century in the belief that all students would benefit from exposure to the great ideas of civilization and from initiation into the life of the mind. In general the students agreed: recollections of students from this period emphasise their excitement at participating in something larger than a personal quest for qualifications. Geoffrey Hutton, a journalist with the Argus and then The Age, entered Ormond College at the University of Melbourne and enrolled in English and Philosophy in 1928 after completing his schooling at Scotch College:

There was good company, minds to hone your own against, conversation to be enjoyed, late nights sitting over a batch of crumpets on a wood fire … (Hutton, 1985, p. 18).

Hutton’s family was comfortably well-off, but students from less-affluent backgrounds shared that sense of excitement. Edward “Weary” Dunlop entered Ormond College the year before Hutton, having completed a diploma at the Melbourne Pharmacy College. Dunlop had topped his year and won several prizes, then turned his back on a potentially lucrative career as a pharmacist and opted for the comparative poverty of several more years of study to become a doctor (Ebury, 1994). Hutton’s emphasis on honing the mind through conversation and Dunlop’s need to find a satisfying role in life rather than a well-paid occupation illustrate Newman’s contention that education was a “higher word (than instruction); it implies action upon our moral nature and the formation of character; it is something individual and permanent” (Newman, 1852, p. 187).

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Some of the best examples of student support for the aristocratic or liberal-humanist view of the purpose of university are to be found in the editorials written by a very young Robert Menzies for Melbourne University Magazine: one in particular was written in response to criticism of the university as a “bear-garden of the idle rich”. In it he made his commitment to the liberal-humanist perspective on education very clear:

… our responsibility to the community is a tremendous one. Having received much, we must give much. Look beyond the narrow bounds of our particular professions to a great world crying for light and leading (Menzies, 1916, p. 38).

However conscious the students were of their social responsibilities, the aristocratic view of education as a process of character formation encompassed a lighter side as well. Defending the traditions of serenading and Gala Day that were under attack in the mid-twenties, Frank McManus (who was to become a Member of Parliament some years later) quoted one member of the SRC:

If we are to retain any vestige of our ancient European cultural heritage, if we are to make any resistance to the insidious advance of the barbarous American heresy, of efficiency and the strictly business view of life, if popular freedom and the art of popular celebration are to be given any chance of surviving, then so far from repressing, we should encourage students’ revels and all they stand for (McManus, 1985, p. 64).

University education was restricted to a tiny handful of students in the 1920s and ’30s, but the conviction that education was for the betterment of the person, and would in turn lead to the improvement of society dominated discussion relating to the provision of education at all levels for much of the pre-war period. “For what must we educate the children of a community such as this?” asked educationalist William Radford in 1938 in the opening chapter of his study of educational needs in the Gippsland region. He then answered his own question:

If this world is to be lived in and understood it must be well known; if mental equipment is to be adequate to master the simple workings of the human and material environment that forms us and in turn is formed by us, a study of those workings must be attempted (Radford, 1938, p. 17).

Radford, who would later become Director of the Australian Council for Educational Research, was well aware of the limited opportunities available in this impoverished and isolated region of Victoria at the end of the Depression – most of the young people he saw would become farmers, housewives, shop assistants, timber cutters or fishermen, yet he insisted that their education should not be limited to narrow vocational concerns. He understood well the importance of vocational preparation, but remained convinced that education should also provide opportunities for cultural enrichment and engagement with the community. These sentiments were expressed in an even more direct fashion in an address by Laurin Zilliacus, Chairman of the New Education Fellowship (of which Radford was a

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member) to delegates at their Australian conference in the same year. Reflecting on the previous war, and on international events that pointed to another conflict in the near future, Zilliacus asserted that democracy meant:

… building all human institutions around an educational aim and measuring them with an educational measure … education should not only charge the mind, it should touch the mind – and the heart – of the growing generation (Zilliacus, 1938, pp. 9-11).

Speakers at the 1938 New Education Fellowship Conference supported the liberal-humanist view of education, arguing that the purpose of education was to improve both the intellectual, social and moral capacity of the student: university graduates were destined to become the political and social leaders of their communities, therefore their improvement was crucial to the wellbeing of society. Fred Whitlam, father of prime minister Gough Whitlam, would have agreed. Despite his antipathy to private education, Fred Whitlam insisted that his son complete his Matriculation studies at Canberra Grammar where he could receive the thorough grounding in the classics, which he believed, every potential leader should have in order to develop the personal qualities they would need in their professional life (Oakes, 1973). This same belief in the ennobling aspects of university education was the subject of an address at Canberra University College in 1939 by Robert Menzies, now a rising politician. He informed his audience that the university was the home of pure culture and learning and that scholarship was valuable because it developed the learners’ humanity and spirituality. He asserted that the university was a training school for the professions and for future leaders, but stressed the moral and intellectual nature of that training; university was a place with a sense of real values that would be available to its students throughout their lives (Menzies, 1939). This same belief in the humanist view of university education informed many of the policy decisions he would make some 20 years later. Regardless of the beliefs or values held by university administrators and students, university was, without question, an elite institution before the Second World War. Just prior to the war, 1.9 per cent of 17-22 year olds were enrolled at university; a total of 14,024 students (Anderson & Vervoorn, 1983). Generally, they came from the wealthiest families and did not need to concern themselves greatly with what they would do after graduation. Their families would support them and jobs for graduates were fairly plentiful – a suitable position could always be found, often through family connections or the social networks they had established while at university. Wartime contingencies ended this idyll and put pressure on Australia’s universities to concentrate on producing skilled technicians as quickly as possible by introducing more vocational subjects and correspondence courses. Sir Eric Ashby, Head of Botany at Sydney University, urged the universities to resist, since these proposals would produce inferior graduates whose personalities had not been fully formed by the experience of participating in campus life. He described universities as “nurseries for intellectual progress” and places where a “ferment of thought” might take place. In his opinion the only criteria for including a subject in the curriculum was that it would lead to “breeding ideas in the mind” (Ashby, 1944, p. 15). Some years later he


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would argue that British technical education had produced excellent technologists who were unfit to manage human beings or shape the policy of a large company or government department because they had not been educated in the humanities or social sciences and lacked understanding of matters outside their area of technical expertise (Ashby, 1958). The liberal-humanist interpretation of the purpose of university education remained dominant even as the first signs of an impending change began to appear. As the war drew to a close the universities faced an influx of students who were neither from high socioeconomic status families nor members of a tiny intellectual elite: first and foremost, these students were seeking qualifications that would improve their employment opportunities. The declaration of peace led to a surge in applications and by 1948 the total student population had risen to 32,000. It would rise by an additional 30,000 during the next decade, doubling the participation rate (Coaldrake & Stedman, 1988). Around half of these new applications came from returned service people who had been employed in a variety of skilled or technical positions during the war and who wished to formalise or upgrade their qualifications for civilian employment: others came from people who were intent on taking advantage of the opportunities provided by post-war reconstruction: journalist and author Keith Dunstan was one of these although his career did not turn out as his family expected.

My education in my final year was all science and mathematics. I was under the illusion that I should become a writer … yet Dad was experienced. He had noted that people who wrote novels starved. The future of the world belonged to engineers. The early 1940s might belong to accountants, but come the war’s end the world would need to be rebuilt and the engineers would control all. So with overwhelming determination he insisted I prepare myself for an engineering course at Melbourne University (Dunstan, 1990, p. 61).

Dunstan’s father was ahead of his time – his utilitarian attitude to university education was still a minority view. T. S. Eliot’s essay on culture that described university education as a process of cultural initiation was more typical of the dominant perception of the function of university education in the 1940s and ’50s. Carefully distinguishing between class and culture, he explained that elite culture could not be restricted to the upper class (who did not always appreciate its nature), but that the upper class had an obligation (since they possessed a greater share of the required material resources) to maintain a particular level of elite culture, not just for their own benefit, but for the benefit of society as a whole:

… culture is not merely the sum of several activities, but a way of life …. young men have profited there (at university) who have been profitless students … (Eliot, 1948, p. 188).

Universities were cultural repositories; the nurseries of liberal thought and values, the milieu in which the intellect and character were refined through study. They ensured the continuation of those values by promoting and reproducing a particular

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ideal of what a human should be and how the individual should relate to society as a whole. In 1950 the Menzies Government implemented the Commonwealth Scholarship scheme that had been devised by Prime Minister Chifley before his defeat at the election in the preceding December, but it did so from a very different perspective of the purpose of education. Without doubt Chifley was concerned with the practical necessity of producing more skilled professionals to assist with reconstruction, but he had immense respect for the intrinsic value of university education, at one point saying that he would rather have had Mr Menzies’ education than a million pounds (Calwell, 1965). Chifley envisaged a society in which education liberated the intellect and imagination of ordinary working women and men – he wanted to democratise the universities, not reshape them; but the Menzies’ version of the program was grounded in an interpretation of education as a way of allowing certain individuals to join the middle class. It offered merit-based scholarships that were not means-tested. Rather than making university more accessible to students from poorer families, they were used to reward his supporters. The majority went to students from the elite private schools and a few selected working class students who could demonstrate that they had mastered an elite curriculum and could be admitted into the middle class. The first year students interviewed by Marjorie Theobald in her 1960 study make it clear that they regarded winning a Commonwealth Scholarship as a sign of personal as well as intellectual superiority:

My father is of the opinion that if you can’t gain a scholarship you’re not fit to go to the University.

My parents and I considered that if I could not gain a scholarship my ability was not such as to warrant further study in a University course (Theobald, 1961, p. 41).

Popular opinion held that there was an intangible quality that marked graduates as different from the common herd, and somehow better. Gareth Evans editorial in the 1965 University of Melbourne Orientation Handbook is an example of this attitude:

Get used to the idea that you are a member of an elite and privileged group in the community and live that role. Intellectual arrogance is a far more forgivable sin than intellectual timidity; banner-waving to fight political causes and to remedy social injustices is not a sin at all; going to parties and drinking and talking and flaking is a sin only around exam time. Work hard, play hard, drink hard and think hard and you will be forgiven.1

Despite increasing enrolments throughout the 1940s and ’50s, the perception that university required and conferred certain intellectual and character attributes that not everyone possessed remained largely unchanged until the mid sixties.

Barbarians Inside the Gates

In 1960, the year that the Murray Committee presented its interim report and the Universities Commission met for the first time, most students left school without completing Matriculation; entry into teaching and nursing courses required


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Leaving Certificate (equivalent to today’s Year 11) and the Victorian police force was happy with the Proficiency Certificate (equivalent to today’s Year 9). Australia was different country in those days: Mr Menzies had been Prime Minister for eleven years, trade was booming and wool had broken the magical “pound for a pound” limit. This was the Australia that Donald Horne described ironically as the “lucky country” (Horne, 1964). Church on Sundays was the norm, most married women did not work outside the family home and unemployment was virtually unknown. Australia was still getting used to the idea that teenagers existed as a distinct group with their own interests, opinions and values. Clothing advertisements and department store window displays gave the impression that sixteen-year-olds were smaller versions of their own parents. When the Beatles toured in 1964, the media, community leaders and politicians were perplexed by the reaction of their otherwise docile sons and daughters who wept and screamed with excitement, but between 1966 when Australia entered the Vietnam War and 1972 when the Whitlam Government was elected Australia underwent a profound and painful cultural transformation. Throughout the 1960s the number of applications for university places grew so rapidly that Universities of Sydney and Melbourne imposed enrolment quotas for the first time (W. F. Connell, 1993). New developments in science and technology raised people’s awareness of the importance of education and indicated that scientists and technological experts would be the new leaders in society. The mining boom promised rewarding careers to graduates in science, engineering, metallurgy and electronics, and indeed most of university development that had occurred over the previous decade had been in those same faculties and departments. Another revolution was underway in business; private companies and the Public Service required more educated personnel to fill new roles in all sectors of the economy. Escalating demand for qualified staff triggered a rush of applications for university places from young people who were anxious to make their fortunes and contributed to the belief that university education was a matter of obtaining a valuable qualification as quickly as possible. There is an alternative interpretation of the rising demand for education: the Depression and the war had made family life impossible for more than a decade; consequently once peace and prosperity returned Australians became engrossed in their families. The Depression had a profound impact on Australian society because of the enormous difference between normal conditions and the depths of poverty that many Australians endured during those years. The men who had been away at the war came home with attitudes that were very different to the ones their fathers had brought back from World War I. They didn’t want the world to be as it had been before the war; they wanted it to be better and they were determined to make the most of every opportunity to improve the comfort and prosperity of their families, including more education for their children (McCalman, 1993). In the 1950s, parents who had not been able to imagine their children attending university just a few years earlier were now encouraging their children to undertake degrees or diplomas of all types. Prime Minister Paul Keating’s decision to leave secondary school after three years and to upgrade his qualifications at night school while

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working was typical of ambitious, but low socioeconomic status, families in the early 1950s: but the fact that his younger sister became a teacher and his younger brother completed a law degree in the 1970s indicates how much community attitudes changed within a short time (Carew, 1988). The economic boom stimulated interest in university and technical education and strengthened the connection between economics and higher education just as the neoliberal economists began to argue for a radical interpretation of economic policy. In their opinion, university was not a means of developing one’s character in order to become fit for leadership; a place at university was a commodity like any other (Hayek, 1960). This idea was slow to gain acceptance in Australia, but there was widespread acceptance of the community service approach to the function of a university. As considerable sums of public money were spent on university expansion, the conviction grew that the universities and their graduates ought to make some kind of tangible return. There was an expectation that academics should participate in community organisations or sit on public boards, but there was also a less definable expectation that universities ought to focus on the issues and problems of most concern to the community. Whatever the exact cause, a majority of the students who enrolled during the 1960s based their decision on occupational expectations; Marjorie Theobald (1961) found that just 26 per cent of them had considered a non-university career even though there were many alternative paths leading to highly regarded and well-paid careers. More and more parents began to agree with the attitude expressed by Keith Dunstan’s father some 20 years earlier. They encouraged or pushed their children into enrolling because it was an opportunity to see their children make something of themselves that was too good to pass up or because it fulfilled some long-held dream. Teachers, who often saw their students’ progression to university as evidence of their own success, contributed to the rise in applications by shunting students who achieved good marks in that direction – “the question whether he can master a course of study is taken for the question of whether it suits him” (Marris, 1964). Increasingly, self-interest came to dominate the public mood. In 1974, Time magazine described the new conservativism on American campuses and spoke of the “me-generation”, other commentators called them the “Self-Centred Generation”. Similar attitudes developed in Australia under the combined influence of government policy and international trends. Changes that had occurred during the 1960s and ’70s intensified throughout the 1980s. In Britain, analysts wrote about “Thatcher’s children” who were selfish and avid consumers, concerned with the pursuit of personal freedom and happiness without external restriction (Silver & Silver, 1997). Changes in attitudes to university followed this general trend and English sociologist Ronald Barnett warned about the dangers that would occur when the effects of the “demographic time-bomb” (Barnett, 1990, p. 7) of young adults entering universities began to appear. Young Australians agreed that completing twelve years of education was desirable as it would lead to better employment prospects and the resulting rise in retention rates led to an increase in the number of young


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people in a position to contemplate going further (Harvey-Beavis & Robinson, 2000). Popular television shows such as LA Law and The Young Doctors also concentrated on occupations that required a university degree. Teachers knew little about the TAFE system and tended to advise their students on the basis of their own university experience. The universities also worked hard to consolidate their place as the preferred option for tertiary study, but at some cost to their identity. Degree courses proliferated as new disciplines and subjects were added: students could now take degrees in media studies, business management, cultural studies and exercise science blurring the distinction between university and TAFE colleges and undermining the universities position. The total number of university students grew substantially, and the composition of the student body began to change as specific policy initiatives led to significant increases in the numbers of female students, indigenous students and students from non-English speaking backgrounds (Andersen & Vervoorn, 1983). More families from all backgrounds and socioeconomic levels could now identify a relative or neighbour who was at university and the aristocratic model of university education became less and less credible. The Hawke Government was in the process of deregulating the economy and tying university education to a narrow set of developmental goals; the job-market was highly competitive and technological change in the workplace demanded different skills and knowledge. All of these factors indicted that university was both accessible and a good investment. By the end of the 20th century, going to university had become such a commonplace course of action that most Australian secondary students believed their parents would like them to go (James, 2000), and they could think of nothing, other than poor exam results that might prevent them from enrolling. The idea that university was an exclusive destination reserved for the elite and for a handful of others who had proved themselves worthy by winning a scholarship had become utterly alien and hardly credible. At the same time, the emphasis on the vocational aspects of university education developed a desperate edge in response to the high levels of anxiety and insecurity emanating from the 1990s recession. Parents and teachers became increasingly anxious about secondary school students believing that they needed to develop a serious attitude to study, do well in exams and stay ahead. Psychologist and social researcher, Hugh Mackay summed up the situation neatly:

Today’s children are thought to be under more pressure at school, more pressure at play and more pressure from a media, marketing and social environment more stimulating and seductive than the environment in which their parents grew up (McKay, 1993, p. 64).

Mackay described these parents, who grew up during the ’60s and ’70s, as the generation who thought that “the economic escalator would go infinitely upwards and as “poor planners, unenthusiastic savers and voracious consumers” (p. 65). They were unnerved and poorly prepared when unemployment exceeded 10 per cent in the 1991/92 financial year and did not seem likely to fall. Structural unemployment of the kind that Australia had not previously

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experienced became a reality and many Australians were confronted with the realisation that their children’s work history was likely to be less secure and rewarding than their own. No longer nurseries of liberal values, the universities had become nurseries of economic values. In the 1960s a degree had been the way in which many families hoped to leap upward into the middle class; in the 1990s it became the way that many families hoped to prevent the family from sliding back into lower-class obscurity or real poverty. Desire for high-status, highly paid jobs resulted in four times as many New South Wales students aspiring to university as to TAFE (DEET, 1993). The conviction that a degree would lead to financial security led some of these students to enrol despite having no apparent interest in academic study. Professor Robert Manne, who teaches politics at La Trobe University described the difficulty of teaching these students:

… (they) pursue their subjects to the end. They are not really curious about what they are studying. Sometimes they appear to have chosen their courses almost at random. … They have been deceived by a world which has led them to believe that university study is appropriate to them. Many would dearly love to be learning a skill or trade which might lead them eventually to a job. Many, oddly enough, have decided to study at a traditional university – which is of necessity committed to initiating the young into the most abstract and difficult of disciplines, the sciences, mathematics and philosophy – only because their secondary school scores were too low to gain them entry to a course in hotel management or physiotherapy. They are compelled to study Plato because they have failed to qualify for podiatry (Manne, 1998, pp. 259-260).

Economic values appeared to have infiltrated the universities at the highest level; the Australian Vice Chancellors Committee’s response to Dawkins’ White Paper suggested that they had also abandoned the traditional liberal-humanist perception of university to a large degree:

The institution will have courses which meet national and international standards at a high level; the institution will have courses which meet criteria prescribed by the relevant professional associations, as appropriate; the academic staff of the institution will have high qualifications and professional standing in the community with their peers; the institution will have a demonstrated capacity to produce graduates who have good employment acceptability (Australian Vice-Chancellors’ Committee, 1989, p. 1).

This approach infuriated academics and commentators who regarded universities as more than service providers. Sociologist Michael Pusey (1991) castigated the universities, calling senior academics and administrators the “switchmen” who had abandoned their traditional role and permitted a general shift in social values to occur; a shift that did not just replace traditional liberal-humanist perception of education, with a utilitarian or vocationally oriented approach, but one which held civil society in contempt.


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An Economic View

There is an alternative to this account of the gradual domination of the liberal-humanism vision of education by utilitarian values. Commenting on the changes he saw occurring around him in the 1960s, Melbourne sociologist Sol Encel (1965) suggested that the increasingly utilitarian attitudes held by many students enrolling in Australian universities was a direct reflection of the universities’ own actions. Encel asserted that from their founding over a hundred years earlier, Australian universities had done little more than pay lip service to liberal-humanist notions about character development; their real task had been to provide a sufficient number of qualified professionals necessary for the continuing prosperity of the colonies, and later, the nation. Encel also pointed out that as the government in its various forms employed the majority of graduates, universities could hardly have become anything other than “service stations” for government departments. He quoted a speech delivered in 1962 by James Auchmuty, who would become the first Vice Chancellor of Newcastle University, in support:

a high proportion of students in Australian universities are committed from the first day of lectures to some ultimate employer whether state or private … an outside authority, in effect determines what subjects a student shall take at a university and his advisers at the university can seldom do much to help him (Encel, 1965, p. 109).

E. L. French, from the Faculty of Medicine at The University of Melbourne, was even harsher, arguing that Australian education had always had a strongly utilitarian flavour. In his opinion, the traditional liberal-humanist model of education was “the education of the class born to rule and the culture that valued reflection”, already out step with the needs of the emerging English middle-class by the end of the eighteenth-century, and completely inappropriate in the Australian colonies which were, or had recently been, populated by convicts:

The society of the early penal settlements lacked any considerable social class comparable to the English aristocratic class, and it was generally inhospitable to the things of the mind. Its small official class was distinguished by a callous obsession with wealth, its community life was noted for its incapacity to rise above the level of the crude or mundane, and its institutional life extended little further than church on Sundays and a rudimentary schooling for the fortunate few on weekdays (French, 1959, p. 35).

In time, and with increasing prosperity, schooling became less rudimentary, but many of the schools looked to Scotland, rather than England for their curriculum. “Scottish” schools offering tuition in English, accounting, mathematics, modern languages and Natural Philosophy as well as the Classics were established in Sydney, Hobart, Adelaide and Melbourne in the 1840s and ’50s. The colonies had no real landed gentry, no high state officials other than military officers appointed by England and no high clergy who wanted or appreciated the type of classical humanist education offered at the English Great Schools. Moreover, there was little

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opportunity for employment in areas that might have valued a classical education. Intellectual skills were held to be of little value because they were not really necessary to the production of wealth; commerce and the pastoral industry offered the best promise of reward in Australian society. The middle class frequently had large landholdings, and possibly considerable wealth, but their wealth had been achieved in adverse conditions through hard labour: they had little time for philosophy or Latin. The Anglican and Catholic schools that had attempted to replicate classical education in the colonies were obliged to introduce modern or practical subjects in order to attract pupils. The students who enrolled at the University of Melbourne during its first few years were gentlemen in so far as they came from landowning or professional families but the land had been cleared within the last generation, not inherited: and their social status could not compare with the lofty position occupied by the elite of English or European society (Clarke, 2002). Viewed from this perspective, it is not surprising that psychology professor Samuel Hammond was unimpressed with the intellectual aspirations of the students he encountered at The University of Melbourne. He argued that a fixation with employment prospects and a lack of interest in intellectual development had been the norm among Australian university students for some years:

… university courses, viewed as a set of occupational pathways, are ranked with the longer professional courses of Medicine and Engineering at the top …. when students enroll for courses at the university they do so with varying degrees of conviction and commitment. Ten per cent of a 1955-6 first year said that they did not actively want to do their course, and 7 per cent that they would have preferred a non-university course …. when asked their reasons for enrolling in their university courses about half the first-year students in Arts, Law and Science said that it was for reasons of opportunity, pressure or expediency rather than interest (Hammond, 1961, p. 112).

Hammond’s comments suggest that any change from the liberal-humanist perception of university education to a commodity view is illusory. There is some merit in his arguments and it is worth noting that Newman himself acknowledged that a major function of university education was to train the future leaders of society, although his idea of training potential leaders was to develop their characters in such a way that they were fit to lead. Newman’s discourses were prompted by the rise of a narrow interpretation of the function of university education that emphasised practical outcomes and applied knowledge – especially in the areas of science and engineering – at universities in Scotland and Europe. This utilitarian approach was exemplified in the founding of the University of London (now University College London) in 1826. It paid little attention to students’ character or spiritual development, provided no religious instruction, allowed students to live off campus and made no effort to form their characters; pride of place was given to the medical school, not undergraduate colleges (Rothblatt, 1989).


