The gloom after no boom: La Trobe University suffers heaviest hit - The Age

As La Trobe University staff logged back on last month after an uneasy summer break, they were greeted by an update from vice-chancellor John Dewar warning them that as tough as 2020 had been, this year was going to be even harder.

“Last year was tough for all of us,” Dewar wrote. Valued colleagues had been lost, salaries had been shrunk, courses had been discontinued or pared back.

La Trobe University will shed up to 300 more jobs in 2021, as it weathers a $170 million revenue downturn.

The university, with its main campus in suburban Bundoora, went $9.5 million into deficit last year Dewar told them, amid a $90 million downturn in expected revenue. Its forecast for 2021 is worse: a $170 million hit to revenue compared with pre-COVID forecasts and no end to the downturn expected in 2022.

The sustained closure of Australia’s borders had led La Trobe to give up on the return of full fee-paying international students in 2021.