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An Enduring Commitment to Liberal Values

On reflection, the arguments put forward by French, Hammond and Encel are not convincing. Newman’s definition of training involved making the student worthy to lead by educating their intellect and shaping their character, and it had wide appeal in Australia. There was an aristocratic or high cultural approach to education in colonies as far back as the early years of the 19th century; it survived the difficulties posed by the two great depressions of the 1890s and the 1930s and two world wars; it survived the radical changes of the sixties and it continues to exist today despite the rise of neoliberalism. The academic content of the courses offered at the universities in Sydney and Melbourne at the time of their founding was distinctly conservative, conditioned by the traditions of Oxford, Cambridge and Dublin, the same universities that had educated the great majority of graduates resident in 19th century Australia. There were a substantial number of noted scholars among the professors of those days, who had received exactly the sort of liberal-humanist education endorsed by Newman and who exerted an enormous influence on the intellectual, cultural, and in some cases political, life of the various colonies. It is difficult to accept comments about the utilitarian and anti-intellectual nature of Australian education at face value when considering figures such as Professor W. E. Hearn, formerly Professor of Greek at Queen’s College, Galway and founding Dean of Law at the University of Melbourne. Hearn taught Modern History, Literature, Political Economy, Logic and the Classics as well as law; he wrote a textbook for law students and became a member of the Victorian Legislative Council where he had a profound influence on the operations of the Council and played a major role in the codification of Victorian law. In Sydney, there was Charles Badham, a favourite pupil of Pestalozzi, friend of Thackeray and Oxford graduate, who came to the university with recommendations from Huxley and Newman himself (Auchmuty & Jeffares, 1959). Critics of the colonial universities’ commitment to the liberal-humanist view of education, in particular French and Hammond, do not appear to have understood that the restrictions attached to Commonwealth Scholarships prevented many middle-income students from attending university. Young people from wealthy families could afford fees while those from impoverished families could qualify for living allowances, but there was a substantial number of young people between these two extremes who were forced to accept bonded studentships to get access to university education. It is true that Australian universities began to deviate from the English-style classical education and introduce “modern” subjects before the end of the 19th century, but this should not be taken as a lack of support for the liberal-humanist model. Realising that many members of the community considered a classical liberal education to be inappropriate in an emerging nation, Australia’s universities did not resile from their conviction that the purpose of a university education was to train the mind and the character; instead they redefined liberal education to include modern languages, botany, history and English literature (French, 1959). The classics were reluctantly stripped of their compulsory status, partly because the assertion that

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classical texts held all-important knowledge could not be justified in the face of recent scientific and medical discoveries, and partly because the growing study of philology and linguistics showed that Latin and Greek had no special qualities not found in French, German or other languages. Greek survived into the early 20th century, and Latin until the late 1950s, because of their importance as social class markers, although French gradually assumed that role (Selleck, 2003). To begin with, French was taught at university and in schools, particularly boys’ schools, as a disciplinary and linguistic study in the manner of the classics. Long after it was accepted as a living language in the 1920s, the disciplinary approach persisted for many years at university level: Matriculation French exam papers from the ’60s reveal that the disciplinary approach was still very much in evidence though unacknowledged (Wykes & King, 1968). In Victoria, evidence of the University of Melbourne’s determination to protect the elite nature of the education it offered can be found in its determination to restrict the curriculum at the Working Men’s College to purely trade-oriented subjects, in the strained relationship between the University and the heads of the Victorian secondary schools and in the lists of subjects included for Matriculation, which it controlled until 1964 when the Victorian Universities and Schools Examination Board (VUSEB) was created (W.F. Connell, 1993). The universities’ grip on the curriculum was eased slightly in 1979 when the Matriculation Certificate was replaced by the Higher School Certificate and control of the new examination passed to the Victorian Institute of Secondary Education (VISE). Nevertheless, the universities were still represented on the VISE board and also had the authority to stipulate prerequisite subjects for entrance. Until the second half of the 20th century, the universities also remained uneasy over attempts to include technical courses or subjects preferring to keep them apart in separate (although usually affiliated) colleges. University attitudes to the type of material worthy of inclusion in higher education began to change in the 1920s as interest in science and technology increased. Changes in transport and communications also made it easier for the Australian academic community to stay in touch with developments overseas. At the University of Melbourne, Chairs were appointed in Dentistry and Economics, despite some concerns about the appropriateness of this innovation, but attitudes remained conservative: until 1924 no professor was appointed who had not studied or taught at a university in Britain (Selleck, 2003). Further evidence of an aristocratic perspective can be found in the organisation and curricula of the schools that produced the great majority of university students − Victoria’s own version of the Great Schools. The schools whose reputations depended on preparing candidates for university concentrated on the classical liberal curriculum: Melbourne’s Xavier College aimed to “afford a liberal education by carefully developing and training the mind” and reassured parents that the curriculum in the higher school included subjects required for the University Public Examinations (St Francis Xavier, 1981, p. 3). The situation at Presbyterian Ladies’ College (PLC) was similar. From the outset, PLC offered an


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academic education deeply influenced by liberal-humanist values as demonstrated by Headmaster Andrew Harper’s address to the students in 1881:

Our aim is to make you love learning, and to give you some taste of what intellectual pleasure means, and to put into your hands the tools which you will require to pursue your studies for yourselves, so that life may be made full and rich to you as it is to the most highly educated amongst us. You cannot possible know, as yet, how empty, and flat and unprofitable long reaches of even the most fortunate life must be if we have not within us sources of delight which the outer world, the world of possessions, cannot give, and so cannot take away (Fitzpatrick, 1975, p. 80).

His successors shared his sentiments: the curriculum focused on traditional academic subjects until the 1950s when new subjects such as economics and social studies were added once they were approved for Matriculation. Schools like Xavier College and PLC demonstrated their loyalty to the liberal-humanist ideal of education in many ways. Xavier reassured parents that their educational program balanced training the mind with training the body and the character. At PLC, the pupils’ personal and social development was accomplished through numerous clubs and activities. In the 1950s and ‘60 older boarding students were permitted to attend the opera, theatre or ballet in the city and the girls were encouraged to discuss of current events so that they could participate in society without embarrassment. In 1960 a Students’ Representative Council was established to provide leadership opportunities and in the ’70s, individual learning projects were introduced into the senior curriculum to bridge the gap between conventional schoolwork and the self-directed style of learning expected at university (Fitzpatrick, 1975). Not all private schools concentrated so strongly on academic results, but their loyalty to the liberal ideal of education was still very much in evidence. Under the leadership of Miss Cunningham (Headmistress from 1936 until 1962), Fintona offered a comprehensive curriculum explicitly designed to develop all aspects of the students’ characters. It included literature, music, painting, sewing and modern languages.

I know what I would want for a daughter if I had one. I would want her to develop every power she had of body, mind and spirit. I would want her to work hard and find her work a pleasure and a joy (Gillison, 1982).

Friday afternoons were reserved for club activities in a wide range of areas and Hobbies Day was held annually to allow the girls, to display their achievements; in 1959, the traditional prefect system was abolished and replaced with a sixth form Senate to allow all senior girls an opportunity to develop leadership skills. Schools of all types, including country schools, maintained a commitment to the liberal-humanist belief that education was intrinsically beneficial through the existence of their “exam stream” – a handful, sometimes just one or two students who were taking languages and mathematics in the hope of securing a place at university.

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When journalist Kate Legge enrolled at university in the 1970s, she thought more about how much she would enjoy being a student rather that the type of job she might get with a degree. Legge’s father was a founding professor at Monash, but she explained her preference for The University of Melbourne by recalling a visit there when she was eight. She was intrigued by the exciting atmosphere that seemed to imbue the Union Building and ten years later still associated that memory with the raffish character of the area around the university:

Carlton extended Melbourne University’s campus by a couple of miles. It was rich in extracurricular activities – a perfect playground for students of the 1970s .…. the Australian band Skyhooks belted its way to the top of the charts in 1974 singing about the “Lygon Street Limbo”, while I ploughed my way through HSC at the Melbourne Church of England Girls’ Grammar School. The words went to my head …. I longed to chuck my navy blue felt bowler in the Yarra and soak myself in this hedonistic lifestyle (Legge, 1985, p. 177).

A more accurate interpretation of the history of Australian higher education would be to accept that the founders of Australia’s 19th century universities genuinely supported the liberal ideal of the university; as did the academic staff and the small numbers of scholars and intellectuals in the community, most of whom were educated at Oxford and Cambridge; Professor Ernest Scott, author of the 1936 history of The University of Melbourne, described Hearn and Barry as “cultural evangelists” (Scott, 1936). It is possible that a substantial part of the colonial middle class shared this view, however it is also probable that the colonial governments and the general population held more pragmatic views. The sons of wealthy landholders or government officials did not need a degree to be successful in Australia, yet they presented themselves for admission in ever-increasing numbers. As a consequence, Australian universities were forced to combine the liberal-humanist view of university education with a utilitarian approach from the outset. The Governor of New South Wales and his Legislative Council established University of Sydney for the “betterment of religion and morality and the promotion of useful knowledge”, but there were disagreements over the definition of “useful knowledge” almost from the first year of operation (Williams, 2002). The University of Melbourne adopted a slightly more utilitarian approach than its Sydney counterpart, which required every student to produce a certificate of competent religious attainment from the principal of their college before any degree could be conferred, but there was a strong and enduring commitment to liberal-humanist education in all of the sandstone universities founded in the 19th century. Educationalists such as Radford and Zilliacus were all genuine in their belief that there was a unique quality to the nature of university education, and as the previous chapter has shown, a number of key political figures including Menzies (a graduate of The University of Melbourne), Whitlam (a graduate of The University of Sydney) and Fraser (a graduate of Oxford University) also believed that university was special in some way and tried to protect


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it, although their opinions on the nature of university education, and who should have access to it, differed greatly. Since 1850, when the University of Sydney opened, contradictory beliefs about the purpose of university education have existed in the Australian community. There is an undeniable connection between university education and employment that predisposes young people to adopt a utilitarian approach to their studies, but there is evidence that they also expect or at least hope that their time at university will be enjoyable and will in some way contribute to their personal development as well. Many of the students interviewed in the early 1960s by Theobald hoped that their university studies would be an enriching experience; a few years later researchers Katz and Katz (1968) found that while students regarded entry into the profession of their choice as the primary purpose of university education, they also regarded studying at university as an opportunity for personal growth and development. In the 1970s Graham Little (1975) described students who found great pleasure in their studies in his book Faces on the Campus, as did Peel in the interviews he conducted for the Monash Transition Study in the 1990s. The division between liberal-humanist and utilitarian perspectives is no longer tenable, if indeed it ever was. Perhaps Encel was correct to say that the struggle over the purpose of university education was over quickly in Australia, and that the functionalists won, at least at the systemic level; but as social attitudes change over time, there are always families or individuals who continue to support earlier models, or alternatives, based upon their personal beliefs, values and experiences. The liberal-humanist ideal of the university has not been obliterated; in fact it appears to be thriving in some environments.

NOTES

1 This editorial is cited in K. Scott, Gareth Evans. St Leonards: Allen & Unwin, 1999

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Clarke, S. (2002). The young and the wealthy: The new students of 1856. In Students, scholars & structures, early tales from the university of Melbourne. (pp. 106-115). Melbourne: History Department, The University of Melbourne.

Coaldrake, P. & Stedman, L. (1998). On the brink: Australia’s universities confronting their future. St Lucia: University of Queensland Press.

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Dunstan, K. (1990). No brains at all. Ringwood: Viking. Ebury, S. (1994). Weary: The life of Sir Edward Dunlop. Ringwood: Viking. Eliot, T. S. (1948). Notes towards the definition of culture. London: Faber Fitzpatrick, K. (1975). PLC Melbourne: The first century. Burwood: The Presbyterian Ladies’ College. French, E. L. (1959). The humanities in secondary education. In A. Grenfell Price (Ed.). The humanities

in Australia – A survey. (pp. 34-55) Sydney: Angus & Robertson. Gillison, J. (1982). Margaret Cunningham of Fintona: a biography. Balwyn: Fintona Girls’ School. Hammond, S. B. (1961). The students and the university. In Melbourne studies in education.

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Australian journal of higher education. 3(2) 111-119. Legge, K. (1985). Kate Legge. In H. Dow (Ed). More memories of Melbourne University.

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Mackay, H. (1993). Reinventing Australia. The mind and mood of Australia in the 90s. Melbourne: Angus & Robertson.

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Education for complete living (pp. 3-13). Melbourne: Australian Council for Educational Research.

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He’s the son of a doctor, lawyer or someone else with a house in St Ives or Kew. Because his parents wanted him to have the best education money could buy they sent him to a private school, to study academic subjects and learn the importance of not getting his hands dirty. He went direct from school to college, avoiding the real world en route except for glimpses through the windscreen of the sports car his parents bought him. After a few years he too becomes a doctor or a lawyer, and so begins to accumulate the money necessary to build a house larger than his father’s and to send his children to university (Anderson & Vervoorn, 1983, p. 1).

University has been the preferred destination for the majority of young people leaving school at the end of Year Twelve since the 1990s. However, these reasons – and the connection between culture, class and students’ perception of university – have not been fully explored in the Australian context until now. There is ongoing support in the community for the liberal-humanist view of education as well as for the utilitarian approach, but it is not clear which view predominates amongst particular groups of students. It is likely that young people’s desire to enrol at university is prompted by deeply personal and widely differing reasons. It would be tempting to assume that the liberal-humanist perspective of education would find greater support among high socioeconomic status students. Students from affluent backgrounds are less dependent on their academic qualifications for their livelihood, are likely to have had greater exposure to high culture that values learning for its own sake and the schools that they are likely to have attended emphasise the character-forming nature of education. Promotional materials from the more elite schools highlight the values with which they will inculcate students: these schools also offer scholarships and prizes for character-building activities such as music, drama or athletics as well as academic ability. In contrast, students from low socioeconomic backgrounds might be expected to have an interest in occupational qualifications, but not in the cultivation of the mind or the character traditionally associated with a liberal arts or science degree. However, there are a number of weaknesses in this assumption. To begin with, it implies that the nature of socioeconomic status in Australia is fixed; it also implies that high socioeconomic status families uniquely value specific intellectual or culture pursuits. Measures of socioeconomic status are also notoriously imprecise and open to interpretation. In the past, one of the most commonly used procedures was to classify people according to occupation on the assumption that this would provide an accurate index to income – the higher the

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income, the higher the family’s status. This type of simple classification has largely been abandoned as lacking in discrimination – a train driver may earn considerably more than a junior solicitor, a builder or plumber may earn more than double their starting salary, yet the solicitor’s position has a higher status as well as the potential to earn a very substantial income in the future as well. More refined systems of classification have developed hierarchies of occupations that attempt to incorporate income, qualifications and social status, but there are still limitations. In Australia, socioeconomic status is both complex and mutable; it cannot be defined simply in terms of lists of occupations and income levels; wealth and occupation are relevant, but so are family membership and educational achievements. An ambition to achieve a high income or high status occupation is not necessarily linked to enjoyment of intellectual pursuits or high cultural activities such as opera or ballet. Moreover, until the second half of the 20th century, the type of education provided at university was elite by definition; with the exception of vocational courses such as medicine, law and engineering, university education was deliberately impractical and not particularly useful to ambitious students from humble backgrounds. Students who fell into that category were more likely to enrol at one of the teaching, agricultural or other professional colleges that existed until the early 1970s, or at one of the Colleges of Advanced Education created as a consequence of the Martin Report in 1965. There is a demonstrable link between university enrolment and socioeconomic status: this went unremarked until the late 1940s when educational researchers noted that young people from high socioeconomic status families often went to university, while the ones from low socioeconomic status families seldom did. Researchers began to ask how that situation could be changed, but there was no coherent explanation for this phenomenon until Bourdieu formalised these questions into his theory of capital in the 1950s. Bourdieu recognised that wealth – economic capital – was important in determining a child’s attitudes to education, but it was of lesser importance than the “cultural” capital that is passed on from generation to generation. Patterns of educational achievement are inherited from the previous generation: children whose parents are tertiary educated respond to their parents’ expectations and develop greater academic ability in order to meet those expectations. This remains largely true, but in a globalised world, an individual’s family or community can extend far beyond previously accepted limits. Electronic media including email, Skype and social networking sites have made it easy for extended families to exchange news over long distances and so the pressure to conform to expectations regarding education and choice of occupation is far more intense than in the days of an occasional letter reporting on the progress of cousins or of friends’ children. But young people in Australian are also exposed to a variety of influences that play a vital role in the formation of their personal identity and plans for the future. Friends can exert subtle (and at times no-so-subtle) pressure to conform and the media also share in the process by highlighting the rewards that accrue from particular forms of education.

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The early experiences of two well-known Australian figures, World War II hero Sir Edward “Weary” Dunlop and Prime Minister Robert Gordon Menzies not only illustrate the impact of cultural capital, but also demonstrate how its operation has changed over time. Dunlop came from a poor family near Benalla. His father did not see any point in allowing Edward to continue his schooling beyond the compulsory years until one of his teachers intervened, pointing out that the boy had potential. By all accounts, he was an inconsistent student who made little effort with his studies until he was warned that he would probably fail his exams. ‘Stung by his teachers’ remarks, he completed Leaving Certificate with excellent grades, but then left school to work for a local pharmacist. Dunlop was bored with life in a small town and increasingly restless. He took the only available opportunity to escape from Benalla and enrolled in the Melbourne Pharmacy College. He said later that he did not contemplate studying at university until the college principal, impressed by Dunlop’s outstanding results, insisted that he apply for a place in the Faculty of Medicine (Ebury, 1994). Dunlop achieved academic success despite his family’s lack of cultural capital, but only after the intervention of his teachers. Robert Menzies was also born into a poor rural family when the whole nation was struggling to survive the 1890s depression. His mother Kate named him after General Gordon, the hero of Khartoum (Perkins, 1968). She was convinced that Robert was a genius from an early age and pushed him to excel at school. She also protected him from the worst of his father’s wrath when he neglected his chores in order to read. Neither of his parents had much schooling, but both were great readers and also maintained the Scottish tradition of having one member of the family read while the rest worked at various tasks in the evening. They had great respect for learning and each of the children was sent in turn to stay with Grandmother Menzies in Ballarat to attend Humffray Street State School, renowned for its excellent scholarship and the frequency with which its pupils won scholarships (Joske, 1978). Throughout Menzies’ childhood, the family was in a precarious financial position; there was little money for non-essentials, but somehow enough could be found for books. School fees were out of the question, but Menzies was able to progress through secondary school and to university by winning a succession of scholarships. From the age of 11 to 13, he studied until very late every night; his efforts paid off when he not only won a scholarship to complete his education at a private school in Melbourne, but he topped the state examinations. Despite his lack of economic capital, Menzies possessed the required cultural capital to achieve academic success. Nevertheless, few students from poor or uneducated families made it to university before World War II. Anderson and Vervoorn argue that until the rapid influx of students in the late 1940s, “it was commonly regarded as a matter of course that those persons with the talent, ambition and resources necessary for study at university level did so, while less talented individuals perhaps undertook some trade or technical training. The status quo of the distribution of good and privileges in society was simply accepted, with a sense of predestination on the part of some and fatalism on the part of others” (Anderson & Vervoorn, 1983,

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p. 5). Many young adults in this pre-war generation had seen the terrible effects of the 1930s depression first-hand and their parents were also haunted by memories of the 1890s depression; together, these experiences made them feel that they should be grateful for any educational or employment opportunities, however meagre or unappealing (McCalman, 1993). University was out of reach for most working-class and lower-middle class people; the Working Men’s College (later the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology), which offered subjects in a wide variety of technical and applied areas was the most they could aspire to. Although university did become more accessible throughout the 1950s, ’60s and ’70s, the rate of change was very slow and the effects were negligible, at least for students entering directly from secondary school (Anderson & Vervoorn, 1983). World War Two created an explicit and urgent link between study and employment that continued through the reconstruction phase and into the long period of rapid economic development that followed, but many families who had little or no experience of education were unlikely to consider university when thinking about their children’s future. They may have been perplexed if their children showed any interest in enrolling, or worried that their children would become ashamed of them, or regarded their child’s increased earning capacity as a rebuke to their own financial struggles. More probably, going to university did not even occur to them. In the late 1950s, when the universities were bursting with young people anxious to qualify for the seemingly limitless number of new jobs being created by the reconstruction boom, writer and academic Robert Hillman left school aged fifteen:

… more or less because my father had expected that I would. He saw no virtue in education beyond the subsistence level. I could read and write – what more did I want? … My father had lived through the Great Depression. Employment to him, and to every other male Australian of his class and generation, was victory (Hillman, 2003).

Hillman's father apprenticed him to a butcher; a steady trade, but one that he loathed and abandoned as soon as possible. It was many years before he found his way to university. Even when young people from lower class backgrounds were able to complete school, there was no guarantee that university would follow: many gifted students who completed their secondary school courses and took the matriculation examination did not go on to university either because they lacked the necessary funds, or because they found more attainable opportunities elsewhere and decided that university was not worth the effort required, or they simply may have been unable to envisage themselves at university – until the sixties the Working Men’s College was still the apex of education for many young people from low socioeconomic status backgrounds. Similar patterns of exclusion were repeated over the decades. In 1960, the Price Committee on Higher Education in New South Wales found that some 41 per cent of university students came from upper-middle class backgrounds even though they made up only 24 per cent of the primary school population. In contrast only 6 per cent of university students could be described as working class (New South

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Wales, 1961). In 1971/72 around 8 per cent of boys and 6 per cent of girls who completed secondary school enrolled at university, but almost one-third of those had fathers who were senior managers or managers and another quarter had professional fathers compared with 3 per cent whose fathers were semi-skilled (Radford & Wilkes, 1975). Anderson and Vervoorn cited 11 studies completed between the 1940s and the 1970s that examined the socioeconomic backgrounds of university students in Australia: all reached a similar conclusion.1 Young people from high socioeconomic status families (as measured by father’s occupation) went to university; young people from low socioeconomic status families did not. A long series of studies into educational outcomes of children at school also demonstrated similar links between academic success and socioeconomic status (Connell, Stoorbant, Sinclair, & Rogers, 1975; Edgar, 1974; Edgar, 1981; Radford, 1962; Radford & Wilkes, 1975; Rosier, 1972; Rosier, 1973; Taft, 1975a; Taft, 1975b; Toomey, 1968). These studies supported Bourdieu and Passeron’s conclusion that the school system eliminated children from lower socioeconomic backgrounds by persuading them that university was an impossible destination for people like them. In the late 1960s R. W. Connell was surprised and appalled by the responses he received from low socioeconomic status children and teenagers to questions about the type of jobs they might get when they left school. Almost a quarter indicated that they would have liked to take up professional or high status occupations, but dismissed these hopes as fanciful because they did not have “brains”. They were resigned to working in shops or factories. He found these comments disturbing because the children “were not subnormal, simply working class. They live in lower-status suburbs; their fathers are tradesmen, drivers, factory process workers, and so on” (R. W. Connell, 1977). And their estimation of their chances of getting “good jobs” was deadly accurate. Bourdieu and Passeron concurred: “the subjective expectation of entering university tends, for the most disadvantaged, to be even lower than the objective chances” (Bourdieu & Passeron, 1977, p. 5). The young people R. W. Connell interviewed could not picture themselves in the “good jobs”, and therefore did not consider what steps, such as a university degree or college diploma, they would need to undertake in order to secure one. The children from high-status families confidently expected to enter professions or high status positions as a matter of course and often spoke of parents who wanted them to attend university, occasionally nominating a particular university. It appears that the family’s level of educational aspiration was the crucial factor in determining whether a child would complete school and the type of tertiary education they would pursue. Young people’s own subjective judgment about their ability as students or as intellectuals is far more important than the objective ranking of people into higher and lower social groups. Those judgments that give young people an ability to imagine themselves at university participating in activities and succeeding at academic tasks derive, in the main, from their family backgrounds. Occupational inheritance among some professional groups in Australia, most notably lawyers and doctors, has been remarkably high which may help to explain why studies of social background and educational success undertaken in the 1980s produced similar results to studies undertaken a decade or two earlier (Broom & Jones, 1969;

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Broom & Jones, 1976; Anderson & Vervoorn, 1983). In 1992 14.6 per cent of domestic students enrolled at Australian universities came from low socioeconomic status family backgrounds: by 1999 that figure had increased to just 14.7 per cent. Among country students the situation was even worse, with school completion rates so low that many “do not reach the point at which it is meaningful to speak of barriers to higher education” (James, 2002, p. 2). A review conducted on behalf of Universities Australia in 2008 concluded that the situation had remained virtually unchanged over 15 years in spite of various attempts to redress the balance (Centre for the Study of Higher Education, 2008).

Not Class, But Culture

In 2003 On Track, a destinations monitoring program in Victoria, found that nearly two-thirds of all high achievers in Year 12 came from high to very high socioeconomic status backgrounds (Teese, Polesel & Mason, 2003); the existence of the remaining third, who come from medium or low socioeconomic status backgrounds, supports the proposition that the family’s domestic culture is the key to academic success. In part, the drive towards academic success among young people from middle and low socioeconomic status backgrounds must be attributed to a desire for secure, well-paid employment. Since the 1960s prospective university students can hardly have failed to be aware of the connection between a degree and employment: for at least forty years the media and popular culture have routinely portrayed affluent and successful adult characters working in occupations that require a degree while ignoring or trivialising lower status occupations or depicting them in less than positive situations. Moreover, there is solid evidence to support these media images: unemployment among non-graduates is significantly higher than among graduates and has been throughout the post-war period. On almost any indicator, graduates do better than people who have other types of tertiary qualifications and far better than those with none. Nevertheless, an improvement in employment prospects is only part of the answer. The dismal list of studies linking university enrolment to high socioeconomic status that stretches back to the mid-1940s has almost obscured one very important point: young people from low socioeconomic status families often want the same opportunities as their more affluent peers and for the same reasons. The children interviewed by Connell wanted the “good” jobs because they regarded them as interesting and rewarding, jobs that they thought they would enjoy:

… I’d like to do something with science. … (I) suppose you need a lot of money; I don’t know … I’d like to do astronomy, or archaeology or something like that.” Girl, 12

I’d like to be a kindergarten teacher. I’ve got four brothers and sisters younger than me and I get along with them real good, play games with them on weekends and that. I can get along with children. I’m very patient with them. … That’s what I’d like to be. Or if I couldn’t do that, which I don’t think I’ve got the brains really, the intelligence, you know you’ve got to go all through school and then university and college and such …” Girl. 13 (R. W. Connell, 1977, p. 152).

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None of the young people in these interviews mentioned money or social status, nor could kindergarten teacher, astronomer or archaeologists be regarded as particularly well-paid occupations; what these young people were dreaming of was the sort of intellectual satisfaction that the traditional liberal-humanist model associated with higher education, circumscribed by their previous knowledge of occupational role models. No explicit enthusiasm for Newman’s liberal-humanist position, but not a purely utilitarian approach either. For some low socioeconomic status students a degree has been a way of entering a new world. Gareth Evans, Chancellor of the Australian National University and former Foreign Minister of Australia, was a bright child from a lower middle-class family (his father was a tram driver and his mother ran a small business from home), who won a place at the selective-entry Melbourne High School and discovered a world beyond the one he knew. In his opinion, a law degree was not so much a way into a highly paid career, or a way of improving his social position, but also the entry portal into an intellectually stimulating and personally satisfying way of life (K. Scott, 1999). Other students had similar hopes, but found that compromises would be necessary to achieve that ambition: writer, singer and former teacher Juliette Hughes, enrolled in the only course that she could afford:

I was awarded a Victorian Government Teacher Studentship in 1967. It enabled me to take up a place I was offered in the Melbourne University Arts Faculty to do an Honours Degree. I was also offered a Commonwealth Scholarship, which would pay for the university place, but its living allowance was severely means-tested … it was impossible for me to accept the Commonwealth Scholarship, since I would have been reduced to about five dollars a week living allowance. Only paupers and millionaires could afford to take them up … the lower-middle-class battlers were kept firmly out of the professional/academic loop in this way. The Studentship paid a living allowance of $22 a week – an office wage was commonly $40 a week. But it was a mixed blessing: I could not elect to do a performance degree at the Conservatorium, only a teaching-oriented one.

The Function of Education

A family’s domestic culture not only shapes the young person’s decision to enrol at university, it determines how the family interprets the function of university education and affects the student’s motivation to enrol. At the strictly utilitarian end of the spectrum are families, like the ones caricatured by Anderson and Vervoorn, who regard university education as desirable because it leads to a professional career and because of the status attached to those careers. Families who hold this view of education are likely to encourage (or even insist) that their children attend university and enrol in a particular course regardless of the child’s own preferences. In those families, cultivation of the mind or development of the character run a poor second to obtaining a qualification that will achieve or maintain a certain social position.

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At the other end of the spectrum are families who value university for all the reasons that Newman outlined, and who regard themselves in a very different light from Anderson and Vervoorn’s doctors and lawyers. Diana Dyason enrolled at The University of Melbourne in 1938 at the end of the Depression and although she has had a long and successful career as an academic, career plans were not her primary concern when she enrolled:

For some freshers the University of Melbourne was an alien land: for me it was familiar territory – on Saturday mornings in my primary school days I had played by the lake whilst my father lectured to commerce students. My uncle, Ernest Scott, (later Sir Ernest) was Professor of History. Throughout my early life academics had been frequent visitors … Since my early teens I had been experiencing the University … through the doings of three older cousins and my brother John … My relations had taken me to witness the students’ Block Parades … With the senior school contingent I had partaken of public lectures and Science Nights put on at the University … All this experience gave me an impression of the University as fun, a place where rags, theatre and sport were the norm, professors and staff were human beings, and learning had its lighter side (Dyason, 1983, pp. 89-90).

Between these two extremes there exists an almost infinite range of variations. In his study of university students in the 1970s, Faces on Campus, Little described two students whom he called Lyn Welch and Libby Deane and who encapsulated the different interpretations of the function of university. Lyn, from a lower-middle class family living in the northern suburbs of Melbourne, was taking Honours in Arts, but was not really enjoying university. Her family was immensely proud of having a daughter at university and took a very close interest in her studies, pressing her relentlessly to study hard and do well. Lyn expected that a degree would give her the qualifications necessary to secure a high-status job. In contrast, Libby came from an upper class family. She was dismissive of girls who were there just for a laugh, but she regarded university as a kind of finishing school. Despite being highly able, and apparently enjoying her studies, she was taking Pass Arts and was content to do just enough work to get by. Libby’s parents were “terrified” by her tentative proposal to study law; her father comforted himself with the observation that she “probably won’t practise anyway”. Lyn Welch’s family wanted her to graduate so that she could get a good job (Little, 1975, pp. 37-39). Ten years later most “(working class) parents … valued education as a means of improving their children’s chances of getting a job which would have better working conditions than they themselves have had to endure (e.g. in factories)” (Wilson & Wyn, 1985, p. 280). Little’s examples appear to support the proposition that high socioeconomic status students will be more supportive of the liberal-humanist view, but in fact they suggest that both the Welch and Deane families had a predominantly utilitarian approach even though their goals were different.

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Many migrants had attitudes that were similar to ones expressed by Australian-born working-class parents; both groups regarded education as the entry to well-paid, clean occupations and the path to a successful future:

We are conditioned by our parents, because as soon as we are able to understand, the question is put to us, “What do you want to be?” The reply is, naturally “A doctor.” Everybody I visited, I remember when I was 9 years old, questioned me and rubbed it in. Because they have missed education, our parents want their children to have it. Because the higher the standard of education the children reach, the more it reflects on them – their children’s education adds pride to their life (Isaacs, 1981, pp. 10-11).

Similar attitudes could be found among the children of immigrant parents in Australia at the time they can still be found here and in many other countries as well. Superficially, immigrant families appear to be motivated by utilitarianism, but their values are remarkably similar to the values held by the rising middle class in the sixties and seventies and just as complex. In the ’70s, the Welch family regarded having a child at university as confirmation of certain beliefs about themselves, but Little also described another student, Arnold Wilensky who came from a Polish-Czech background. Arnold was looking forward to the kind of life that he would be able to enjoy because he had a degree. Even more than the material benefits his degree would bring, he anticipated enjoying the sense of satisfaction that he had been able to please his family and himself and join the intellectual elite. Little found that this combination of responses was common among migrant families: enthusiasm for higher education was generated by increased opportunities for economic and social advancement, combined (in some cases at least) with an interest in the intellectual culture (Little, 1975). Recent migrants are often economically disadvantaged, but if they have been professionals in their own country, their motivation might have more to do with their perception of themselves as educated people than it does with achieving a particular financial or social status. June Factor’s family migrated to Australia from Poland in 1936. The family was poor, but her music lessons were a priority and they shaped her later career in an unexpected way.

The University (of Melbourne) was my oyster long before I matriculated and entered the Arts faculty in 1955. For years I had been a student at the Conservatorium … Catching the Lygon Street tram from Brunswick, getting off at Elgin Street (the end of the section: it cost too much to go another stop), then walking through the University to the Con. – and the same in reverse to go home – became a once-a-week part of my life from the age of 10 or 11. Then, when the golden portals of University High School opened to receive me in 1951 (going to high school – especially this high school – felt very much like entering a secular paradise), it became a daily event … Occasionally, I varied the routine by … catching the Sydney Road tram; the journey may have taken a little less time, but such a route couldn’t compare with the University for interest, and I used it rarely … I never doubted that I would go to the University (Factor, 1985, pp. 118-119).

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Dr Factor did go to university; she became a writer and folklorist, with a special interest in childhood and was director of The Australian Children’s Folklore Collection in Museum Victoria for 25 years. A generation later, law students from a variety of ethnic backgrounds gave similar responses when asked about their socioeconomic status: one University of Melbourne law student from a refugee family said that he did not know how to describe his family because they were disadvantaged financially, but were very strongly oriented towards education because his parents had had professional careers in their homeland (University of Melbourne Equal Opportunity Committee, 1996). In both his case, and Dr Factor’s, family culture was a stronger influence than financial circumstances. Nor does a migrant background preclude altruistic reasons for wanting to go to university: Isaacs cited the case of a young Greek-Australian man studying to become a teacher, partly for his own social advancement, but also to help other young Greeks overcome the disadvantages of an unfamiliar and sometimes hostile school system. Separating liberal-humanist and utilitarian approaches to enrolling at university is further complicated by difficulties in defining “utilitarian”, as this comment from a teacher I interviewed in 2003 suggests:

I did an Education degree specialising in art because I wanted to be an artist. Teaching was the only career that would give me access to professional quality facilities at no cost. I could work on my own stuff and teach at the same time.

And this one from a student, recorded in 1999.

I am interested in primary teaching because I enjoy the company of children and I like to see them learn. Plus there is always a need for teachers (James, Baldwin & McInnis, 1999, p. 18).

A PERILOUS CHOICE

Regardless of their ethnic background, going to university can be difficult for young people whose family culture has not equipped them with appropriate cultural capital.

At university I met a different type of kid – one I never met before. When I spoke to these kids I found out they were from some private schools. Their training was different; their speech was different, easier, while I stumbled when I wanted to express myself (Isaacs, 1981, p. 10).

Some of the young people in this study who came from lower socioeconomic backgrounds are genuinely disinclined to go to university believing that a TAFE course would be more useful than a university course. These students were less interested in the subjects that they might study at university, they were less confident that they would be able to achieve the necessary entry grades and less confident that they would have the subjects required to take the courses that might interest them at university. They were also less confident that their parents wanted

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them to go to university and had a much stronger interest in earning an income as soon as possible. The perceived cost of a university course was also a major disincentive for students from low socioeconomic backgrounds who would have to support themselves during study, as their families do not have the necessary resources. Enrolling at university can be such a perilous choice for young people from low socioeconomic status or non-traditional backgrounds that many see it as simply not worth the risk They understand its function as a means of social advancement, and they may also appreciate the liberal-humanist aspects of attending, but they worry that they might fail and have to pay off student loans even though they do not have the good job that is supposed to follow a degree. Fear of failure is also associated with fear of humiliation – facing the disappointment of family members and the jeering of jealous neighbours who predicted it. Nor was graduation seen by these young people as an automatic ticket to the good life; an awareness of the hierarchy of prestige among universities also deterred some prospective students who realised that they were unlikely to be accepted by the highest status institutions. Rather than expose themselves to discrimination for having a degree from a low-status university or college, they preferred to do without. Some young people evaluated their chances of finding suitable employment and decided that the cost of further study and the effort required to graduate were not justified. Others were ambivalent about enrolling or elected not to enrol at all because they understood the cultural function of university and rejected it; they knew people from their school or neighbourhood, who had been to university and were changed by their experiences. They worried that something similar would happen to them and that they would become alienated from their family and friends as a result. Migrant families appeared to be particularly concerned about possible disruption to the family structure and on occasion expressed disdain for the intellectual culture on offer. When they did enrol, some young people from low socioeconomic status or non-traditional backgrounds found the experience very different from what they had expected; their values were different, they took their studies too seriously and they lacked the ease and confidence displayed by high-status students. The case of Lyn Welch illustrates Bourdieu’s argument very neatly. The Welch family regarded their small domestic refinements as evidence of their superior values and domestic culture, but at university Lyn discovered that her values were out of step: fashion talk and the social round identified the high-status students and she found a division “between people whose preparation was good and allows them to feel at home there” and people like herself, for whom the university is an alien territory (Little, 1975, p. 41). Her problem was accentuated because it was unexpected; she expected to be welcomed by the elite and was deeply hurt to discover that she would never be one of them no matter how good her grades were. In the worst cases, students who crossed social barriers to enrol might experience outright hostility from their fellow students and teachers (Isaacs, 1971).

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Social Capital

The missing ingredient in the discussion of the function of university education is Bourdieu’s idea of social capital. Social capital is “the aggregate of the actual or potential resources which are linked to possession of a durable network of more or less institutionalized relationships of mutual acquaintance and recognition” (Bourdieu, 1986, p. 248). The quantity of social capital a person possesses is determined by the size of their network, the sum of its resources and by how successfully they can make use of the network and its resources. Social capital explains how families with large amounts of cultural and financial capital are able to preserve what they already have or extend it even further; social capital also explains why some individuals are able to prosper apparently without sufficient institutionalised cultural capital in the form of academic qualifications. Graduates derive economic capital benefits from their studies, but universities also increase social capital by binding people together through shared values, experiences and interests. As numerous personal recollections have testified, many young people from middle-class families were told to present themselves at a certain place, and a job or a scholarship or place at university would be made available until the introduction of equal opportunity legislation made such behaviour illegal. These networks of influence were established primarily through family connections, but also through church, school and university attendance. Janet McCalman (1983) documented the social networks among young people attending some of Victoria’s most elite schools and suggested that the relationships established along the tram route servicing these schools have had a profound effect on Victorian society: one former Victorian Premier met his future wife on the tram when he attended Scotch College and she was at Fintona in the 1960s. An analysis of the educational backgrounds of people listed in Who’s Who in Australia 1988, showed that an overwhelming majority of the leaders of Australian society attended a handful of schools, and that the domination of the elite independent schools was particularly noticeable in Victoria where five Greater Protestant schools made up 41 per cent of the Victorian elite; the addition of Xavier College and the remaining old Greater Public Schools took the total to 48 per cent and with the further addition of St Kevin’s, De La Salle College and St Patrick’s East Melbourne and the remaining or Lesser Protestant Schools, 56.6 per cent of the Victorian listings were accounted for (Peel & McCalman, 1992). Adding to this concentration of influence, almost half of the Australian elite took their first degree at either the University of Sydney or Melbourne.

I had grown up expecting to go to university. I did not know what I was going to study, and did not think very seriously about the details of what seemed like a natural course. My parents had painted a romantic picture of university. Occasionally, we drove past Melbourne University on awful Sunday outings when I was a child. My mother, nursing my youngest sister in the front seat, would tell us she had met out father at university. I leaned forward resting my

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head on the top of the front seat, while my father told us stories about his University days (Carbines, 1983, p. 203).

In this way, social capital is consolidated and used to reinforce cultural capital to produce the comprehensive view of life identified by Eliot in the 1940s. Moreover, there continues to be a high rate of intermarriage among university graduates, and the rate increases with the status of the university. Graduates of the established universities are more likely to marry other graduates than graduates of the new universities, and they are more likely to marry each other thereby consolidating their social capital even further (Teese, Polesel & Mason, 2004). Alternatively, social capital can act as a disincentive to academic success: young people from high-socioeconomic status families have always had greater opportunities to indulge in dilettantism since they are less reliant on their qualifications for employment. If membership of a particular social group outweighs the value of academic qualifications then a person may reject the conventional markings of success such as a degree in favour of a more appealing alternative. As R. W. Connell pointed out, the great majority of university places have been occupied by the children of professionals and senior managers, not entrepreneurs: the late Kerry Packer, who was at one point Australia’s richest individual, dismissed the idea that his son James would attend university with the comment “Uni! Why would he want to go there? To learn how to smoke marijuana!” (Tippett, 2005). In Kerry Packer’s opinion, a degree would not have boosted his son’s employment prospects or developed his intellect or character. It was not the gateway into a better life, but an impediment to his son’s success; a waste of time that could be spent learning the ropes of the family business empire. Young people from low socioeconomic status backgrounds continue to be about half as likely to enrol in higher education as their peers from medium and high socioeconomic status backgrounds, and although university is the preferred destination across all socioeconomic levels, young people from low socioeconomic status backgrounds are less likely to choose university over vocational education. Nevertheless, the assumption that students from low socioeconomic status are more interested in the occupational or functional aspects of university education appears unfounded. There are students at both ends of the socioeconomic spectrum who are not interested in higher education, albeit for different reasons. Without question, high-status students are in a better position to make the best advantage of their qualifications; they have more scope to pursue subjects that interest them, regardless of their eventual employment prospects, and more scope to engage in dilettantism. But there are students who adopt a strictly utilitarian approach to their studies, and students who crave the cultural and intellectual stimulation provided by university study at all socioeconomic levels.

NOTE

1 The studies examined by Anderson and Vervoorn were: Dawson, M, (1965). Graduate and Married. Department of Adult Education. University of Sydney.

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Gilchrist, M. B. & Hammond, S. B, (1971) University Entrants and their Non-Intellectual Peers. Australian Journal of Psychology,23 (3) 317–333.

Henderson, N. K. (1942). What Chance Has Your Child? Melbourne: Left Book Club of Victoria. Hohne, H. H. (1951). The Prediction of Academic Success. Melbourne: Australian Council for

Educational Research. Hohne, H. H. (1955). Success and Failure in Scientific Faculties of the University of Melbourne.

Melbourne: Australian Council for Educational Research. La Nauze, J. A. (1940). Some aspects of educational opportunity in South Australia. Australian

Educational Studies (Second Series). Educational Research Series No 59. Parkville: Melbourne University Press.

La Nauze, J. A. (1943). Education for Some. Future of Education Series No 3. Parkville: Melbourne University Press.

Serle, G. (1971). A survey of honours graduates of the University of Melbourne School of History, 1937–1966. Historical Studies, 15 (57) 43–58.

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Bourdieu, P. & Passeron, J. (1979). The inheritors: French students and their relation to culture. (R. Nice, Trans.) Chicago: University of Chicago Press. (original work published 1964)

Bourdieu, P. & Passeron, J. (1977). Reproduction in education, society and culture. (R. Nice, Trans.) London: SAGE Publications. (original work published 1970)

Bourdieu, P. (1986). Forms of capital. In J. G. Richardson. Handbook of theory and research for the sociology of education. (pp. 241–258) Westport: Greenwood Press.

Broom, L. & Jones, F. L. (1969). Father-to-son mobility: Australia in a comparative perspective. American Journal of Sociology, (74) 333–342.

Broom, L. & Jones, F. L. (1976). Opportunity and attainment in Australia. Stanford. CA: Stanford University Press.

Carbines, L. (1983). Louise Carbines. In H. Dow. (Ed). Memories of Melbourne University. University. undergraduate life in the years since 1917. (pp. 202–220). Hawthorn: Hutchinson Publishing Group.

Connell, R. W. (1977). Ruling class, ruling culture. Middle Park: Cambridge University Press. Connell, W. F., Stoorbant, R. E., Sinclair, K. E., & Rogers, K. E. (1975). 12 to 20: Studies of city youth.

Sydney: Hicks Smith. Dyason, D (1983). Diana Dyason. In H. Dow. (Ed.) Memories of Melbourne University. University.

undergraduate life in the years since 1917. (pp 89–118). Hawthorn: Hutchinson Publishing Group. Ebury, S. (1994). Weary: The life of Sir Edward Dunlop. Ringwood: Viking. Edgar, D. E. (1974). Adolescent Competence and Sexual Disadvantage. Melbourne: La Trobe

Sociology Papers No 10. Edgar, D. E. (1981). Social Class Differences and the Structure of Education. In P. Hiller. (Ed.). (1981).

Class and Inequality in Australia: sociological perspectives and research. (pp 214–231). Sydney: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.

Eliot, T. S. (1948). Notes towards the definition of culture. London: Faber Elkin, A. P. (1957). Marriage and the family in Australia. Sydney: Angus & Robertson. Factor, J. (1985). June Factor. In H. Dow. (Ed.) More Memories of Melbourne University. University.

Undergraduate life in the years since 1919. (pp 118–137). Hawthorn: Hutchinson Publishing Group. Gilchrist, M. B. & Hammond, S. B, (1971) University entrants and their non-intellectual peers.

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Hammond, S. B. (1961). The students and the university. In Melbourne Studies in Education. (pp. 95–124). Parkville: Melbourne University Press.

Hillman, R. (2003) The boy in the green suit. Carlton: Scribe Publications. Isaacs, E. (1981). Greek children at school and after. Education Research and Development Committee.

Canberra: Australian Government Publishing Service. James, R. (2000). TAFE, university or work. The early preferences and choices of students in year 10,

11 and 12. Leabrook: National Centre for Vocational Education Research. James, R., Baldwin, G., & McInnes, C. (1999). Which university? The factors influencing the choices of

prospective undergraduates. DEET. Canberra: Australian Government Publishing Service. Joske, P. (1978). Sir Robert Menzies 1894–1978; a new informal memoir. Melbourne: Angus &

Robertson. Little, G. (1975). Faces on the campus. Carlton: Melbourne University Press. McCalman, J. (1993). Journeyings. The biography of a middle class generation 1920–1990. Carlton:

Melbourne University Press. New South Wales Committee Appointed by the Minister for Education to Enquire into Various Aspects

of Higher education in New South Wales. (1961). First report. (Price Committee). Peel, M. & McCalman, J. (1992). Who went where in who’s who 1988. The Schooling of the Australian

Elite. Parkville: History Department, The University of Melbourne. Perkins, K. (1968). Menzies, last of the queen’s men. Adelaide: Rigby Limited. Radford, W. C. (1962). School Leavers in Australia 1959-60. Melbourne: Australian Council for

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CHAPTER 5

INHERITORS AND NEWCOMERS

Did you know that in the Commonwealth of Australia only 1.7 persons per thousand are in universities, and 3.8 persons per thousand are in hospitals for the insane? It is about twice as likely that you will go to a hospital for the insane as to a university; more than twice as likely as you have to pass a matriculation examination to get into the one, but not to enter the other (Ashby, 1946, p. 67).

The place that university occupies in the imagination of Australian school leavers has changed immeasurably since the 1950s. At the start of the 21st century, few young Australians would be able to say that they know nothing about university, however vague or inaccurate their knowledge might be. In theory, a university degree is now within reach of all young Australians, but until the period of rapid expansion in the mid-1950s, Australian universities, like their counterparts in the United Kingdom, the United States and Europe were intentionally elite institutions. In 1906 when the total number of enrolments was recorded in the Australian Year Book for the first time there were 2,595 students, around one per cent of the cohort: a place at university indicated a level of wealth and culture far beyond the experience of most citizens. University was a very pleasant place for those young people wealthy enough to afford the fees: in the early 1930s the Melbourne University Magazine and Farrago, the student newspaper, depicted a world of clubs, sporting events such as the Boat Race, social occasions such as the varsity reviews and the Block Parade. There were occasional mentions of study or examinations. By the late 30s there was also an increasing awareness of world events and speculation on the possibility of another war and the viability of the League of Nations, but until the mid-1960s more column-inches were devoted to drama reviews, musical events, fashion, sport and social events than to academic affairs or social issues. There is plenty of anecdotal evidence suggesting that university (with some notable exceptions) was a rite of passage for the upper class. There were no quotas and entry from accredited schools in Victoria was by personal recommendation from one’s headmaster or headmistress. Even when a pass at Matriculation level was required, careful coaching could usually produce the required number of pass grades for admittance. Australian universities produced some outstanding scholars in the first half of the 20th century, but the majority of undergraduates were unexceptional, disinclined to examine too closely their reasons for enrolling and content to muddle through their studies. In many instances, family expectations, rather than genuine interest or aptitude had prompted them to enroll (University Appointments Board, 1956). At this point in history, campus life in Australia was a cosy and insular world.

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In this world, academic performance and the content of university courses were not particularly relevant since a university education was a formal, ritualised process. Bourdieu and Passeron stress the ritual nature of university by showing that the style of language used by university lecturers, the magisterial discourse, was incomprehensible to students but, they added, lack of meaning was the very quality which rendered it powerful:

The traditional professor may have abandoned his ermine and his gown, he may even choose to descend from his dais and mingle with the crowd, but he cannot abdicate his ultimate protection, the professorial use of a professional language. There is nothing on which he cannot speak, be it incest or the class struggle, because his position, his person and his role imply the ‘neutralisation’ of his utterances; and also because language can also cease to be an instrument of communication and serve as an instrument of incantation whose principal function is to attest and impose the pedagogic authority of the communication and content communicated (Bourdieu & Passeron, 1977, p. 110).

In response, the students used “pseudo-generalities and prudent approximations which are ‘not even wrong’ and will win him, as the phrase goes, ‘a mark between 9 and 11’ ” (Bourdieu & Passeron, 1977, p. 13). Their aim was to produce a reasonable imitation of the same magisterial tone in order to earn a satisfactory mark. So long as the professors’ authority was not challenged, it did not matter that there had been no communication between teacher and student: the real objective of the university was the certification, not education, of students. In this way the universities were able to perpetuate and monopolise social privilege by controlling access to desired credentials (through the school examination system) and success (by determining who graduated). Intellectual achievement was not the real purpose of higher education; the acquisition of appropriate cultural values outweighed mere cleverness. Yet, to be welcomed by the university community, candidates applying for admission to the university needed to be able to demonstrate that they had mastered the appropriate cultural values (University Appointments Board, 1959). University education was a rite of passage through which young people from privileged sociocultural backgrounds demonstrated that they had earned their place among the social elite.

The Inheritors in Australia

When it was first published in 1964 Les Héritiers, Bourdieu and Passeron’s study of academic success, provoked a storm of outrage by demonstrating that children’s educational opportunities in Republican France were far from equal. The examination system that appeared to treat all children with objective fairness actually discriminated in favour of the haute bourgeoisie by identifying their particular cultural values as “normal” and penalising children from the lower classes for being “sub-normal” with the result that academic success, and all the


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benefits that proceeded from it, were concentrated in the elite while the fiction that they had earned their place could be maintained:

… the formal equality provided by the concours merely transforms privilege into merit, since it allows the influence of social origin to operate, though through more secret channels ((Bourdieu & Passeron, 1979, p. 68).

Similarly, the history and practice of higher education in Australia produced a set of normative attributes that made up the social category “student” and until as recently as the 1980s, this category was defined as largely Anglo-Saxon, male, privately educated and middle class – the sons of doctors and lawyers identified by Anderson and Vervoorn. The precise definition of those attributes has changed over time, but as a succession of researchers have shown, university enrolments have been dominated by young people drawn from a relatively narrow socioeconomic band since the first universities were founded in Australia.1 Patterns of school attendance and marriage have continued to consolidate social, cultural and financial capital in a relatively small number of families in a way that ensures this dominance survives despite the efforts of both state and commonwealth governments to promote equity.2 Moreover, any sign that their privileged position may be under threat is sufficient to provoke fierce resistance in those sections of society who feel that their children are entitled to a university place. Citing the fact that six children from “prominent medical families” had been rejected by the Faculty of Medicine during the preceding three years a group of South Australian doctors accused the University of South Australia of bias against private school students and doctor’s children. The mother of an unsuccessful applicant mounted a public campaign against the university lasting more than two years and Dr Harry Medlin, former Deputy Chancellor of Adelaide University, joined in saying that the new admissions procedure, which was intended to broaden access to medical degrees, did not take into account the fact that some applicants had a “culture of medicine in their families, if their parents or grandparents were doctors”.3 In reality, Australia has its own Inheritors. Until the 1960s, the Australian financial and social elite consisted of a small group of families, many of whom owed their wealth and position to the grandfathers and great-grandfathers who had made their fortunes in the early 19th century, and who had had sufficient business acumen to improve on that legacy: the Knox, Fairfax, Baillieu, Downer and Fraser families and their like, controlled an extraordinary proportion of the national wealth through their business interests and land holdings (Wheelwright, 1957). They knew one another, did business together, married one another and sent their children to the same schools (R. W. Connell, 1977). They Australian upper middle class cannot be equated precisely with the French haute bourgeoisie in terms of their appreciation of aristocratic culture (since many of them were, self-made people who had acquired their middle-class status and tastes only recently) yet those were the exact values and tastes to which they aspired. In every major Australian city and some of the larger regional towns, the middle class mimicked upper-middle-class society in Britain; even the habit of referring to Britain as

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“Home” suggested an aspiration towards something more cultured or genteel than run-of-the-mill Australian society could provide. Adding a touch of authenticity to this attitude was a small number of families who were genuinely a part of a social and cultural tradition reaching back into history. But in Australia, as all over the developed world, this comfortable, insular society was already under threat. In the late 1940s , T. S. Eliot deplored the suggestion that society should recognise merit as the basis of inclusion among the elite on the grounds that:

the specialist of genius, who may be fully qualified on the ground of his vocational attainment for membership of one of Dr Mannheim’s elites, may very well not be one of the “cultured persons” … he may be only a highly valued contributor to it … in an elite composed of individuals who find their way into it solely for their individual pre-eminence, the differences of background will be so great, that they will be united only by their common interests, and separated by everything else (Eliot, 1948, pp. 41-42).

However, in the post-war world, there was no turning back: during the 1950s, governments in the United Kingdom, America and Australia began to admit that the universities should be opened to all comers. Distinguished American university administrator Clark Kerr was among the most notable advocates of dismantling the walls of the “city of the intellect”, (Kerr, 1963) arguing that it was not possible for society to operate effectively if some of the best and brightest minds were kept outside for spurious reasons such as class, ethnicity or sex. In part, this was a reaction against the entrenched privileges that had existed in the pre-war era, but at the same time there was an economic imperative behind this desire to create a more equitable society. Rebuilding a world economy that had been severely damaged by war required more and better-skilled workers – and those workers needed to be educated. Given that intellectual talent had never been confined to one class only, it was apparent that the universities could not continue as finishing schools for the elite:

We are witnessing everywhere the demise of two long-held notions: that higher education ought to be restricted to a small elite minority, and that only a small percentage of a country’s population is capable of benefiting from some kind of higher education (Kerr, 1991, p. 117).

A new type of candidate would have to be admitted, one who had little connection to the traditions and rituals of the university: the Newcomer. Throughout the industrialised world, changing social conditions and expectations drove demand: Britain, the United States and Europe all underwent profound restructuring of their tertiary education sectors as they strove to keep pace with ever-increasing demand for education: almost two-thirds of all universities founded since the twelfth century were established between 1950 and 1985 (Ramirez & Riddle, 1991). In Australia, the post-war baby boom and very high levels of immigration led to a rapid expansion of the proportion of young people in the population, while increasing prosperity meant that a substantial number were sufficiently well-off to be able to consider applying for a place at


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university. Since the end of the Second World War, economic prosperity combined with a relatively open immigration policy has led to Australia being characterised as a land of opportunity, promising success to all comers. Reaction against the social tensions that were blamed for the war, memories of the Depression and a determination that things would be better led to generalised, popular support for policies that would reduce inequity and create a more just society. Education was understood to be one way of doing this, and it offered protection against unemployment in the future if the hard times returned. However, after the initial reconstruction period, the 1950s and ’60s were a period of unsurpassed economic growth and it was a case of joining in or getting left behind as the economy boomed. Prosperity combined with democracy made Australia an attractive destination for thousands of migrants from all parts of the world who, generally speaking, saw nothing ironic in political scientist Donald Horne’s (1964) description of this as the “Lucky Country”. The states were forced to create a mass secondary education system as the trickle of students passing through high school became a flood and the ’50s and ’60s became the middle class decades (McCalman, 1993). As ordinary Australians became more prosperous they became more willing to keep their children at school beyond the school leaving age and interested in seeing them progress to university. Changes in the occupational structure of the Australian workforce stemming from technological change, micro-economic reform and globalisation have led to an increase in the proportion of skilled to non-skilled workers over the last 50 years. This has led to an overall rise in family incomes, which has enabled more families to pay for more education. Family size has also declined so that more money is available for the educational needs of each child and families are less dependent on their children’s wages as a contribution to the household budget. Despite periodic fluctuations in the national economy such as the oil shock of the 1970s, the recession in the 1990s and the Global Financial Crisis 2007-2010 – the post-war years have seen a steady increase in the standard of living in Australia: not only have more families been able to afford to educate their children, but it has been a valuable investment. Over time this has produced a multiplier effect: the proportion of people with a university education grew, and as a consequence the number of school leavers with graduate parents increased. Since the 1960s, the middle class has grown larger, and there are more middle-class families demanding university places for their children. Sir Louis Matheson, founding Vice Chancellor of Monash University, recalled:

(being) waited upon by a formidable deputation from the legal profession. It had just been realized that Melbourne University’s’ distinguished Law School was full and that the children of lawyers could no longer rely on being accepted as students. Was not Monash intended to cope with this sort of situation? (Matheson, 1980).

The same changes in the structure of the Australian workforce that led to increased prosperity have also led to the collapse of full-time employment for young adults. During the sixties, the unemployment rate for 15 to 19 year olds was negligible; less

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than five per cent for much of that period. There were many attractive, reasonably well-paid occupations that did not require Matriculation, including the public service, kindergarten teaching, nursing and retail or clerical work. During the 1970s, the youth unemployment rate rose to more than 15 per cent and although it has risen higher in response to economic conditions, it has not dropped far below that figure since then: while there have been peaks and troughs that correspond to changes in economic activity, the overall pattern is one of successively high peaks of unemployment followed by shallower troughs. Under these circumstances, additional education has become doubly attractive, first because the alternative to pursuing some form of education is likely to be unemployment, but also because additional education is likely to lessen the prospect of unemployment in the future. At the same time, the increased availability of part-time work has enabled more young people from low and middle socioeconomic status backgrounds to earn an income that has allowed them to remain at school for a full 12 years and to progress from there to tertiary education. Increased participation in education by non-traditional or Newcomer students has also been facilitated by changes in educational practice and the introduction of policies designed to encourage, or at least allow, greater diversity. The abolition of technical schools in favour of comprehensive secondary schools and the abolition of streaming within those schools removed systemic discrimination that sorted 11 and 12 year old children into different occupational streams on the basis of their perceived aptitudes and abilities. Improved teaching and learning methods, as well as the abolition of corporal punishmentz in Victorian schools in 1983 also made schools less alienating. The creation of national programs such as the Disadvantaged Schools Program in the 1970s, the Participation and Equity Program in the 1980s and the Education Maintenance allowance (a dedicated welfare payment to help low-income families pay for school expenses) in the 1990s also assisted more students from low-socioeconomic status backgrounds to remain at school long enough to consider the possibility of enrolling at university. In the meantime, Commonwealth Government policies assisted them further by creating equity-based special university admission schemes and the worst effects of the re-introduction of tuition fees were avoided because the HECS did not require students to pay on enrolment. One final factor that has contributed to the diversity of the university student population in the early 21st century is the universities themselves. At Federation in 1901, Australia had five universities; two more were founded between Federation and World War One; the rest were established between the 1940s and the 1990s. They encompassed a wide diversity of organisational cultures and educational traditions: not all of them were happy to continue supporting the 19th century liberal tradition promulgated by Newman and his Australian supporters. The universities founded in the 1960s saw themselves as trendsetters, establishing a new academic tradition and appealing to students who wanted to be part of a new, more modern style of university. La Trobe University was planned as an American-style “cluster college” consisting of a series of small colleges, each of which would have its own Union and administration under the umbrella of the larger university administration (The Menu is a LaTrobe, 1968). Creation of the


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Unified National System in 1988 added to the diversity of institutions. While the older “sandstone” universities continued to see themselves as elite institutions with a strong focus on research, many of the newer universities that were created out of Institutes of Technology or Colleges of Advanced Education have developed a more pragmatic style. In some cases, they have developed an explicit commitment to providing opportunities for young people from lower socioeconomic status backgrounds: Victoria University, formed through the amalgamation of several technical colleges continues to give preference to residents of the Western metropolitan region. At the same time, specific programs have been developed at the sandstone universities to admit small numbers of students from disadvantaged areas. The number and type of degrees has also proliferated almost beyond counting as universities have added new courses to attract students. Just as the increasing size of the middle class led to an increase in demand for university places, the increase in the number and type of Australian universities has led to greater diversity among the student population. However, it is also important to recognise that the increased diversity of the student population is the result of change on two separate fronts: change brought about by the increased enrolment of “new” or “non-traditional” students, and change deriving from the more intensive use of university by traditional students. As average family size declined and incomes rose, many families were able to support all of their children at university, not just one or perhaps two, who showed special promise. Nor did the insular view of the university as an elite way of life disappear quickly or quietly: there were lamentations over the destruction of the liberal-humanist idea of the university, caused by the epistemological and sociological undermining of higher education through the rapid expansion of the tertiary sector and the coincidental shift towards neo-classical economics and assertions that the general public did not understand the value of the emancipatory nature of university education and was probably not fully aware of what it had lost (Barnett, 1990). According to every socioeconomic measure, today’s population of university students is more diverse than ever in the history of higher education in Australia. But has this diversity of origins been accompanied by a diversity of view and expectations?

THE NATURE OF DEMAND

The possibility of widely divergent views in how young people see university is important, since their existence would have great significance for the provision of higher education in Australia. If the demand for higher education is based on a traditional-humanist view, then the provision of regional universities or technical universities may not be an effective way of widening participation or achieving the targets recommended by the Bradley Review in 2008. Solution since these are unlikely to provide the rich experience that prospective students with a liberal-humanist perspective will want. Yet, if the majority of students simply want a credential as quickly as possible, then investment in traditional universities that offer a broad range of qualifications and generalist degrees may be an inappropriate use of limited resources. At this point there is no way of determining if the

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traditional students, the Inheritors, resemble Robert Menzies in their respect and admiration for the liberal tradition of university education as a civilising experience. It is also difficult to ascertain whether the non-traditional students, the Newcomers, are more akin to John Dawkins and his successors who wanted universities to produce trained graduates as quickly and cheaply as possible. Dawkins’ White Paper on Higher Education (1988) framed the arguments for reform almost entirely in economic terms, yet the changes it introduced were justified in terms of public demand for higher education and predicted increases in the level of unmet demand. That there is demand for university education is clear, but the nature of that demand is not. There may be a group of young people who want a deeply affecting and enriching experience, while another group of young people just want a credential that will enable them to secure a “good” job. There are undergraduates who refer to university as “school” and do not perceive any difference in terms of philosophy or pedagogy. It might be expected that the Newcomers would share these opinions as, by definition, they have had little exposure to what Aristotle called the “life of the mind”. If this division were valid, then many Newcomers might be better off directed into the TAFE sector to complete their postcompulsory education while university remained the preserve of the Inheritors, who could enjoy its elite culture without distraction. It might also be expected that the Inheritors would prefer to see the universities to retain their cachet as elite institutions since nothing devalues the prestige of a product as quickly as mass consumption. If there are two radically different views of university: one that conceives of higher education as opposed to further education, and one that views all education as qualitatively equal, then government policy might be justified in returning campus life to its pre-war insularity. Alternately, a bipolar division could justify the creation of a two-tier university sector of the type dreaded by Ashby (1944) and Menzies consisting of technical and other specialist universities while the elite universities focus on providing an enriching experience to the select few and professional training in law and medicine (Bessant, 1977). Or, it could lead to a new interpretation of university education that is both vocational and emancipatory. However, neither Dawkins nor any Minister for Education since, has had a clear picture of what young people want from university. Politicians and policymakers do not know if there is a group of young people who want all the traditions of a liberal education because they were raised to expect them, and another separate group who just want a job, or whether the situation is more complicated. As a consequence neither the government, nor the community can make informed judgments about the future of higher education from a cultural perspective. The Newcomers may have had little opportunity to share in the cultural life, but it is possible that they have adopted and assimilated liberal-humanist ideas to some degree through family networks or their school experiences: Menzies attributed his love of learning and his success to his mother’s influence, while Evans discovered a world he didn’t know existed until he went to a selective secondary school. In 1959 French suggested was dismissive of the backgrounds of many of the early students at the University of Melbourne. but it must be recognised that those families were openly declaring their support for a set of cultural values by enrolling their sons at university – in some instances their fortunes


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were considerable and their social position assured, but they wanted their children to have entry into a world of ideas experiences that only higher education could provide. At the same time, it is possible that the Inheritors have grown more pragmatic in response to the market forces. To the Inheritors, a university degree has long been a social indicator that identifies the possessor as part of the social elite, but as wealth has become the most important way of determining status in a market driven society, certain qualifications have increased in value in direct proportion to their ability to earn money, while others have declined. Law is still an attractive option both in terms of income and status, but medicine is less attractive – the work is hard, it takes a long time to qualify and the job is very demanding; to some young people a degree in business management seems to be a better investment. These are extreme positions: what is more probable is that both Newcomers and Inheritors want something from each model of university. Young people are very aware of the connection between university education and employment, but young people also want to be excited by university; their needs and desires overlap and they require high-quality university programs that will combine sound preparation for employment with stimulating and enriching intellectual experiences. For almost 50 years Australian governments of all political persuasions have talked about community demand for education: it is time for them to make good on those promises and provide the type of university education that the community wants.

NOTES

1 Aside from Anderson & Vervoorn’s landmark study , the most prominent of these studies include: R. W. Connell, D. J. Ashenden, S. Kessler & G. W. Dowsett, (1982). Making the

difference: Schools, families and social division. Sydney: George Allen & Unwin. P. Parker, G. Cooney, L. Bornholt, K. Harman, S. Ball & C. Scott, (1993). Going on to university.

Canberra: Department of Employment, Education and Training. . R. James, (2002). Socioeconomic background and higher education participation: An analysis of

school students’ aspirations and expectations. Centre for the Study of Higher Education, Parkville: University of Melbourne.

B. Williams, (1982). Governments and Universities Since 1959. Vestes. 25(1) pp. 3–17 T. Williams, M. Long, P. Carpenter & M. Hayden, (1982). Year 12 in the 1980s. Melbourne:

Australian Government Publishing Service, 2 Since the 1950s, a number of studies have examined the consolidation of social status through

school attendance and marriage. These include: J. Martin, (1957). Marriage, the Family and Class. In A. P. Elkin. Marriage and the Family in

Australia. (pp. 24–53). Sydney: Angus & Robertson. . R. Teese, (1981). The Social Function of Private Schools. (pp. 94–141). Melbourne Working

Papers. Carlton: University of Melbourne, , . M. Peel & J. McCalman, (1992). Who went where in who’s who 1988. The Schooling of the

Australian Elite, History Department. Parkville: The University of Melbourne. 3 The Australian was particularly interested in this issue and ran articles by Verity Edwards on

successive days about the apparent bias against private school students by university admission offices: Medical faculty accused of bias. (2006, June 1) The Australian, p. 3 and Top marks but the wrong credentials.(2006, June 2). The Australian, p. 1.

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REFERENCES


Ashby, E. (1944). Universities in Australia. Hawthorn: Australian Council for Educational Research. Ashby, E. (1946). Challenge to Education. Sydney: Angus and Robertson. Ashby, E. (1958). Technology and the academics: an essay on universities and the scientific revolution.

London: Macmillan. Bessant, B. (1977). Robert Gordon Menzies and education in Australia. In Melbourne Studies in

Education 1977. (pp 75-101). Parkville: University of Melbourne Press. Bourdieu, P. & Passeron, J. (1964). Les Héritiers: les étudiants et la culture. Paris: Éditions de Minuit. Bourdieu, P. & Passeron, J. (1977). Reproduction in education, society and culture. (R. Nice, Trans.)

London: SAGE Publications. (original work published 1970) Bourdieu, P. & Passeron, J. (1979). The inheritors: French students and their relation to culture.

(R. Nice, Trans.) Chicago: University of Chicago Press. (original work published 1964) Connell, R. W. (1977). Ruling class, ruling culture. Middle Park: Cambridge University Press. Dawkins, J. S. (1988). A new commitment to higher education in Australia. Department of Employment,

Education and Training and Youth Affairs. Australian Government Publishing Service. Canberra: Australian Government Publishing Service

Eliot, T. S. (1948). Notes towards the definition of culture. London: Faber French, E. L. (1959). The humanities in secondary education. In A. Grenfell Price (Ed.). The

Humanities in Australia – A Survey. (pp. 34–55) Sydney: Angus & Robertson. Horne, D. (2001). Looking for leadership. Australia in the Howard years. Ringwood: Viking/Penguin. Kerr, C. (1963). The uses of the university. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press. Kerr, C. (1991). The great transformation in higher education 1960–1980. Albany: State University of

New York Press. Matheson, L. (1980). Still learning. South Melbourne: Macmillan. McCalman, J. (1993). Journeyings. The biography of a middle class generation 1920–1990. Carlton:

Melbourne University Press. Ramirez, F. O. & Riddle, P. (1991). The expansion of higher education. In P. G. Altbach. (Ed.).

International higher education: An encyclopedia. (pp. 91-105). New York: Garland Press. The menu is a La Trobe. (1968, April 26). Farrago, pp. 6-7. University Appointments Board. (1956). Report on a conference on careers. Parkville: Melbourne

University Press. University Appointments Board. (1959). Problems of transition from secondary school to university.

Parkville: Melbourne University Press. Wheelwright, E. L. (1957). Ownership and control of Australian companies. Sydney: Law Boom

Company.

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CHAPTER 6

“GOING TO UNIVERITY WILL ...”

In studies of social stratification in Australia the term ‘upper class’ is simply not used, largely because of the absence of an hereditary aristocracy. The result is that we have a middle class that is not middle at all, but rather the top of the social pyramid … in the absence of a utopian change of values, there is likely to be ever increasing differentiation between various types of professional and managerial occupations in terms of prestige, privilege and economic rewards. What we will be left with, in other words, is a society which is middle class from top to bottom (Anderson & Vervoorn, 1983, p. 148).

Anderson and Vervoorn’s comments about the apparent homogeneity of Australian society prompted me to examine the circumstances of the young people who participated in the study. This book is not concerned with the views or plans of young people who left school to pursue their future elsewhere; it is restricted to young people who are attending school voluntarily, therefore it follows that there are some similarities between them regardless of other elements in their backgrounds. To begin with, all of these young people expressed a desire to enrol at university. A second factor that contributes to their apparent homogeneity is the ubiquity of cultural influences on young Australian; young people in all suburbs, towns and regions have access to the same television programs, radio stations, and magazines: consequently their tastes in music, fashion and leisure pursuits are similar as are many of their values and attitudes. The type of social stratification identified by Bourdieu and Passeron in Les Héritiers does not exist in Australia; however, the comparative homogeneity of the Australian population conceals subtle, but important differences. The young people whose views are represented in this book were divided into two groups, Newcomers and Inheritors, on the basis of their fathers’ education and occupation with the understanding that it would provide an accurate and meaningful way of measuring sociocultural differences: this chapter explores the strength and validity of that division.

Definitions of Social Class in Australia

How social class or status should be measured or described continues to be a difficult question in the Australian context. One of the greatest hurdles to overcome in developing reliable measures is that many Australians are reluctant to admit that class distinctions exist at all despite abundant evidence to the contrary (McGreggor, 1997). Recognising the existence of social classes would force them to confront the uncomfortable issues of social superiority and

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inferiority and the implications that flow from that recognition. Young people are also likely to overlook or disregard the importance of social class as a factor in determining academic opportunities and to interpret their choices as a consequence of different levels of ability. Difficulties in determining social class, or even defining the nature of class – Marxist and Weberian concepts of social class are quite distinct – have led to the search for alternate forms of measurement based on social stratification. Early researchers used the social ranking of particular occupations since they were a reliable reflection of the basic values of any given society (Parsons, 1954). Later, Broom, Jones and Zubrzycki (1968) used five measures of social rank to describe Australian society including self-rank as well as income and occupation. In the 70s Broom and Jones (1976) revised this model to produce an index of social rank, but at the same time they rejected the argument that Australia was a class-based society. Because Australia lacks the type of rigid class boundaries that are still visible in Europe, and because it is relatively easy for individuals to move up the social scale, and easier for them to pretend that they have always had a particular social status than it would be in countries where an accent or school record would give the game away immediately, Broom and Jones preferred to use occupational status as a measure of social class. However, occupational status is not an entirely reliable measure of social class because hierarchical tables of occupations developed in the 1980s and ’90s do not reflect the impact of changed employment patterns among women adequately or recognise the emergence of new occupations (Hauser & Warren, 1996). More nuanced measures of social class continue to use occupational status to measure social class, but combine social class with educational attainment since occupational status is determined by the duration and/or difficulty of the training involved as well as the level of expected income (Western, McMillan & Durrington, 1998). Medicine and law are high-status occupations because entry is restricted, the training is long and difficult and the returns are substantial. However, even a combined scale has not produced a measure that is sufficiently precise to describe socioeconomic status in a country that has had high levels of migration and social mobility for almost three generations. In Australia, socioeconomic status is determined by a complex mix of occupation, education, income, gender, ethnicity, family and self-perception that alter according to context. Nevertheless, it appears that Anderson and Vervoorn’s prediction, cited at the beginning of this chapter, had come true by the late 1990s when around half of Australian men and women regarded themselves as middle class, between 25 and a 35 per cent as working class and about ten per cent as upper-middle class or upper class. The proportion of the population that describes itself as middle class has expanded in direct relation to the growth in white-collar employment since the end of the Second World War and in direct relation to the increasingly privatised suburban lifestyle that Australians have adopted over the same period. Lower levels of identification with the workplace and increasing levels of prosperity have undermined the sort of traditional class allegiances that were common in the first half of the 20th century (McGregor, 1997).


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Class Subdivisions

In reality, the expansion of the middle class has hidden the existence of subdivisions within it and camouflaged the contested nature of its boundaries. Greater prosperity may have allowed people to own items associated with a middle class lifestyle, but it does not necessarily lead to the embracement of a new set of values. In the 1960s British sociologist John Goldthorpe and his colleagues discovered that factory workers and white-collar workers had very different aspirations and social values even when the factory workers earned comparable wages. Members of the working class may have used their new affluence to buy a house, move to the suburbs, buy a car or television or send their child to a selective school in the hope that they would enter a non-manual occupation, but this did not alter their fundamental values or perspective on life (Goldthorpe, Lockwood, Bechofer & Platt, 1969). More recently, British social commentators have turned their attention to the so-called CHAVs (council housed and violent) – wealthy (sometimes very wealthy) people from working class backgrounds with a taste for ostentatious display, who ignore or actively reject high cultural values (Groskop, 2005; Hayward & Yar, 2006; Snell, 2006). The Australian variant is the CUB (cashed-up Bogan) a growing group of “executive” tradespeople and wealthy business people who define success entirely in material terms and have no interest in high culture; in fact they openly reject its values (Campbell, 2006). Earning high to very high incomes, the CUBs are likely to own large new houses in the middle-to-outer suburbs, drive late model cars with a preference for sports utility vehicles and invest heavily in expensive household goods such as home entertainment systems and elaborate barbeque equipment, but not in books, season tickets to the opera or ballet or any of the other cultural artefacts that might appeal to the more traditional middle class. Increased awareness of subgroups that appear to cross or subvert class boundaries has made the task of describing social class extremely difficult. Approaches using occupation as a determining factor have relied on employment in the public or private sector (Dunleavy, 1980), or employment in the “service” class or “intermediate” class as the determining factor (Goldthorpe, 1995). Ownership of certain types of occupational assets has also been used to determine class status (Savage, Barlow, Dickens, and Fielding, 1992) while other theorists have made a distinction between the “old middle class” whose wealth and status derived from the production and distribution of material goods and the “new middle class” who draw their wealth and status from the production and distribution of symbolic knowledge (Power, Edwards, Whitty and Wigfall, 2003). Each of these approaches has made some interesting observations on the nature of class, but none of them has produced a completely satisfactory result because social class has both subjective and objective aspects. A generation ago, French found Australian middle class pretensions to gentility faintly ridiculous because many members of the social elite were only two or three generations removed from their very humble origins. His comments were mean-spirited, but they continue to be an important reminder about the fluid nature of social class in Australia. A substantial number of the Inheritor parents could be

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described as marginal Inheritors at best: they are the first members of their families to attend university, their “middle class values” have been acquired recently and their own experiences of university were shaped by pragmatic needs rather than a deep appreciation of the world of ideas. These are the children, or in some cases, grandchildren of the undergraduates described by Marjorie Theobald in the 1960s; ambitious young people who were keen to take advantage of the increased opportunities provided by a booming economy. But there is an important distinction between middle-class parents who have lower levels of educational attainment and who have “worked their way up” to managerial positions and those with higher levels of tertiary qualifications who are able to enter professional employment, often in the public sector. The Inheritor who has a degree in accounting or business studies from one of the post-Dawkins universities is vastly different from one who has graduated from a prestigious faculty at one of the sandstone universities like their father and grandfather before them. This is the crux of Bourdieu’s theory of cultural capital; it is the family’s heritage that shapes the values of each individual member and each successive generation. In an essay on the changes taking place in Australian society first published in 1998, Robert Manne argued that Australia is in fact two nations that coexist within one country; the dividing line is not socioeconomic status that separated classes, but an “ideological-cultural line separating ordinary people from the elites” (Manne, 2001, p. 15). Money is not the crucial factor separating these two nations; they have discrepant world views and are quite unable to understand each other’s points of view. Almost a decade later journalist Andrew West (2006) elaborated on this theme, dividing the upper middle class into “materialists” and “culturists” according to their personal values. Culturists, who retain traditional liberal-humanist values, comprise the intellectual, civil and artistic elite and have “social power” rather than economic clout; in contrast the Materialists are the economic and business elite who devote their lives to making money and purchasing goods and services that advertise their success: they may use the same schools or universities, but with completely different intentions and in pursuit of different objectives. West’s essay adopts a satirical tone at times, but his categorisation provides a valuable insight into contemporary Australian values. Nevertheless, the values that are dominant in contemporary society are not the ones that were dominant 40-50 years ago. The vision of an aristocratic society, based on the innate superiority of certain individuals or families, could not be sustained in the market-driven society that has developed since the Second World War. Modern capitalism required a large, educated work force and the aristocratic class was too small to prevail. At the same time, the aristocratic attitude became less and less acceptable to the majority of the population that had embraced popular democracy. These economic and social changes have obliged the middle and upper classes to find more acceptable ways to maintain their privileged position:

Of all the solutions put forward throughout history to the problem of the transmission of power and privileges, there surely does not exist one that is better concealed, and therefore better adapted to societies which tend to


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refuse the most patent forms of hereditary transmission of power and privileges, than that solution which the educational system provides by contributing to the reproduction of the structure of class relations and by concealing, by an apparently neutral attitude, the fact that it fills this function (Bourdieu, 1973, pp. 110-112).

It is not a coincidence that the overwhelming majority of all high achieving school leavers are drawn from high- to very-high socioeconomic status backgrounds. The social elite choose schools that will reflect their attitudes and values; parents and teachers join forces to create different expectations and objectives. Implicitly, rather than explicitly, they teach modes of behaviour that mirror the social roles and work roles that these children will assume in later life. Success in the final exams ensures that middle class young people are able to enter the elite professions, thus maintaining the family’s social and economic standing, and as school and university are also where young middle class women and men find appropriate partners, their privileged status is preserved through marriage, rather than diluted. Now, as in the 1960s and ‘70s, recently arrived Inheritors are excluded from this inner circle to a large degree primarily because they lack the appropriate stock of cultural and social capital; their status as “class jumpers” is obvious to those who care to look for the signs. True Inheritors have a certainty about their place in the social structure coming from their familiarity with the nuances of its structures that grows out of their family history. In a society where class decisions are not fixed, differences within social classes may sometimes be greater than between social classes and may explain why some Newcomer families appear to have many Inheritor attributes and others do not (Vincent, 2001). Young people in this study are classified as Newcomers because their fathers had not completed secondary school, but the most common occupational category among Newcomer fathers was owner/manager of a business. These owner/manager fathers were used to acting autonomously, making complex decisions and directing subordinates, qualities that are typical of professional occupations and although the questionnaire did not include questions about family income, it is evident that some of them have also been very successful financially. They are not Inheritors, but they intend to become Inheritors, and they understand that education is a crucial factor in the creation in the achievement of that ambition. Yet, as Goldthorpe suggested, it appears that in many cases the family’s fundamental values have not changed significantly. Eventually, time may reduce or eliminate differences between the Newcomers and Inheritors entirely. In many respects the recently arrived Inheritors and the Newcomers are similar to the 19th century squatters and business people who sent their children to Australia’s colonial universities; they wanted something from those institutions that wealth alone cannot provide.

Social Class and Leisure Activities

A young person’s choice of leisure or recreational activities can provide a guide to their self-image or persona, and in turn provide some insight into their core values

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and beliefs: in all probability the person who attends the theatre or an art-house cinema and visits art galleries has a different set of cultural values to one who prefers big musical shows, the latest Hollywood blockbuster films and pop concerts. Similarly, a preference for sports such as kayaking over jet-skiing suggests greater respect for the environment and possibly a more reflective approach to life. Be that as it may, I found little evidence of a social cleavage in young people’s leisure pursuits. Regardless of their backgrounds, most of the young people who participated in this research enjoy the same leisure pursuits; most of them like listening to music and watching television, and hanging out with friends; few of them like gardening or belong to a service organisation such as the Scouts or Guides. However, closer examination of the responses to the questions about leisure activities produce some subtle indicators of more fundamental differences and justifies their division into opposing groups. The first real evidence of difference lay in the fact that, the Inheritors are far busier than the Newcomers. Inheritors are more likely to report that they have no really free time, time in which they do nothing very much at all. Several wrote marginal comments on the questionnaires about the amount of homework they had, but their responses were not uniform and in fact there appear to be two subgroups of Inheritors. Some Inheritors are more likely than Newcomers to go the movies regularly watch a great deal of television, but there are also Inheritors who state that they never go to the movies or watch television at all. Given the small size of the sample it is not possible to generalise these differences. However it appears that some Inheritors are aiming for a place in an elite course and as a consequence have little time for recreation of any kind, while others have a more relaxed, possibly dilettantish, approach to study and leisure. The Inheritors also play a great deal more sport than the Newcomers. Much of this was team sport, which could have been a part of their school commitments, but their parents may have encouraged high levels of sporting activity as a way of keeping them out of mischief and developing further stores of social capital. Unless some of the Inheritors are exaggerating, they appear to lead lives that could only be described as micromanaged; between school, homework, sport, music lessons and other recreational activities, they truly have no time to themselves. Newcomers also have sporting commitments and music lessons, but they have more time for more adult activities such as part time jobs or nightclubbing, and few of them seem to be as relentlessly occupied as the Inheritors. Bourdieu found that the higher the family’s socio-economic status, the more often they engaged in cultural activities such as reading literature, attending the theatre or visiting art galleries, however, he also linked participation in these activities to the fathers’ occupation:

With the exception of the liberal professions … the structure of the distribution of economic capital is symmetric and opposite to the structure of the distribution of cultural capital – that is to say, in order, heads of industry and of commerce, professionals, managers, engineers, and lastly, civil servants and teachers (Bourdieu, 1973, p. 501).


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Millicent Poole’s (1992) study of adolescent leisure activities confirmed Bourdieu’s findings on the connection between socio-economic status and high culture: but Poole also found adolescents from high socioeconomic status families did not necessarily enjoy intellectual pursuits or high culture, suggesting that Goldthorpe was correct in concluding that a family’s essential values did not change when their income rose. It is possible that some of the young people in Poole’s study had been pushed into participating in high cultural activities and events by their parents, or perhaps they were sampling activities that had been unavailable until recently. I did not find a clear link between high socio-economic status and intellectual or high cultural leisure activities. Inheritors are more likely than Newcomers to read for enjoyment and to visit friends, but the differences are small. Inheritors are moderate theatre-goers and prefer popular theatrical productions when they do attend, but Inheritors are also more likely than Newcomers to state that they never attend the theatre at all. Similarly, the Inheritors are more likely to visit an art-house cinema occasionally, but much less likely than the Newcomers to go frequently. Inheritors are occasional visitors to art galleries, but the Newcomers are more likely to be regular or frequent visitors and more likely to write for pleasure on a regular basis. Many of the Inheritors are class jumpers, their middle class status has been achieved within the last generation, and they may not yet have developed an appreciation for high culture or it may be that young people are more willing to experiment with a variety of recreational activities such as sport, music and art to construct personal identities that cross social class boundaries; their tastes are more democratic or eclectic and their class identities more loosely formed.

Social Class and Choice of Subjects

If an examination of the Newcomers’ and Inheritors’ preferred leisure pursuits does not suggest the any real differences between the two groups in this domain, the same cannot be said of their choice of Year 12 subjects. The introduction of mass secondary education in the 1960s created a new set of hierarchies between schools and within schools that has allowed the upper middle class to preserve its privileged position. One such hierarchy involved dividing the curriculum into elite academic, non-elite academic and non-academic subjects. The most highly ranked subjects are academic languages, mathematics and the physical sciences because of their intrinsic qualities, but also for their supposed reliability in assessing the quality of the students:

… they had more in common than the mental dispositions they demanded of students. Highly abstract, as in rules of syntax or chemical equilibrium or mathematical logic, they were at the same time highly structured. Languages, mathematics and physical sciences were all organised into specialized departments of areas in which knowledge could be taught and examined systematically and which were comparatively stable and predictable (Teese & Polesel, 2003, p. 21).

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In part, this attitude is a remnant of traditional, humanist beliefs about the nature of learning, the intellect and the special qualities attributed to certain subjects, particularly mathematics and Latin, which were understood to provide superior training in logic and improve the ability to reason. When Latin declined in popularity, many of the same qualities were attributed to French or other modern languages; they are still attributed to the Asian languages now available in schools. The literary subjects are next in the hierarchy, followed by the social sciences, the vocational subjects such as legal studies and accounting and the applied vocational subjects such as food technology. The special status of certain elite subjects is recognised through the complicated system of bonus points awarded to students taking physics, particular branches of mathematics and languages by the Victorian Tertiary Admissions Committee (VTAC, 2010). There are also hierarchies within subject areas: English Language and Literature are elite subjects, but English is not; History of Revolutions is an elite subject but Australian History is not, Specialist Mathematics is an elite subject, but Further Mathematics (the easiest of the three Year 12 mathematics subjects) is not. In general, these rankings are based upon the real or perceived difficulty of the subject, which determines the type of student who will enrol; in turn, the type of student taking a particular subject affects the subject’s reputation and status. Languages are usually ranked highly, but community languages such as Italian, Vietnamese or Turkish are ranked far lower on the scale than French, German or Chinese; Australian History is popular with academically average students, therefore it ranks lower than other history subjects such as the History of Revolutions. There are strong links between the subjects a student takes in secondary school and their social class (Teese, 2000). High socio-economic status families are more likely to direct their children towards university than middle or low socioeconomic status families. Parents with high reserves of cultural capital are more likely than others to insist that their children take particular subjects that will position them for entry into the elite courses. In this way, cultural capital is preserved or increased and the maximum return on any investment of economic and social capital is achieved. Figure 6.1 illustrates this situation very clearly: Inheritors are more likely to take academically elite subjects such as English Language, French or another language (usually Japanese) that has the potential to increase their examination score which is used to determine eligibility for entry into almost all university courses. Newcomers are more likely to take Literature and Italian, which are often the only academic language subjects available at their schools, particularly in the case of the country schools. As well as taking elite humanities and languages, the Inheritors are significantly more likely to take elite mathematics and sciences that would allow them entry into high-status courses such as medicine, law and engineering, while Newcomers took the less-elite options which would exclude them from those courses. Newcomers are also more likely to avoid any of the elite subjects in favour of vocational subjects such as Business Management and Accounting, thus reducing their options even further. Thirty years ago, upper-class students congregated in the elite faculties of law and medicine, while those lower-class students who made it to


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Figure 6.1. Subject choice – English and languages other than English.

university were more likely to be found in the education and engineering faculties. Allowing for the inclusion of new para-medical occupations such as physiotherapy, podiatry and optometry, and for occasional individuals who make unusual choices, this pattern remains remarkably consistent. Newcomers and Inheritors have different reasons for taking particular subjects that indicate significant differences in their overall approach to education and supports the contention that Inheritors are more strategic in their approach and aware of how the university application process works: Inheritors are more certain that the subjects they were taking will qualify them for entry into their preferred university courses and they are about twice as likely to have attended a university Open Day or course information session. Not only have they began to explore their options in detail ahead of the Newcomers, but they are more likely to turn to parents, siblings and family friends than teachers for advice about careers and courses and studying at university and life on campus and generally more avid for information about going to university. And that desire for encouragement is being met: two-thirds of the Inheritors believe that their teachers support their plans to apply for a place at university, compared with just over half of the Newcomers. Competition for places in some elite courses is so fierce that the difference between inclusion and exclusion is as small as 0.5. The weighting given to certain subjects such as Specialist Mathematics or physics can give students a significant advantage, while students who excel in other subjects such as art or technology may be disadvantaged. Inheritors are not just more confident of their academic abilities, but employ a more strategic approach when selecting subjects

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Figure 6.2. Subject choice – mathematics and sciences

for their final year at school. Inheritors are more likely than the Newcomers to express interest in the subjects that they are taking, but 5 per cent of Inheritors were taking subjects that they did not find interesting. They have chosen their Year 12 subjects with an eye to achieving the maximum university entry score even if those subjects have little relevance to the degree they hope to take and they will endure a certain amount of boredom in order to secure higher grades: it is not uncommon to find young people who aspire to a law degree taking a combination of maths and science subjects rather than humanities in order to secure bonus points. In contrast, Newcomers appear to be selecting subjects on the basis of personal interest rather than strategic importance. Newcomers are also more likely than Inheritors to have accepted less-preferred subjects because of timetabling issues or because their school did not offer their first choice. It may be that the Newcomers do not know enough about particular subjects or advantageous combinations of subjects to be discriminating in their choices or it may be that they are more phlegmatic about accepting the limitations imposed by smaller, less affluent schools. Unfortunately, interest alone cannot guarantee academic success or overcome the effects of disadvantage and just 29 per cent of the young people who believe they will obtain very good final results are Newcomers. Another factor to have an impact on the Newcomers’ interest in their subjects is their lack of confidence in their academic ability. There is a direct correlation between students’ academic success and the value they give to their schooling (Teese & Polesel, 2003). It is natural for young people who do well at school to find their studies more interesting and they are more likely to choose to continue their education than those who find school difficult and uninteresting. The Inheritors are significantly more confident of their ability to achieve very good or


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good results in the Year 12 exams than the Newcomers and that confidence, which grows out of their family’s reserves of cultural capital, gives them an enormous advantage. This pattern is consistent with research showing that as well as having access to higher quality educational resources throughout their lives, young people from high socioeconomic status, educated family backgrounds are familiar with the cultural forms – ideas and knowledge, the books, music and plays – that feature in the curriculum and they are able to respond to them naturally whereas young people from less-educated backgrounds (such as the Newcomers) often struggle to discuss and respond to unfamiliar ideas in unfamiliar language. They also know how to behave in an academic environment, how to analyse information, manage complex information, communicate effectively and prepare for examinations:

Young people from university-educated homes are trained in these attitudes and behaviours from an early age, beginning with the style in which they learn to speak and project themselves as thinkers. With early success, their self-confidence grows. Young people from poorly educated working-class families do not have the same influences. Their formal language skills do not develop as rapidly, they are less oriented by their parents to class-room learning, their self-confidence is weaker and their identification with academic work in secondary school is much more conditional and problematic (Teese & Polesel, 2003, p. 166).

The Inheritors have been taught to think of themselves as high achievers. Consequently, they have no difficulty in picturing themselves as completing Year 12 and going on to university. In contrast, the Newcomers are doubtful about their ability to secure the university places they so dearly want, and this doubt undermines their ability to succeed. Not only is there a clear divide between Newcomers and Inheritors on the subject of how well they expected to do in their Year 12 exams, but Newcomers are less happy with their progress in English and even less happy with their progress in mathematics. Refusing to take the elite subjects such as Specialist Mathematics, Mathematical Methods, Physics or Chemistry or taking them but performing poorly means that they will be excluded from many university courses and occupations, while the ones that are open to them may not be the most appropriate, as was the case with the students described by Robert Manne in Chapter Three, who had enrolled in Humanities because they did not qualify for a place in podiatry.

Social Class and Occupational Choice

Since the principal reason for taking particular subjects at school is to qualify for entry into particular occupations, and since the Newcomers and Inheritors choose quite different subjects, it follows that their occupational choices are also different. Confirming the pattern identified by R. W. Connell (1977) in the 1970s, the Inheritors have a marked preference for the traditional middle-class professions, and for the newer paramedical specialisations such as physiotherapy, optometry and podiatry. In contrast, the Newcomers prefer lower-status, but lucrative careers

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in business management and accounting. Primary teaching, which has been the path to upward mobility for many low socioeconomic status students (especially girls) during the ’60 and ’70s (Anderson & Vervoorn, 1983), has retained its popularity among Newcomers, but does not feature in the ten most popular occupational choices for Inheritors. Law is popular with both Newcomers and Inheritors, suggesting that it has retained its social prestige and attractiveness in the face of competition from other well-paid occupations.

Table 1. Most popular occupational choices

Newcomers Inheritors

Business Management 19.3 Physiotherapy/ Optometry/ Podiatry

14.6

Accounting 12.0 Law 12.5Primary Teaching 12.0 Business Management 11.5Art 10.8 Art 11.4Law 10.8 Media 10.4Media 9.6 Computer Operator 9.4Other 9.6 Medicine/Dentistry 9.4Computer Programmer

7.2 Psychology 8.4

Nursing 7.2 Architecture 7.3Science 7.2 Engineering 7.3

Careers in art and the media also rate very highly, and are almost equally appealing to Newcomers and Inheritors, but art and media are anomalous career choices: they attract passionate support from people who are likely to value talent above other social considerations, they are glamorous, and also have the capacity to earn huge incomes for the few who achieve popular recognition. The young people who chose careers in art, both Newcomers and Inheritors, frequently refused to list an alternative, and there is virtually no difference between alternative career choices among the ones who did. It is difficult to separate young people’s values from their occupational choices. Students enrolled in liberal-arts courses have different attitudes to university education to those enrolled in vocational courses, but the extent to which differences in values prompt occupational choices or choice of occupation shapes young people’s values is not clear (Lagemann, 2003). The primary motivation in choosing a course or occupation is interest in the field of study, but interest in a particular field of study is conditioned by the family culture (Lareau, 1989). Students from low socio-economic backgrounds are not attracted to generalist degrees in literature or science, and it is possible, even probable that


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they are wary of expending the scarce resources on courses that do not offer a clearly identifiable career. Vocational courses such as business management or accounting are easier to explain or justify to family members and lead to careers that are more concerned with ability and achievement than social capital. Young people from upper middle class families, who are not driven by necessity, choose occupations to suit their personal values: according to West (2006), Materialists choose investment banking, property development or corporate law, while Culturists opt for the public service, medicine, academia or law, but not corporate law which is regarded as too mercenary.

Commitment to University

University matters more to the Inheritors. They express a far stronger desire to be at university, and less interest in a particular course. The Inheritors’ greater reliance on university as a means of establishing their identity, and the intense pressure they face from their families and peers makes getting a place at university very important – even when they are not sure if it is the right place. A place at university, almost any university, is an end in itself: 70 per cent of Inheritors say they will take any university place offered to them, while fewer than a quarter of them say they would refuse a place if it came to a choice between a course they did not really want and missing out altogether. Once they have achieved that first vital step, the Inheritors intend to use university as an opportunity to consider a variety of careers, and many of them have chosen their Year 12 subjects with this in mind. Rather than locking themselves into a particular course they are keeping their options open. In contrast, Newcomers appear to feel ambivalent about enrolling at university. On the one hand they are very determined to obtain entry into a particular course, but their desire to be at university is not as strong and they are less certain about their plans. The whole process of applying for a university place is so complicated, and attending university so set about with pitfalls that many low socioeconomic students have second thoughts (Archer & Hutchings, 2000; Archer, 2003). Moreover, because students from low socio-economic backgrounds are more likely to achieve low examination scores, the offers that they receive are likely to be from less prestigious universities, and in many cases these offers will be rejected as unworthy (Teese & Polesel, 2003). Perhaps the most revealing measure of difference between the Newcomers and Inheritors is their responses to the question about when they first gave serious thought to the idea of going to university. Young people usually decide on the field of study that interests them during the middle years of secondary school and then refine their choice of occupation, course of study and institution in their senior years, but in a demonstration of the power of family culture to affect educational orientation, almost half of the Inheritors had already decided on university before they began secondary school.

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Social Class and Parental Education

That parental education has an important, even crucial function in the development of young people’s educational aspirations has been recognised for a considerable period of time. Until recently, researchers have focused on the ways in which young people’s educational pathways and achievements are influenced by their fathers’ level of education, but there is growing evidence that mothers’ educational attainment may be even more influential in many instances. More than a half of the Inheritor mothers have a degree or postgraduate degree. Adding these results to the fact that 100 per cent of Inheritor fathers have a degree or postgraduate degree, it becomes easy to understand why so many Inheritors are able to say that they have always known they would go to university. Replace with ‘In reality, almost 11 per cent of Newcomers do, in fact have a parent who is a university graduate – their mother. The differences between Newcomer and Inheritor mothers illustrate the strength of the argument that mothers’ “invisible work as ‘status maintainers’ is crucial to the development, knitting together and activation of different forms of capital” (Ball, 2003, p. 107). Moreover, the influence of these graduate, Newcomer mothers cannot be overlooked – particularly as more than 60 per cent of the Newcomers are girls, and girls from low socioeconomic status families are more strongly influenced by their mothers than fathers when making decisions about tertiary education (Brooks, 2004). Australian girls, including low socio-economic status and rural girls, are more likely than boys to complete school and proceed directly to higher education than boys. Parents are often happy to keep girls at school since their employment prospects are also much poorer than boys’, particularly in country areas where the destruction of rural infrastructure means that there are no more “good” jobs to be had at the shire office or regional office of a government department. Consolidation of banking into large regional centres and the consequent decline of many small towns has also led to a lack of employment opportunities and pushed many girls (and some boys), higher up the education system who might otherwise have chosen to leave school or undertake an apprenticeship. Labour market reforms that specifically address girls and women have had little impact on decisions about school and further education, but the shift towards degree qualifications for the most popular traditional female occupations – nursing and teaching – has made a major difference (Collins, Kenway & McLeod, 2000). Patterns of participation in higher education over the last 20 years suggest that many of the Newcomer mothers would have completed their university studies as mature-age students and it is possible that the presence of a mother engaged in university studies could have acted as a powerful incentive to their children, in particular their daughters, and it is probable that at least some of these girls share the experience of studying with their mothers (McLeod & Yates, 2006). In other households, parents who are very conscious of the extent to which lack of education had limited their own opportunities are likely to encourage their children to apply for tertiary education of some type. In either case, negative modelling may


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account for the fact that those rural students who decide to go to university are deeply committed to that goal:

Students saw mirrored in less-successful community members the possibility of their own demise and they struggled deliberately to erase that possibility from view … in some communities with particularly vulnerable economies …. students imagined their futures in binary terms – they could drop out of school or they could continue with their studies. For these students, the choice was not genuinely open for anyone who dreamt of being more than a bum (Alloway et al., 2001, pp. 155-156).

Whatever the cause, the majority of Newcomers are determined to go to university, but it is the Inheritors who have grown up in families that are linked to university by history and tradition in a way that the Newcomers cannot appreciate at this stage. As in the case of the newly-prosperous university entrants of the late 1950s and early ’60s, the Newcomers regard university as a desirable destination, but it is a largely unknown one. The young people who are accepted into the elite courses at university are the ones with the best school results, but this begs the question of why two-thirds of high achievers are drawn from high to very high socioeconomic status background. The shifting and largely invisible nature of class distinctions in Australia, and the ubiquity of popular culture have led to a situation where many Australians do not recognise the existence of social class, although they do recognise differences in income. At first glance there are few areas of significant difference between the Newcomers and Inheritors: their school backgrounds and cultural pursuits are similar and their intended destinations are also similar in many respects. Real differences emerged in their confidence, in their aspirations and their destinations. Both groups believe that education can make a difference to their futures; in fact, Australians are keenly aware of the impact that education has on their life chances. Some Inheritors need only look to their own family history over the last two or three generations for evidence of what can be achieved. At the same time, the lack of highly visible differences between social classes, the close proximity in which Inheritors and Newcomers live, and the fact that all of the schools included in the survey contain both Inheritors and Newcomers (but in differing proportions) creates a situation that encourages many Newcomers to believe that they too can become Inheritors. History suggests that some of them will, but in reality the differences the between Newcomers and Inheritors are real and persistent:

… controlled mobility of a limited category of individuals, carefully selected and modified by and for individual ascent, is not incompatible with the permanence of the structures, and … is even capable of contributing to social stability in the only way conceivable in societies based upon democratic ideals and thereby may help to perpetuate the structure of class relations (Bourdieu, 1977, p. 101).

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The Newcomers and Inheritors may share the same taste in music and may even attend the same school, but the Inheritors’ confidence and orientation to academic study has been carefully cultivated since birth; their parents and teachers have succeeded in inculcating an appropriate habitus, the sum total of those learned habits, skills, knowledge and tastes that predisposes them to the most prestigious subjects and fosters in them a high expectation of success at school and after.

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CHAPTER 7

KNOWLEDGE AND HIGHER EDUCATION

The expansion of the college-going population fills the high schools with college preparatory students… but this development also affects the character of the terminal students, and of the terminal education in high school, as well. When a few students went on to college, there was no disgrace in not doing so; moreover, except for the professions, it was not so clear that occupational success was closely linked to academic success (Trow, 1961, pp. 144-165).

Not all Australian school leavers are motivated by the same desires or intentions when they consider enrolling at university. Their reasons for wanting to go to university are determined to a large extent by their attitudes to education and knowledge, their sense of who they are and the role they see themselves playing in society in the future. There is a high degree of convergence between the Newcomers and Inheritors in terms of their taste in leisure activities and intended destinations, but there are significant differences between the two groups in terms of their academic self-perception, confidence, aspirations and expectations of success. These differences indicate the existence of deeper underlying differences in their attitudes to knowledge and in their reasons for wanting to go to university which illustrate the differential effects of habitus on intrinsic satisfaction with learning (Bourdieu & Passeron, 1977). One of those views, which is closely linked to the traditional-humanist perspective, could be described as cultural or even clerkly. Like the medieval clerks, members of this group have great respect for education and scholarship; learning is regarded as intrinsically valuable and educated people are to be admired. The spiritual leaders of the group who share this view are Newman, Jaspers and Barnett, all of whom have all argued that there is a qualitative difference between university education and all other forms of education. Newman, who was steeped in both the Christian and Classical Humanist traditions, understood university education to be a matter of allowing innate, uniquely human characteristics to emerge with some guidance from the academic staff:

To have a cultivated intellect, a delicate taste, a candid, equitable, dispassionate mind and a noble and courteous bearing in the conduct of life; - these are the connatural qualities of a large knowledge; they are the objects of a university (Newman, 1852, p. 196).

A little less than a hundred years later, German philosopher Karl Jaspers (1960) wrote that the essence of university education as the fearless pursuit of truth. His

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book Idea of the University was first published in Germany in 1946 in response to Nazi influence in the universities and then updated in the 1960s. Jaspers argued that universities were obligated to inculcate a questioning and sceptical attitude in their students, which would in turn lead to a shared search for wisdom and understanding that would transform both the students and the whole of society. British academic Ronald Barnett rejected the term tertiary education in favour of “higher education” from the conviction that there is a conceptual difference between the type of education acquired at university and through vocational training:

Higher education is more than just a sub-set of the education system. There are certain values and aims which are intrinsic to educational processes and which warrant the description “higher education” … because it is connected with not only the transmission of knowledge, but also its advancement through research, higher education has the task of legitimating society’s cognitive structures (Barnett, 1990, pp. 7-8).

The alternative view of education is “capitalist” in nature and can be traced back to the rise of the secular, utilitarian universities in Germany and England in the eighteenth century. The capitalist view is essentially materialist (West, 2006) – it regards education as an investment from which the client hopes to receive a favourable return, or as a commodity to be bought and consumed for personal benefit. The capitalist looks to Samuelson (1954), Friedman (1962), Hayek (1979; 1991) and more recently journalist and conservative social commentator Andrew Norton (2002) for inspiration. Hayek rejected educational policies that attempted to compensate for disadvantage on the grounds that they would undercut the market and also rejected demands for equality of opportunity as a way of concealing envy. Norton dismissed the culturist view of university education, doubting that the increase in university enrolments since 1989 was prompted by a “sudden preference for further study and intellectual inquiry” (p.12). He acknowledged that there were students outside the vocational faculties who appeared to be motivated by interest in the subjects they had chosen to study, but regarded these generalist degrees as luxury items since they were unlikely to lead directly to employment, but students with sufficient resources should be able to purchase them if they wished to do so. The division between the culturist and capitalist or materialist views of education is real, and is closely linked to the young peoples’ sociocultural status. In general, Newcomers and Inheritors approach learning from very different perspectives. Inheritors are more likely to support the culturist view of education, while Newcomers are more likely to support the capitalist view; but there is some overlap between the groups. There are some Newcomers who support the culturist view of education and some Inheritors who support the capitalist or materialist approach. As Figure 7.1 indicates, few Newcomers enjoy their studies even though they understand the importance of getting good grades; in contrast, the majority of Inheritors find learning to be a satisfying and enjoyable experience. Undoubtedly, a good part of their enjoyment comes from the fact that, by and large, the Inheritors are successful learners, but much of that success must be attributed to their positive orientation to


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school which derives from their family culture. Family culture has a profound impact on self-perception and academic self-esteem, and in turn, on academic success.

Figure 7.1. “enjoy learning.”

There was a consistency in the pattern of opinions about the value of knowledge and the best source of learning that indicates a deep division between the Newcomers and Inheritors and points to the existence of a group of young people who reject the intrinsic value of education in favour of practical experience or “the university of life”. This response shows the effects of what might be termed anti-intellectual habitus. Excluding the small percentage who have graduate mothers, the Newcomers have little family experience of university that extends over more than the present generation of children and they may doubt its worth. On the one hand, university is understood to be a desirable destination and the gateway to social and financial success, but on the other, it is an unknown and potentially hostile territory. Admitting that books or study might be more beneficial than life experience could be interpreted as a slur against their family and friends. At the same time, the importance placed on the archetype of the self-made man (or woman) in contemporary Australian society makes it difficult for anyone, even the culturist-inclined Inheritors, to proclaim the superiority of academic learning; to do so is to invite accusations of intellectual snobbery. Responses to the suggestion that it is possible to be “too educated” showed quite pronounced differences between Inheritors and Newcomers: there is a group of young people who value and respect knowledge and derive enjoyment from academic study, and another who value practical knowledge and skills and do not believe that success in life depends on success in the world of learning. The division in responses to this proposition underscore the connection between the

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family’s culture and the value placed on learning. All of the Inheritor fathers, and the majority of Inheritor mothers, have a university degree; most of them are professionals, their friends and associates are also likely to be university-educated professionals. Knowledge and education are central to their lives and are accorded the utmost respect.

Figure 7.2.“It is possible to be too educated.”

The gap between the culturist and capitalist viewpoints should not be underestimated. These are not just separate views of the purpose of education; they are opposing ways of interpreting the nature of human society and they point to deeper cleavages in Australian society that are reflected in opposing views of the purpose of education, choice of occupation, taste in architecture, clothing and recreational pursuits. In education as in all areas of life, culturists value the experience above all else because they are convinced that it adds to their personal development; Materialists value the outcome so long as it produces an advantage. The ways in which leadership is interpreted also divide along culturist and materialist lines. One of the principal reasons for the high value that culturists give to education is the belief that learning is the prime qualification for leadership. Culturists, like Prime Minister Gough Whitlam’s father Frank, share the liberal-humanist view that education enlightens and ennobles the recipient; educated people are leaders by virtue of their wisdom and willingness to defend the truth against sectional interests; they produce and protect ideas and values that are essential to the well-being of society. On the other hand, having rejected the concept of emancipatory, transformative education and reduced it to a series of skills and competencies rather than a process of striving for excellence the Materialists interpret leadership as a demonstration of appropriate skills. So long as


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the leader is able to do their job effectively, nothing else matters; their education and personal qualities are irrelevant. Newcomers reject the proposition that only educated people have the capacity to hold leadership positions far more strongly because it goes to the heart of their self-concept and aspirations for the future. Knowing themselves to be at a disadvantage, but driven by a desire for success, they find it almost impossible to accept that their efforts might be in vain. The link between education and leadership runs counter to their everyday experience; many of their parents are leaders in the sense that they own and run businesses and many of the community leaders they encounter on a regular basis are not highly educated. The Newcomers consistently downplay the importance of education. They are less dependent on university as a means of achieving success and more able than the Inheritors to see alternatives such as employment or TAFE and less bound by family expectations. To the Newcomers, academic learning is desirable but not especially privileged, and university is just one part of a whole suite of choices.

Sources of the Division

The association between the Inheritors and the culturist view and between the Newcomers and the capitalist view has been demonstrated repeatedly.1 As I have demonstrated in Chapter Six, the Inheritors have had a culturally richer experience growing up; they are more confident of their academic abilities than the Newcomers and have higher expectations of success, so it is understandable that they are also more likely to enjoy learning, respect knowledge and believe that it is impossible to be too educated. On the other hand, the Newcomers are unfamiliar with the nature of higher education or the life of the mind and don’t understand or appreciate the clerkly view. To Newcomers, education is about positioning themselves to take advantage of the job market so that they can leverage their way up the social scale; the process of education does not interest them, just the outcome. But this explanation, if unqualified, is simplistic and overlooks the multifaceted and occasionally contradictory attitudes that these young people express about education. There is in fact a small, but significant group of Newcomers who support the culturist view of education. Learning gives them pleasure, and they are excited at the idea of exploring new ideas and meeting interesting people at university; if university also helps them to get an interesting job with a reasonable income, that is a welcome addition. (With this in mind, it is also worth noting that the Inheritors are more inclined than the Newcomers to support shorter degrees.) And while the Inheritors might enjoy learning and believe in the intrinsic benefits of education, they also have a shrewd appreciation of its functional value. Their attitude is understandable: the Inheritors have seen the benefits of university education in their own families. Education is the source of their social status and it will enable them to claim their inheritance, but only if they are successful. Many of Bourdieu’s héritiers were not scholars, but philistines who regarded university as a necessary rite of passage that conferred social acceptability; they did

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not expect it to be an uplifting or transformative experience. Or they were dilettantes who could indulge their personal whims secure in the knowledge that their family’s wealth would protect them from the trials of earning a living. The evidence points to the existence of philistines and dilettantes among the young people in this study as well. The philistines, who aimed for “a mark between 9 and 11” (Bourdieu & Passeron, 1977, p. 113), used their university degrees to gain entry to society, but were largely indifferent to the material they were required to study. In describing the same type of person, West (2006) dubbed them the materialists since they regard a university education as useful only because it allows them to get a better-paid job and that allows them to acquire more material wealth including the trappings of affluence. Some of the philistines in this study were tempted to bypass university altogether. Like the young Australian entrepreneurs Jodee Rich, Poppy King (who were held up as role models in the 1990s) and their more famous international counterparts Steve Jobs and Mark Zuckerberg and like the boy who wrote in response to the question about his parents’ occupations that his parents didn’t work but lived off their investments, they know that there are other ways of making money that do not require five or six years of demanding study at university. There are dilettantes in this sample of young people as well – or perhaps “extreme culturists” would be a better description. These young people are happy to contemplate careers as artists, actors, musicians or fashion designers, occupations that are rich in social or cultural value, but are unlikely to provide a sustainable income. Both of these subgroups (which are very small) are composed primarily of Inheritors since a young person who rejects university to take up a risky venture of this type would need considerable reserves of social and economic capital. Few Newcomers would have the ability, or courage, to turn their backs on the commonly accepted way of transmitting social power; not one of them intends to leave school without continuing in some form of further education. It is more difficult to understand the source of the Newcomers culturist attitudes, but there is a range of factors that could have raised their aspirational levels above those of their peers: they may have parents who regret not being able to go to university and who have encouraged them to pursue their education as far as possible, or they may be responding to encouragement from members of their ethnic community. It is also possible that their teachers have inspired them and encouraged them to go to university. Teachers do tend to regard their students’ progression to university as evidence of their own worth and, unless they have worked in industry themselves, very few teachers know much about the vocational education sector includingTAFE. It is highly likely that more than one of the Newcomers first thought of going to university under the influence of an enthusiastic teacher. Then there is the issue of school type.

The Role of the Schools

The study on which this book is based did not examine the influence of school type on young people’s attitudes to education. However, this does not mean that the


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status of the school exerts no influence. The schools that participated in this study varied in their status and degree of identification with the Great School archetype and these variations offer some explanation of the intersection between Capitalists and Culturists, Newcomers and Inheritors. To begin with, there is an inherent contradiction in the nature of private schooling. On the one hand, the schools emphasise the character-forming nature of the education they provide; their websites, advertisements and prospectuses leave no doubt that these schools are in the business of forming or developing their students through the curriculum and a variety of activities including sporting and cultural events. They also make frequent mention of their commitment to community service activities and programs:

Ever conscious of its … heritage, the College aims to provide comprehensive educational and pastoral programs firmly based on Gospel values …. The College promotes and supports the spiritual growth and development of all students. The College is committed to academic achievement and the development of skills by promoting a love of learning and the pursuit of excellence .… Students are affirmed in their self-worth and given reasons for hope. It is expected that all will contribute positively to their school and the wider community in a spirit of service (North Central College Mission Statement).

However, the same private schools that promote the concept of education as character-forming, charge fees for their services thus demonstrating that education is a commodity to be bought and sold. Some of the schools mitigate this fact by minimising the emphasis on the economic aspects of the relationship between the school administration and the students’ families, while others emphasise the quality of the product to justify fees that are well beyond the reach of families earning an average income. Schools in this second group use their exclusive nature as a marketing device to parents who are led to believe that high fees must necessarily result in educational success, and as secondary school qualifications have lost their value, and university qualifications appear to be following suit, the scramble for position is increasing (Marginson, 1992). In 2006, Victorian newspapers reported that complaints against one of the state’s most prestigious schools which offered full-fee scholarships to high-achieving students from less prestigious private schools and government schools were framed in terms of unfair competition between rival businesses (Bachelard, 2006; Bachelard & Flynn, 2006) and a case brought against another private school by a disgruntled parent argued that the family had not received the quality of service for which it had paid (Rood & Leung, 2006). Scholarship programs reveal a great deal about a school’s values: Ariel College offers a range of scholarships – academic, performing arts instrumental and choral music, as well as general excellence – but it is clear from the selection criteria that the purpose of these scholarships is to recruit the most talented and capable students available, not to provide opportunities for the underprivileged. Candidates for the Year 10 music scholarship are required to have passed the Australian Music Education Board Grade 7 exam; the same level required for entry into the

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Conservatorium and two grades higher than required for Year 10 entry into the selective Victorian College of the Arts Secondary College. Criteria for the General Excellence scholarship are as follows:

… (the scholarships) are offered to those who have exceptional talents in two or more of the following areas — Music, Performing Arts, Sports and Academic ability — and are able to benefit from the extensive academic and co-curricular program at (the school). Students offered a General Excellence Scholarship should have had measured success in the areas nominated and be able to show a level of commitment to the field of excellence over several years. (Ariel College website)

The General Excellence Scholarship is available only to children entering at Year 7, that is, between ten and twelve years of age; it appears that the focus is how the child can add value to the schools rather than on how the school can help the child to realise their potential. Schools that use their scholarship programs in this way may claim to be promoting a love of learning, but in reality they are propagating a set of competitive and commodity-driven values. Ariel College’s approach was in sharp contrast to St Mary’s. St Mary’s College is located in a very wealthy suburb, but at the time of the study it rejected the capitalist or market approach to education and deliberately recruited a proportion of its students from parish schools in the low-income, outer south-eastern suburbs. It budgeted to forgo around 15 per cent of tuition fees each year in order to accommodate these girls. According to the principal at the time the express purpose of the policy was to prevent the school from becoming “just another middle-class school”. The elite schools are able to confer social advantage upon their pupils because they concentrate economic, social and cultural capital on one site in a way that low-fee-paying religious schools cannot. Catholic schools in less-affluent suburbs and country towns may be more selective than their public neighbours, but as a consequence of their open admission policies their pupils are too diverse for them to be able to guarantee academic success and the social status that proceeds from it (Teese & Polesel, 2003). At the same time, the education offered by elite schools is genuinely impressive and encourages exactly the type of character development that Newman would have admired; nor would he have objected to their charging high fees, since his own university did likewise (but he would have approved of the approach taken by St Mary’s to ensure that all the intrinsic benefits of education were not the exclusive preserve of the rich). More importantly, families use schools in different ways depending on whether they are Culturists or Materialists. Regardless of their income, culturist families will look for a school that satisfies their desire for personal development while capitalist families will look for one that provides a positional advantage. In some cases their financial circumstances will limit their choice to the local Catholic school. Catholic schools in the inner suburbs and country towns have traditionally provided the only alternative for parents who find the diversity in government schools too challenging and the fees at the Independent schools too high. The new


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generation of Catholic Regional Colleges continues to fill that role in the outer suburbs. Wealthier families have the luxury of choosing from among the elite independent schools, but their motives are the same; the Culturists come for the experience and the Materialists for the brand name. And the schools (particularly the elite ones) are adept at marketing themselves to both groups by emphasising different aspects of their services. Culturist parents are assured that they are securing an enriching educational experience for their children and capitalist parents are reminded about the positional advantages of their choice. Durkheim (1972) noted that it possible for individuals to hold contradictory beliefs simultaneously; schools are no less able to embody contradictory beliefs about education, but it is rare indeed for any school to be able to reverse the effects of the family’s deeply held values.

Going to University will …

The decision to enrol at university is both complex and deeply personal, and it is made on the basis of a range of factors including social class, family culture, personal interest and self-image (Peel, 1998). Broadly speaking, all of the young people in this study believe that a university degree will qualify them for their chosen occupation or improve their employment prospects, but as I have established in Chapter Four, the distinction between liberal-humanist and utilitarian interpretations of the purpose of university has been subsumed into something new in contemporary society. Newcomers and Inheritors share an overwhelming concern with getting a job, but putting that aside, their reasons for wanting to go to university differ in degree rather than orientation. There are three significant exceptions, but in general Newcomers and Inheritors give broadly similar reasons for wanting to go to university confirming Richard James’ (2002) finding that university was a deeply attractive destination to most young people who completed Year 12. Despite their preoccupation with the employment-related aspects of studying at university, a substantial number of the young people who participated in this study share Newman’s belief in the transformative nature of higher education: going to university will make them better people. Newcomers are not blind to the personal and social development aspects of a university education, but are less likely than the Inheritors to accept the suggestion that going to university is the only way, or even the best way to achieve these goals. Research undertaken among British students from low socioeconomic status backgrounds suggested that young people from low socioeconomic status families or from ethnic minorities may be wary of accepting that university education can bring about significant changes in their character because they resent the implication that their experiences or cultural values are deficient in some way (Archer & Hutchings, 2000). In fact, there is a small number of Newcomers who responded so strongly to this questionnaire item that their reactions could be called hostile. Perhaps their ambivalence stems from anxiety about fitting in, or failing and disappointing their families. Nevertheless, the evidence is consistent: Newcomers have lower levels of self-confidence in their academic performance

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and ability to obtain high examination results in Year 12 which might lead to higher levels of anxiety, ambivalence or hostility. Newcomers are uncertain and somewhat apprehensive about the value of university: because they have no long-term family history of university education, Newcomers know less about what to expect from university and are more uncertain about the benefits of enrolling. Will it broaden their outlook on life? Will it help them to understand society and prepare them for active participation in community life? They cannot really know the answers to these questions until they arrive on campus. But they would really like the opportunity to find out. Newcomers also have different expectations of how they might be involved in their local, regional or ethnic communities, or in “the community” in general, and often do not see the relevance of university education to this aspect of their lives. Or it might be that the Inheritors have been inculcated with a sense of obligation to the community in the tradition of L.A. Adamson, Headmaster of Wesley College, who reminded his students (including the future prime minister Robert Menzies) that they owed society a debt for the privileges that they had received, and that debt should be paid through service to society (Martin, 1996). Coincidentally, although participation in service organisations such as the Scouts is very low, it is higher among Inheritors than Newcomers. If participation in community life is understood to mean helping to run a local sporting team or joining a cultural association, then a degree would not be an advantage in the way that it might if one intended to stand for public office or take a seat on the board of an organisation.

Exceptions: Peers, Family Expectations and Study

Despite similarities between the reasons that Newcomers and Inheritors give for wanting to go to university, there are three exceptions that revealed important differences between the two groups. The most telling of these differences is that far more of the Inheritors know that most of their friends will also go to university. It appears that almost all of the Year 12 students from some schools will migrate en masse to a limited number of faculties at the same universities. Under the circumstances it is not surprising that the Inheritors are looking forward to university and confident that they will enjoy the experience. University will hold few surprises for them; their parents have prepared them well – they might even find themselves living in the same college and playing on the same varsity teams as one of their parents or another family member. In some cases they might even encounter signs of their family’s academic achievements on honour boards or acknowledgement of gifts made by their family to the university going back several generations. And – it deserves to be reiterated – they will be going there with their friends. A large part of the Inheritors desire to go to university is the knowledge that they are good at academic study. Many of the Newcomers are interested in the subjects that they will be able to study at university and believe that university will help them to develop new ideas, some are even looking forward to the challenge, but few of them express the same level of confidence as the Inheritors in their academic abilities, and it is no surprise to discover that they do not relish the


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thought of more years of study. Their answers are more tentative. They want to go to university and are looking forward to it, but they are also expecting the work to be difficult and are a little worried that they might not be able to keep up. The last significant difference between the Newcomers and Inheritors concerns their families’ expectations. Both Newcomers and Inheritors are aware of their parents’ aspirations and of the general expectation in contemporary society that all capable school-leavers should want to go to university. As Trow remarked in the quotation at the head of this chapter, when only a limited number of high school students went on to higher education there was no disgrace in not going – but that has not been the case in Australia, and the rest of the developed world, for some time. Speaking of his daughter’s study plans, historian Robert Manne commented:

It is simply assumed by the society in which she lives that if she does well at school she will concentrate in her university studies on something with prospects, preferably either medicine or law … If she rejects the chance of a place in a faculty offering a potentially lucrative career her behaviour will be regarded as both irresponsible and odd (Manne, 2000).

Of course, pressure to enrol, or to enrol in an elite course, does not apply equally to all young people. Similar numbers of Newcomers and Inheritors believe that their parents want them to go to university, but the Inheritors are more certain than the Newcomers that their families expect them to go. Underlining the association between the family’s cultural values and its socioeconomic status, Newcomers are considerably more likely to assert that their families do not expect them to go, or to be unsure about their families’ attitude. In contrast, the Inheritors are usually in no doubt about what is expected of them. Inheritors were almost twice as likely as Newcomers to report that they had always known they would go to university. In many instances the Inheritors are more focused on getting to university than on where university might lead them. Often, the Inheritors are quite happy to agree that going to university will give them time to consider a range of possible careers, whereas the Newcomers tend to regard it the path to a particular occupation or profession. In general, the Newcomers are ambitious and capable (though neither quite as ambitious nor as capable as the Inheritors), and they know that their parents have high expectations of them, but they also have greater opportunities to change their minds and their plans. Their attitude is consistent with their greater support for the capitalist view of education; since they perceive university to be just one of several paths to success in life they are less dependent on it and more ambivalent about the effort required to get in and then to graduate. In contrast, going to university is central to the Inheritors view of themselves. Since education is not just the key to social or economic success, but the way in which individuals become eligible for leadership and demonstrate their personal worth to their peers, going to university matters very deeply to the Inheritors. It might be a ritual, as Bourdieu suggested, but it is a ritual that has both a real and symbolic role in their lives. To a large extent, the Inheritors self-esteem rests on their academic self-concept; they see themselves as people who do well at academic study and who should, therefore, go

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university. There can be few better illustrations of the transmission of cultural capital than the airy confidence expressed by the Inheritors and the certainty about the path they are expected to follow to success. But self-concept is a product of a series of relationships with parents, teachers and peers that leads to a particular orientation to learning, in other words, habitus. In effect, the Inheritors do not appear to be able to imagine an alternative to the life mapped out for them since birth; this was true for the generation who entered university during the expansionary postwar period and it is also true for the young people who participated in this study. The doctors’ and lawyers’ children (and the children of other professionals) are not so much driven by their parents’ ambitions as unable to fight against the tide of personal, family and social expectations. As a group, young Australians are generally biased in favour of a utilitarian, capitalist view of education for all of the reasons that I outlined in Chapter Five. Changes in technology, in the prevailing ideology and in employment patterns, have created a sense of competition for resources (jobs and income) that pervades all levels of society. Education is generally understood to be an asset that will help individuals in this competition, even by people who do not necessarily feel comfortable with this view. At its deepest level, the function of education is to reflect contemporary social values and to ensure their continuation, by promoting a particular ideal of what a human should be and how they should relate to society as a whole (Durkheim, 1972). At present, the dominant ideal is an materialist one; federal government policy has continued to stress (albeit with less intensity than during the Howard Government era) the economic value of university education at the expense of its social and personal values for almost 30 years, so much so that by the time he released Higher Education at the Crossroads in 2002, the Federal Minister for Education, Dr Brendan Nelson found it difficult to speak of university education in any terms except economic. And popular opinion has shifted to accommodate and support these changes. That both Newcomers and Inheritors tend to connect university with preparation for employment before other considerations (such as exploration of their innermost selves or increasing their understanding of society) is a sign that utilitarian values are predominant in the majority of the population. Although the materialist ideal is dominant in contemporary society, it is not equally appealing to all social groups; Newcomers and Inheritors select aspects that are relevant to their circumstances and reject the remainder (Wyn & White, 1997). Inheritor families are more likely to continue to support the older humanist model of education, since it is consistent with their understanding of who they are – people with cultivated tastes and discerning intellects. But the Inheritors are a minority within the whole community. Numerically speaking, Newcomers are the dominant group in Australian society. Newcomers are also the people of the future; as the trend towards mass higher education continues their views will prevail. If this study had found a clearly identifiable group of Inheritors who wanted the sort of traditional, humanist education lauded by Newman, the government and


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community could ignore them as a remnant of a bygone era, out of touch with community standards and doomed to extinction. As Andrew Norton suggests, they could be allowed to study for generalist degrees in literature, philosophy or pure science (as long as they have the ability to pay for such luxuries) while the universities get on with their real work of training the new elite. However, the evidence shows that the shift in popular opinion has not been entirely in one direction. The majority of Inheritors and Newcomers want a great deal more than a meal ticket from their experience of university. The Inheritors have retained many of the culturist values expressed by earlier generations of Inheritors, but many of the Newcomers have assimilated those same values. The majority of young people who participated in this study want a degree that will improve their job prospects or give them entry into a rewarding career and also want an experience that is enriching and enjoyable. Having examined the extent to which differences in habitus affects young peoples’ attitudes to knowledge and reasons for wanting to go to university, the following chapter explores their responses to the issues of who should have access to university and who should be responsible for the cost.

NOTES

1 Four studies which have examined this issue in details are:

G. Elsworth & A. Harvey-Beavis.(1998). Individual demand for tertiary education: Interests and fields of study. Canberra: Australian Government Publishing Service.

G. Marks, N. Fleming, M. Long & J. McMillan. (2000). Patterns of participation in year 12 and higher education in Australia: Trends and issues, LSAY Research Report No 17. Hawthorn: Australian Council for Educational Research.

R. James. (2000). TAFE, university or work. The early preferences and choices of students in year 10, 11 and 12. Leabrook: National Centre for Vocational Education Research,

R. James, (2002). Socioeconomic background and higher education participation: An analysis of school students’ aspirations and expectations. Centre for the Study of Higher Education, Parkville: University of Melbourne. .

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Archer, L. & Hutchings, M. (2000). “Bettering Yourself” Discourses of risk, cost and benefit in ethnically diverse, young working-class non-participants’ constructions of higher education. British Journal of Sociology of Education. 21(4), 561–564.

Bourdieu, P. & Passeron, J. (1977). Reproduction in education, society and culture. London: SAGE Publications. Bourdieu, P. & Passeron, J. (1979). The inheritors: French students and their relation to culture. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. (original work published 1964)

Bourdieu, P. (1973). Cultural reproduction and social reproduction. In R. Brown. (Ed.). Knowledge, education, and cultural change: Papers in the sociology of education. (pp. 71–112). London: Tavistock.

Durkheim, E. (1972). Selected writings. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Friedman, M. & Friedman, R. (1980). Free to choose. Melbourne: Macmillan. Friedman, M. (1962). Capitalism and freedom. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.

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Griffin, A. (1999). Knowledge under attack: Consumption, diversity and the need for values. In R. Barnett & A. Griffin. (Eds.). The end of knowledge in higher education. (pp. 2–12) London: Cassell.

Hayek, F. (1979). Law, legislation and liberty: A new statement of the liberal principles of justice and political economy. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.

James, R. (2002). Socioeconomic background and higher education participation: An analysis of school students’ aspirations and expectations. Centre for the Study of Higher Education. Parkville: University of Melbourne.

Jaspers, K. (1960). The idea of the university. London: Peter Owen. Manne, R. (2000, 24 July). Why arts degrees matter. The Age. p. 13 Manne, R. (2001). The two Australian nations. In R. Manne. (Ed.). The barren years: John Howard and

Australian political culture. (pp. 14–17). Melbourne: The Text Publishing Company. Marginson, S. (1992). Commodity forms in education with emphasis on the positional market. Paper

presented at the 1992 AARE/NZARE Joint Conference Deakin University, Geelong. Retrieved from http://www.aare.edu.au/92pap/margs92220.txt

Martin, A.W. (1996). Robert Menzies, a life. Volume 1 1894–1943. Carlton: Melbourne University Press.

Nelson, B. (2002). Higher education at the crossroads: an overview paper. Canberra: Department of Education, Science and Training.


Norton, A. (2002). The unchained university. St Leonards: The Centre for Independent Studies. Samuelson, P. (1954). The pure theory of public expenditure. The Review of Economics and Statistics.

36 (4), 387–389. Trow, M. (1961). The second transformation of American education. International Journal of

Comparative Sociology, 2, 144–165. West, A. (2006). Inside the lifestyles of the rich and tasteful. North Melbourne: Pluto Press. Wyn, J & White, R. (1997). Rethinking youth. St Leonards, NSW: Allen & Unwin.

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Let us imagine that a university is a bus … into the bus are crowded into rows and rows, each row representing a course, are rows and rows of crammed-in students, … they‘re packed into luggage racks, and the students are hanging onto the straps in the aisle, … and the rows of mechanics are sitting there with their toolboxes, and what‘s happened, … is the Government has come along, … said: “Right. What we will do is we will now buy you a brand new bus. It’s going to be a longer bus, there’s going to be a lot more seats on this bus, every person is going to be sitting down on the bus, and they’re going to have a quality journey as they go through their education experience” (The Hon. Brendan Nelson, Minister for Education 2003).

In spite of the fact that the Newcomers have assimilated enough of the traditional view of education to want university to be enjoyable as well as useful, Newcomers and Inheritors still have vastly different attitudes to knowledge and education, and they interpret the purpose of university differently. These differences have grown out of a deep cleavage in their overall system of values: in general Newcomers take a Materialist view while Inheritors take a culturist view of life. The cleavage between these two views of society as a whole (and of education) is not a recent phenomenon; it is a continuation of the separation between the humanist and utilitarian schools of philosophy that led to the establishment of the new, secular universities in post-Enlightenment Europe, but since the Second World War this cleavage has been accentuated by the struggle between the marketplace and government for social control that has turned western social values upside down (Yergin & Stanislaw, 1998). As Durkheim (1972) explained, our personal values are deeply affected by the dominant values of the society in which we have grown to maturity and those values continue to shape every aspect of our lives by defining what is normal and by creating expectations of how things ought to be done. As I have shown in the preceding chapters, the young people in this study have very different attitudes to education and reasons for wanting to go to university. These differences in attitude are grounded in the differences between culturalist and materialist value systems and affect beliefs about the nature of knowledge and the purpose of education. They also extend to beliefs about who should have access to university and who should be responsible for the costs involved. Before examining these beliefs in detail, it is worth reminding ourselves about the formation of community attitudes to higher education in contemporary Australia and the various factors that have shaped them in the modern era.

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SOCIAL TRANSFORMATION

The vision of a new and better society that was formed during the closing days of World War Two was coloured by the hardships ordinary Australians had experienced earlier during both the Great Depression of the 1930s and the First World War. Both the Labor and Liberal governments of the late 1940s and ’50s were adamant that Australian citizens would never be humiliated in the same fashion again although they had vastly different ideological perspectives on the best way to achieve a stable and prosperous society. The Curtin and Chifley Governments relied on Keynesian macroeconomics combined with policies founded on traditional Labor values to achieve their vision of a society in which citizens were integrated into the community through work and reciprocal relationships. By contrast, under Menzies, the Liberal Party promoted a vision of Australian society based on individual effort and independence (Capling, Consideine & Crozier, 1998). Notwithstanding those differences, both the Labor and Liberal parties regarded university education as a matter of personal advancement and of community development. Both parties understood that meeting the pressing need for qualified personnel to undertake the task of reconstruction and restart economic growth would create opportunities for individuals to improve their lives and increase their material wealth, but they also believed that increasing the number of university-educated people in the community would improve the quality of public life. To the women and men who had suffered through the twin evils of poverty and war, the ability to enrol at university or see their children enrol, was an important component of the new Australian society that they wished to build in the post war reconstruction period. Possession of a degree became a powerful symbol of the new era of Australian life, as powerful in its own way as ownership of a new house in the suburbs. In the minds of many people, the growing number of university graduates was evidence that Australia had become an educated, even cultured nation, that it had overcome its uncouth origins while remaining free of the rigid class hierarchies that limited opportunities for success in England and Europe. University education retained its symbolic value to successive governments and the general population until the 1980s when Australia, together with other developed nations, underwent a complete transformation. A radical transformation of social values was not the Hawke Government’s priority in the 1980s. It is doubtful that many members of the government understood the social implications of their policies; they wanted to transform Australia into a modern, globally competitive economy, but in doing so, that transformation gradually reoriented community values to the prevailing economic ideology of the time. The government moved from a grudging support for monetarism in the early 1980s to wholehearted neoliberalism by the end of that decade. Every aspect of human activity was required to contribute to the national economy. The role of higher education in this process was twofold: it produced skilled professionals who would contribute directly to the economy through their work and it could also be used to reshape community values. Chapter 4 has

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outlined the way in which higher education policy was reformulated to encourage student enrolment in science and technology and funds were made available to support study and research in areas deemed to be of national interest at the expense of disciplines that were regarded as unproductive, but the reinterpretation of the purpose of higher education went much further. History provides many examples of the way in which governments have used their education systems to reform ideologies and collective beliefs supporting a new national identity or set of values – indeed, Australian history has already provided one excellent example of this process: following Federation in 1901 the school system was used very effectively to promote a new national identity. The Hawke Government wanted to increase public acceptance for an economic system that promoted competition in all areas of life and used the higher education sector to achieve this goal by changing community attitudes about the purpose of education and about responsibility for the costs involved (Laming, 2009). Constant reiteration of a particular point of view will transform community expectations and values, especially if key figures in society can be persuaded to support it. Milton Friedman (1962) understood this when he stressed the importance of talking about the market-based model of education at every opportunity and in all forums so that it entered the public consciousness as the normal state of affairs. The Hawke Government used a similar approach over several years. To begin with, it framed arguments in favour of restructuring education in terms of a need to make Australia into a “clever country” in order to create jobs and preserve prosperity; it allocated resources to specific types of courses and institutions that were deemed to be particularly relevant to the national interest and produced a series of policies that stressed the economic benefits of education to the individual and to the nation in quick succession (Becher & Kogan, 1980). The message was inescapable: higher education was an economically significant activity, not a matter of personal development. The reintroduction of university fees should have been unthinkable, since their abolition was regarded as a major legacy of the Whitlam Government and a touchstone by Labor Party members and supporters: but the ground had been well-prepared and the government argued shrewdly that a modest administrative charge was necessary to cover the cost of reforming the system. It hastened to add that university graduates could easily afford it since they invariably earned higher salaries. Soon afterwards, it set up a review of university funding, arguing that taxpayers were entitled to feel certain that public funds were being spent wisely. The review recommended that tertiary institutions should relieve the taxpayer’s burden by raising as much income from the private sector as possible (Commonwealth Tertiary Education Commission, 1986). Both policy changes were achieved without much public comment when the government argued that they were fair to the majority of Australians who did not go to university. Finally, in the mid-1980s, the Dawkins reforms brought about the full integration of the higher education sector into the national economy by requiring it to demonstrate measurable economic benefits in return for continuing investment of public funds (Edwards, 2001). The public discourse on education now promoted competition at all levels.

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Access and Equity

But how influential are changes in the public discourse? Pusey (1990) was able to demonstrate that economics students who were taught economics from a monetarist perspective in the 1970s and ’80s carried those attitudes with them into key policymaking positions in both the Australian federal government and state governments, and into private enterprise, where they effected a total reorientation of values at the elite policymaking level. Within a relatively short period the values of this generation of economics graduates pervaded the whole of society. The irony of what we call public policy is that it affects some of the most private aspects of our lives, including marriage, reproduction and death, as well as the more public domains. Research from Britain suggests that there is a clear demarcation between the value system of adults born after the election of the neoliberal Thatcher Government and those who had already reached maturity at that point in time (Karstedt & Farrell, 2003). No similar research has been conducted in Australia, but statements like Minister Nelson’s remarks about university funding being no different from providing a bigger bus for the passengers, which would have been truly shocking in the 1980s, passed almost unnoticed in 2003. Scrutiny of the responses made by the young people who participated in this study, to questions about access to university and responsibility for the cost of attending revealed that their acceptance of the message that university education is a private benefit for which they should pay has been partial and uneven. We should not be surprised by this. Social values are formed over time and at different rates, so there will always be ideas that have a particular resonance in the community and individuals (or families) whose personal values are out of step with the values that are dominant in their society (Durkheim, 1972). As university has become more accessible to students from all socioeconomic backgrounds, young Australians have discarded any notion of university as the preserve of a particular social class or type of person, although they do recognise the importance of aptitude or talent. Fewer that half of the young people in this study agree with the suggestion that most school leavers would be better off going to TAFE, but the Newcomers’ opinions are more sharply polarised. In contrast, the Inheritors are less likely to agree with that proposition, but are also much less certain in their responses. These differences of opinion about the desirability of TAFE can be accounted for by differences in their aspirations, their perceptions of TAFE and also their perceptions of other school leavers. Many of the Newcomers who plan to go to university know themselves to be academically superior to their classmates and they may well have concluded that most school leavers (but not themselves) would be better off at TAFE. Also, the majority of Newcomers are female: young men from low socioeconomic status families prefer TAFE to university, but young women from the same family backgrounds express a strong preference for university (Birrell, Calderon, Dobson & Smith, 2000). Young people from low socioeconomic status backgrounds – and the majority of Newcomers match this criterion – also associate TAFE with trade qualifications. The Newcomers believe that TAFE is second-best; it is where they will go if their

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examination score is not high enough to win a university place. In contrast, few Inheritors know much about TAFE: fewer than ten per cent have a brother or sister who has been a TAFE student; none of their fathers and only five per cent of their mothers have a technical or trade qualification. The Inheritors are also concentrated in schools that do not encourage their students to consider studying at a TAFE college as an alternative to university. They are far less certain about its value (more than a third are not sure if most school leavers would be better off at TAFE or at university), but, if they are thinking about their peers, and their peers’ aspirations towards physiotherapy, law and business studies, then the Inheritors would be likely to assume that university is the more appropriate destination for most school leavers. Nevertheless, we need to be cautious about taking these comments at face value – young people from high socioeconomic status backgrounds know that it is good form to say that everyone is equal even when everything in their experience has demonstrated that this is not the case (McLeod & Yates, 2006). West (2006) would agree, but only if the young people were culturists, because as he often reminds his readers, Materialists are not concerned with form. Many young Australians do not perceive university as an exclusive destination or beyond their reach because of their social class (in fact it is doubtful that many of them recognise the concept of class). The Newcomers’ rejection of the idea that only certain types of people really benefit from university education is understandable; if the capacity to benefit from university education is innate as the poet T. S. Eliot suggested in 1948, then many Newcomers are pursuing an unachievable goal. At the same time, the suggestion that there is a special, transformative power associated with higher education also offends against the Materialists deeply held utilitarian values that regard education as the acquisition of useful knowledge and skills. The Inheritors’ reactions are more vehement. They are more dependent on education to achieve success in a way that is culturally acceptable and they are inclined to regard the existence of a select group (to which they might not belong) as intolerable. Nevertheless, the idea that there is a naturally occurring, archetypal university student, found more support among the Inheritors, many of whom would include themselves in that group. It also attracts support from the small group of culturist Newcomers for much the same reason. Almost half of the Inheritors and around a quarter of the Newcomers say that they have always known they would go to university; if there really is no difference in the quality of people attending university, or in the quality of university education, then their efforts to secure a place are pointless. In some respects, this attitude is anachronistic; it echoes comments made by the students Marjorie Theobald interviewed in 1961, when they asserted that securing a place at university was a public affirmation of a person’s worth. However, it is an idea that still resonates in the imagination of young Australians. To the Inheritors, going to university is a confirmation of their status as members of the intellectual elite. To the Newcomers it is a sign that they will become members in due course; but this response also confirms the argument made by Robert Manne and Andrew West that there is an insurmountable cultural divide in Australian society.

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Commitment to the principle of egalitarianism means that few Australians are willing to argue (in public at least) that selection for university places should be made on anything but merit. The young people who participated in this study are no exception. The majority of them, both Newcomers and Inheritors, support the idea that access to university should be equitable. Given the almost totemic value placed on the “fair go” in Australian culture, the relatively high support for this proposition was not surprising; however the Inheritors greater and more intense support for the “level playing field” might be interpreted as a reflection of the greater value that they place on academic study. Having been raised to think of academic achievement as worthy of respect, they support meritocratic selection for university. Or perhaps they realise that entry into the course of their choice would be jeopardised if policies designed to discriminate in favour of minority groups and non-traditional students were taken seriously. More confident of their academic abilities than the Newcomers, the Inheritors may well realise that meritocratic selection not only allows them to win the majority of places in the most coveted faculties and courses, but also absolves them of any trace of guilt by obscuring the biases that are built into the education process. Lower levels of support for meritocratic selection among the Newcomers may indicate that they are also aware of the bias inherent in the system and are unhappy with the consequences. However, it would appear that there is a sizable part of the middle and upper-middle class who are unashamedly materialist and not at all inclined to feel guilty about using their wealth to obtain whatever they desire. In their opinion, wealth is a visible sign of their talent and success that allows them to purchase other symbols of success including a place in an elite school or a university degree.

Responsibility for Payment

The issue of who should have access to university is linked inextricably to the issue of who should be responsible for paying for university education. Researchers and policymakers do not agree on the question of whether the reintroduction of tuition fees in 1988 discouraged students on low incomes and non-traditional students from enrolling at university. Meredith Edwards, a member of the Wran Committee that recommended the introduction of administrative fees in 1987, asserts that the Higher Education Contribution Scheme did not disadvantage low-income students since it was, in effect, an interest free loan (Edwards, 2001). Some argued that in spite of changes to HECS in the 1996/97 budget, university education was still a worthwhile investment – although not as attractive an investment as it had been previously (Chapman & Salvage, 1997) – but others disagreed, arguing that rising costs had become a significant disincentive for students from low socioeconomic status families during the 1990s. Michael Long (1999) refuted the description of HECS as an interest-free loan, showing that in relation to the inflation rate and cost of living adjustments it was a relatively expensive financial product; and although he was not convinced that the cost of a university education was a disincentive, he pointed to the fact that a significant number of students gave up their studies after rule changes made them ineligible for the Youth Allowance. In real terms the position of low

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socioeconomic status students had worsened over the preceding twenty years due to a combination of factors including rising fees and a decline in the real value of programs providing financial support (Travers, 2001). The effects were most pronounced in families that had no experience of higher education since they were less aware of the possible returns on their investment (Birrell et al., 2000). In 1998 the Howard Government introduced full-fee-paying undergraduate places that required a lower examination score than places funded through the HECS scheme. The lower entry requirement complicated the issue of equitable access for many young Australians and provoked a complex emotional response among prospective university students and their families: utilitarian Materialists regarded them as a sensible and practical move that offered a second chance to capable students who had missed out on a place by as little as 0.5 per cent, but culturists regarded them as a threat to the quality of university education and pointed out that they have allowed students whose results were more than ten marks below the cut off to buy places at university. Full-fee-paying undergraduate places for domestic students were phased out following the election of the Rudd Labor Government in 2007, but the idea was flagged once again during the 2010 election campaign by the Liberal party leader, Tony Abbot. In view of this ongoing debate, which was exceedingly vitriolic at times, it is not surprising that the young people in this study were uncertain about who should be responsible for the cost of going to university or that they offered contradictory responses at times. The majority of young people who participated in this study are opposed to a market-oriented approach to university. However, an examination of the minority of students who support the user-pays approach reveals some very real differences between the capitalist and culturist perspectives and by default, between the Newcomers and Inheritors. Opposition to fees is not as strong among the Newcomers and they are also more inclined to support the idea of using high fees to limit supply for the most desirable courses. The majority of Newcomers are capitalists, and to the capitalist, high course fees (like the high price of luxury goods) increase their positional value and might even increase their desirability. The great majority of young people who participated in this study believe that the government should provide financial assistance of some type to all students who meet the entry requirements; something that has never actually been the case in Australia. Newcomers and Inheritors express very similar levels of support for this idea and this pattern of response is consistent with the idea that all students who can meet the entry requirements should have equal access to university, but the precise reasons for their enthusiasm are not clear. There seems to be a generalised feeling that everyone ought to be treated equally, but at the same time it appears that their support for universal financial help has its origins in a feeling that they should be given some type of reward for getting into university. Newcomers are somewhat stronger in their response to this proposition and less inclined than Inheritors to argue that only disadvantaged students should receive government assistance. This suggests that the Newcomers, who generally came from lower socioeconomic status families, are more aware that the costs involved

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in going to university are a burden even for families that are not actually recognised as disadvantaged. Newcomers are more sensitive to the costs involved in going to university and more concerned about the long-term implications of completing their degree with a substantial debt. They are more likely than the Inheritors to disagree that paying HECS was fair. Policymakers may argue that HECS does not disadvantage low-income students; however many Newcomers and their families are not convinced and perception is what matters when young people make decisions about going to university. One study conducted in the early 1990s found that although low socioeconomic status students identified low grades as the most significant barrier to enrolling at university, they were more aware than high socioeconomic status students of other disincentives including the cost of further education and worries about finding a job after graduation (Parker, Cooney, Bornholt, Harman, Ball & Scott, 1993). These findings were supported by a paper delivered at a conference on the first year in higher education (Lintern & Johnson, 2004), which quoted one father from a farming community, who dismissing the idea of paying for a degree through the HECS with the comment “No daughter of mine will get into debt to go to university!”. As in response to the questions about paying tuition fees, Newcomers are more likely to agree that paying for their education through the HECS is quite reasonable. Having no family tradition of university education (or of free tuition), and a much greater commitment to the capitalist, utilitarian perspective, the Newcomers are not particularly disturbed by the idea of paying for a service. Nevertheless, it would appear that the 15 year period in which there were no university tuition fees left a lasting impression. Inheritors are less likely to support payment through HECS, possibly under the influence of their parents’ stories about free tuition before 1988. As has already been noted, many of the Inheritors have parents who are the first members of their families to go to university and they are well aware of how great an impact this opportunity has had on their families’ fortunes. Yet, many of them are ambitious and have plans to enter high-status, high-income occupations; consequently, they are not completely averse to the capitalist perspective if it is to their advantage. It may be that many of the Inheritors are ambivalent about fees because they are caught between feeling that education ought to be free in an ideal world and the dominant values of an increasingly market-oriented society. Despite growing up under a succession of government that promoted the dogma of user-pays, and argued the economic value of education at every opportunity, there is no overwhelming support for the neoliberal perspective among the young people in this study. Both Inheritors and Newcomers insist that that the government should assist students with the cost of a university education. The Newcomers are slightly more prepared than the Inheritors to absolve the government of financial responsibility for university education and to accept that individuals should make provision for their own needs while the Inheritors appear to be more aware of a possible conflict of values embedded in this proposition and more uncertain in their responses. This study did not ask directly about family income, yet it is reasonable

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to assume that the majority of Inheritors are not financially disadvantaged given their parents’ occupational status; they would be able to pay tuition fees if necessary, but half of them still insist that the government has a responsibility to help with the cost of attending university. They do understand that graduating from university will bring economic rewards, however; their culturist values insist that education benefits the entire community, not just the individual. In their opinion, it is reasonable that the government should use public money to support all university students through abolishing or reducing fees and providing of scholarships or living allowances. These young Australians are convinced that going to university is a matter of personal choice, but they also recognise that the community benefits as a result, so they believe that the community should pay.

Figure 8.1. “University education is so important to our community that the government should pay the costs.”

Nevertheless, this response adds further weight to the argument that there is a cleavage between the capitalist and culturist perspectives of society and underscores the source of the Inheritors’ discontent. As culturists, who regard university as more than just a positional good or even a private benefit, the Inheritors are not happy being asked to pay for something that would contribute to the well-being of the whole community. Their attitude is as aristocratic as were Newman’s or Eliot’s or Menzies’: they believe the whole community benefits from the presence of university-educated people. The universities produce appropriately trained professionals – doctors, lawyers, teachers and engineers – but they also produce thinkers, innovators and leaders without whom the community would

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stagnate or decay. However, there are substantial numbers of Newcomers and Inheritors who are not sure if university education is important enough to warrant government support. This response could be a product of their youth and inexperience, and they may not have considered how graduates contribute to the community, but it would also appear that many young Australian have no clear opinion on the role of government and are prepared to accept a society in which individuals are expected to act autonomously and engage in direct competition for resources (McLeod & Yates, 2006). The extent of the Newcomers’ support for the capitalist perspectives re-emerges into full view in Figure 8.2.

Figure 8.2. “Without fair access to university the whole community suffers.”

This figure illustrates the Inheritors’ clear and unequivocal support for the traditional, liberal view of the value of higher education: with few exceptions, the Inheritors would have had no difficulty agreeing with Newman, Jaspers or Barnett. However, just as the Inheritors regain their certainty when asked directly about the social value of university education, the Newcomers lose theirs and more that two-thirds of them are not sure if the community would suffer as a consequence of inequitable access policies. With their greater commitment to the capitalist, utilitarian perspective many of the Newcomers would struggle to identify the connection between their desire to go university and community welfare. Their response reveals their deep-held values, and it also reveals their limited interpretation of the nature of university education. Analysis of the responses to questions relating to access and payment verifies the existence of a cleavage between the Newcomers and Inheritors, particularly in the way that they perceive the value of university to the community. The

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Newcomers are more materialist or capitalist in their outlook, but they are far from hardline. Most Newcomers don’t approve of fees and are unenthusiastic about HECS. They are more willing than the Inheritors to support the user-pays approach to university education, as they have no cultural bias against it. Newcomers are more aware that financial constraints might prevent them from going to university; user-pays is not a welcome option for people with few financial resources. But if Newcomers are unenthusiastic about the user-pays approach to university, the majority of Inheritors are offended by it. Much of their dislike of fees and HECS can be attributed to their resentment at being asked to pay fees when their parents and teachers probably did not, but in their value system, education is about intellectual development and self-discovery and it should not be bought and sold like some commodity. Support for user-pays is limited to a minority of Newcomers and an even smaller minority of Inheritors. In spite of a general shift in public opinion towards a materialist or capitalist view of society, it would appear that traditional Australian notions about egalitarianism and fairness cannot be replaced easily with a system of values based on market forces. Few of the young people in this study are prepared to give up the egalitarian ideal to argue that different types of students should receive different treatment during the selection process or once they had enrolled. There sentiments are laudable, but bear little connection to reality. In truth, university enrolments are still dominated by applicants from upper-middle and upper socioeconomic status families. Moreover, those applicants are concentrated in the most prestigious courses at the most desirable universities – reinforcing the socially constructed types of the “normal” and “non-traditional” students (Leathwood & O’Connell, 2003). University might (in theory) be within reach of all school leavers, but not all universities are. Young people from low socioeconomic status families may dream of getting one of the “best” places, but their Year 12 subject choices discriminate against them. Their academic results are lower and they are more likely to be offered lower-status courses in less-prestigious universities. The majority of young people in this study were 17 years old and their responses to many of the questionnaire items suggest that they are not fully aware of the complexities involved in applying for a place and making the transition to university. Some of them may reject the offers they receive for a variety of reasons including wounded pride, while others who accept places will face an uphill battle; they are less secure, more prone to feeling that their work is not good enough even when they achieve high grades, and some live in fear that they will be “found out” as inferior, less clever and less cultured than their middle-class peers. If support for equality of access and opposition to fees and HECS are so high, who then is reconciled to the user-pays approach? Most of them are Newcomers. Pusey (2003) described the wealthy ones as globalists who have embraced the market in order to retain control over their lives and done well as a result; the less affluent he called improvers, not wealthy yet, but living in hope and looking for a way to make the market work for them. West (2006) called them the materialists; they are largely self-made, likely to work in finance, corporate law, business or development. Often they come from the sort of migrant backgrounds that excluded

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them from middle-class society a generation ago. Whatever name they go by, they are the people who listened intently to the message emanating from the Hawke, Keating, Howard and Rudd Governments and internalised the message that the function of education was to stimulate economic growth. They are highly individualistic and enthusiastic about an unregulated economy; for them success is about having better possessions and that includes a degree, not just because contemporary society expects one, but because a degree is a passport to material reward. While many Australians continue to believe that there should be more to education than a meal ticket, they are happy to invert Bourdieu’s (1989) remark and be economically dominant but symbolically dominated.

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Power, C & Robertson, F. (1988). Participation in higher education: Effects of the administrative charge. National Institute of Labour Studies Incorporated. Flinders University. Bedford Park.

Pusey, M. (2003). The experience of middle australia. The dark side of economic reform. Port Melbourne: Cambridge University Press.


Travers, P. (2001). Inequality and the futures of our children. In R. Fincher & P. Saunders. Creating unequal futures? Rethinking poverty, inequality and disadvantage in Australia. (pp. 102–128) Sydney: Allen & Unwin.

West, A. (2006). Inside the lifestyles of the rich and tasteful. North Melbourne, Vic: Pluto Press. Yergin, D. & Stanislaw, J. (1998). The commanding heights. New York: Simon & Schuster.

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CHAPTER 9

CONCLUSIONS

The “city of intellect” in a century for the foxes? (Kerr, 2001)

The aim of this book has been to explore and report on young peoples’ values, attitudes to education and their reasons for wanting to enrol at university. In drawing it to a close, I want to consider the question that heads this chapter and its relevance to the answers provided by the young people who participated in this study. Clark Kerr revisited his original lecture on the uses of the university five times over the years between 1963 when it was first published, and 2001 when the final edition was released. In each edition he commented on various developments that had taken place in the intervening years before considering the future of university education. In the fifth and last version, he drew on Isaiah Berlin’s 1953 essay on the hedgehog (representing thinkers who have a clear vision of the world and act according to a single organizing principle) and the fox (who represents thinkers who draw on a wide variety of experiences, appreciate the complexity of life and are able to pursue a variety of loosely related, occasionally contradictory goals) and speculated as to which of them would be better suited to managing higher education in the 21st century. The answer to Kerr’s question depends on what we mean by higher education, and at present, that is a question for which there is no definite answer. Successive Australian governments have defined “higher education” differently and constructed policy with different interpretations in mind. In Chapter One, I alluded to the idea that Australian educators have held competing views of the purpose of education: one which regards it as a way of reducing social inequality and one that sees it as a means of personal advancement through the social strata. In subsequent chapters I demonstrated the ways in which these two competing view of education have shaped public policy and community attitudes as well, but since the 1980s. Since the 1980s, the growing influence of neoliberalism has resulted in a move away from a belief in education as emancipatory towards a conviction that education is a way of enabling less-privileged members of society to join the middle class. As a consequence of changes in the policy environment, the Australian community’s understanding of the nature and purpose of higher education has changed, but the majority of Australians are not yet willing to accept the proposition that education is a positional good for which consumers must pay. They have understood and accepted that higher education has a utilitarian and a humanist dimension since the first universities were established in the 19th century. They understand that the universities provide training for the professions, but they have also been convinced that university education is inherently beneficial to the individual and that the presence of the universities has a civilising influence on society as a whole. Changes in technology, employment patterns and ideology have shifted the balance of community

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opinion towards the utilitarian end of the spectrum, but there is a residual level of support for the liberal-humanist perspective of higher education in the community and high concentrations of support in certain sections. It is disingenuous to expect young people to ignore the very considerable rewards that flow from a university education, and it will surprise no-one to discover that most of the young people in this study regard the primary purpose of going to university as qualifying for the sort of job that would not be open to them without a degree, but the desire for a well-paid and interesting occupation does not obliterate the desire for an intellectually stimulating, life-altering experience. The young people in this study are generally biased in favour of a utilitarian view of education, but this study shows that the majority of them – regardless of their socioeconomic backgrounds – want more from university than a meal ticket. They want all the intangible, humanising aspects of education alluded to by scholars and writers from Newman onwards.

THE SAME, BUT DIFFERENT

All of the young people who took part in the study on which I based this book, are aware of the practical benefits that will accrue from a university degree, even though a very small number of them believe that their own fortunes lie elsewhere. Likewise all of the young people who intended to go to university want it to be an enjoyable experience. Nevertheless, they are deeply divided over attitudes to knowledge and the value that they place on education. Analysis of evidence from the study confirms the existence of two distinct populations of young people. This secondary division cuts across the initial division of the sample into Newcomers and Inheritors and is based on their values rather than their family status or income: there are Materialists, who adopt a predominantly utilitarian attitude to life and to education, and Culturists, who accept the liberal-humanist belief that university will make them better people. These differing attitudes arise from differences in the young people’s stores of cultural and social capital; the ways in which their families, schools and social networks ascribe value to certain types of knowledge, behaviour and achievements Differences in young people’s interpretations of the purpose of university education, the extent to which they regard it as “higher education”, as opposed to further education, are linked to their family values or culture rather than to socioeconomic status. There are Newcomers who are Culturists; there are Inheritors who are Materialists (and their number is growing) but there continues to be a powerful connection between the Inheritors and the Culturist perspective on education. Well-educated families, who have great respect for education, perpetuate the view that education is inherently valuable. The connection between income and education means that the reservoir of support for the liberal-humanist vision of education lies predominantly within the middle and upper-middle-class domain of the Inheritors. Yet the idea of university continues to exert a powerful influence on the imagination of many young people who do not come from this background. It is probable that the Newcomers who have assimilated the liberal-humanist idea of education encountered it in discussion with their teachers –

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Whether the source their inspiration came from teachers, parents or the media is immaterial; the prospect of entering into a world of ideas, of debate and discovery is immensely attractive to them and they will not be fobbed off with the promise of a high salary if they give up that dream to become technicians or tradespeople. Having said that, the increasing proportion of students who have graduated with degrees in business studies, information technology and applied studies over the last 20 years is weakening the connection between having a degree and the liberal-humanist view of knowledge and the purpose of education. The growing emphaisis on quantifiable graduate attributes, the description of graduates as “job-ready” and the decision to allow TAFE colleges to offer degrees all undermine this connection even further. At present, the emphasis on the material and financial benefits of graduating from university is out of step with what young people want, but that may not be the case in future. Few of the young people in this study are prepared to argue against the idea that all applicants to university should be treated equally. Nor are many of them comfortable with the proposition that some applicants are more naturally suited to university education than others. Some of this support for equal treatment is based on self-interest and suspicion that special programs or allowances could disadvantage them, but it is consistent with existing research on young people’s attitudes to university access and it is likely that much of it derives from a genuine commitment to fairness. Academic results continue to be the one selection criterion that most young people are prepared to accept as legitimate. Nevertheless, there is still some lingering support for Eliot’s elite model of higher education. Variations in support for equality of access, or in support for the idea that only some people really benefit from university education, or for the proposition that most young people would be better off going to TAFE are all linked to the young people’s values. Culturists support the view that university is a more appropriate destination for certain people than for others. In their opinion it is the right destination for people who enjoy learning and who understand education to be a process of development as well as the acquisition of information and skills. Materialists, who regard university as no different qualitatively from any other form of education, are more inclined to argue that anyone can go. Previously identified links between values and socioeconomic status mean that Inheritors are more likely than Newcomers to be Culturalists; to support a broadly liberal-humanist approach to matters relating to access and selection. In their opinion, merit, not socioeconomic status should be the key. Moreover, the majority of the young people in this study do not support the idea that they and their families should pay for their university education through the Higher Education Contribution Scheme or fees, but opposition to the user-pays approach on the part of different sub-groups appears to be motivated by different factors. In general, Culturists do not approve the user-pays approach to university. Newcomer-Culturists are angry that lack of money might prevent them from taking a place in what they consider to be their rightful milieu: Inheritor-Culturists are aware that there was a period in which the Commonwealth Government assumed full responsibility for the cost of a place at university and resent the change.

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Moreover they disapprove of treating university education as if it were a commodity. Support for Friedman’s (1962) argument that governments have no responsibility to assist students financially since enrolling at university is a matter of personal choice is limited to the small group of hard-line Materialists, which is composed of a minority of the Newcomers and an even smaller minority of the Inheritors. There is also widespread support among young people for the idea that the government should not leave community development to the mercy of market forces, but take an active role in the process of governance. The majority of Newcomers and Inheritors are convinced that the government has an obligation to assist university students. The lack of support for the neoliberal position is lower than expected, based on research in Australia and Britain (Pusey, 1990, 2003; Marginson, 1992b; Karstedt & Farrall, 2003). The young people in this study have grown up with an education system that has emphasised individual choice and individual responsibility for payment and in an era when government policy has regarded education as valuable insofar as it serves the needs of the economy. They entered school around the time that the Howard Government began enacting policies based on the neoliberal belief that all transactions should be based on market principles. Throughout their lives, they have been subjected to the discourse that economic value trumps all other forms of value and that the market is the only reliable judge of worth. They have grown up with the mantra of “choice”, but it seems as if many of them have chosen to reject the prevailing discourse in regard to education. It is too soon to gauge their reaction to the changes to enrolment practices suggested by the Bradley Review of Australian Higher Education, but it seems likely that these young people would approve of the plan to broaden access to university. Mr. Rudd’s extraordinarily high approval rating among young Australian during the period in which he was promoting the education revolution also lends credence to this assumption.

Implications

Lack of solid evidence regarding what young people expect or hope to gain from a university education means that no government (or party in opposition) can confidently say that their higher education policy reflects what prospective students actually want. Policymakers from both of the major parties have tended to assume that young people and their families have a narrowly utilitarian attitude to higher education, or that they have conceded the traditional, humanist idea of higher education as the price of providing a mass system of tertiary education. In writing this book, I have reached the conclusion that while the majority of higher education policymakers are hedgehogs concentrating on a single, utilitarian vision of higher education, the majority of young people applying for university places are foxes who believe that education should be functional, stimulating and liberating at the same time. An obvious danger of basing higher education policy on a series of assumptions that are out of step with the hopes and expectations of young people is that it will produce unexpected and unwelcome consequences.

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Studying for a university degree represents a significant investment of time, effort and money, and if it is not attractive to young people they will not apply in sufficient numbers to replace the current workforce as it retires leading to shortages across a range of professions. The Howard Government provoked a slowing of demand for university places between 2002 and 2004 when it attempted to restrict access to university while promoting alternatives such as TAFE in the belief that the preceding labor governments had put over- emphasised the university sector of tertiary education and prompted too many young people from the wrong backgrounds to apply (Birrell & Rapson, 2006). At present, the Gillard Government remains committed to meeting the enrolment targets outlined in the Bradley Report, but this will not be possible unless a greater proportion of 18-35 year olds who have not previously considered university study can be persuaded to enroll. Inheritors will continue to apply, because university is inextricably bound up with their identity, but the Inheritors are a minority within the total population; university enrolments rely on attracting Newcomers who have less incentive to enrol and may require more persuasion. In short, the Newcomers must beome the New Inheritors, but this transformation will require policymakers to reassess their own interpretation of the purpose of education. And, as the old divisions between pure and applied knowledge and research become less distinct, it will require a re-evaluation of the meaning of ‘the university’. Undue emphasis on individual economic returns from university study may deter young Newcomers from entering professions that make a significant contribution to community well-being (and indirectly, to the national economy) but are not particularly well-paid: there is already a shortage of graduates in geology, agricultural science, hydrology and some biomedical sciences which is inhibiting Australia’s capacity to develop of new technologies (DEEWR, 2010). The declining breadth of higher education has the potential to undermine the prosperity and security the government claims to be promoting. However, the implications of the current government’s attitude extend far beyond skill shortages. If the Materialists have succeeded in devaluing the idea of “higher education” completely and undermining its epistemological and sociological bases (as Barnett feared had already occurred in the late 1980s). We risk producing a generation of graduates of the type that so worried Ashby (1958) – graduates with technical expertise, but little imagination, ethical judgment or empathy. The consequences for the structure of Australian society are profound. Reflecting on the differences between the students she met on campus in the 1990s and her father’s generation in the 1960s, Alice Garner (2006) was struck by her peers’ lack of excitement or even interest in the subjects they were taking and their reluctance to participate in any of the social activities on campus. She ascribed their lack of enthusiasm to the pressure of fees, but her father, who clearly relished his student days, also paid fees. Fees themselves are not the problem; it is the narrowness of vision and the relentless insistence that all knowledge, learning and research must contribute directly to the economy to be worthy of respect that is

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devaluing the experience of university and reducing the reality to something far less worthwhile, far less joyful, than the idea that inhabits young people’s dreams.

A NEW PERSPECTIVE

Current policy on higher education has reduced the emphasis on the utilitarian nature of university education to some extent; students are no longer “customers” as they were during the Howard Government era, and there has been a considered effort to attract undergraduate students from across the entire social spectrum, There has been more talk about increasing diversity, but as this book has established, current policy is not based on reliable information about what prospective students want from their experience of university. Although 16-18 year olds seldom talk in detail about the idea of the university, this study has shown that most of them continue to regard university education as qualitatively different from other forms of tertiary education. Moreover, from time to time, many of them do reflect on the nature and purpose of higher education as it applies to their own hopes and plans. Policy that did reflect young people’s complex desires accurately would look quite different. To begin with, there would be more funding available to cover recurrent costs allowing for greater diversity among institutions. At present the government advocates diversity, but it has not addressed the impact of years of underfunding which prevents the universities from developing distinctive identities. The Education Revolution made funding available for research and for programs that support disadvantaged students, and the 2001 review has tackled the issue of base funding for higher education (Lomax-Smith, Watson & Webster, 2011), but universities. Universities continue to rely on cross subsidization to support less popular, but perhaps equally important courses making it difficult for any university to specialise along American or European lines. Administrators are obliged to fit specialist courses into the gaps between large faculties or add them to departments in ways that are not always appropriate, and it is not uncommon for students to be forced into rethinking their specialisations because units have been deleted from the course as a result of budget cuts. To a large extent, successful transition to university depends on establishing good relationships with the academic staff and with other students so policies removing some of the more onerous managerial pressures from universities that require them to treat students as customers and prevent them from developing meaningful relationships would please many young people. As would policy compensating the universities for the loss of funds following the introduction of voluntary membership of student “unions” allowing university administrations to provide the range of sporting, cultural and social activities that have been traditionally associated with life on campus. Lastly, there would be adequate living allowances available to students who need them to enable all students to devote sufficient time to their education; the type of education (recalled by a number of former students in Chapters Four and Five) which includes young people honing their minds through discussion over late

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night suppers, taking part in Law Society debates or simply browsing amongst the library shelves as well as attending lectures, seminars and practical classes. These policies would go a long way towards making young people’s idea of university a reality one in which the intellect might be tended, cherished, and exercised - and practical knowledge or skills acquired - so that as graduates they might bring a power and grace to all their future work that would otherwise be lacking. And in this way become more useful to society.

REFERENCES

Ashby, E. (1958). Technology and the academics: an essay on universities and the scientific revolution. London: Macmillan.

Berlin, I. (1953). The hedheog and the fox: An essay on Tolstoy’s view of history. New York: Simon & Schuster.

Birrell, B & Rapson, V. (2006). Clearing the myths away: higher education output and workforce demand. Dusseldorp Skills Forum. Retrieved from www.dsf.org.au

Barnett, R. (1990). The idea of higher education. Maidenhead: Open University Press. Department of Employment, Education and Workplace Relations. (2010). Skill Shortage Lists.

Retrieved from : http://www.deewr.gov.au/employment/lmi/skillshortages/pages/skillshortagelists.aspx

Eliot, T. S. (1948). Notes towards the definition of culture. London: Faber Friedman, M. (1962). Capitalism and freedom. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Garner, A. (2006). The student chronicles. Melbourne: Miegunyah Press. Karstedt, S. & Farrall, S. (2003). The crimes of the respectable: Far too honest? Paper presented at BA

Festival of Science, Salford. Kerr, C. (2001). The uses of the university. (5th edn). Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press. Lomax-Smith, J., Watson, L. & Webster, B. (2011). Higher education base funding review. Final

report. Canberra: Department of Education, Employment and Workplace Relations. Marginson, S. (1992b). Commodity forms in education with emphasis on the positional market. Paper

presented at the 1992 AARE/NZARE Joint Conference Deakin University, Geelong. Retrieved from http://www.aare.edu.au/92pap/margs92220.txt



Pusey, M. (2003). The experience of middle Australia. The dark side of economic reform. Port Melbourne: Cambridge University Press.

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The New Inheritors: Transforming Young Peopleâ€™s Expectations of University

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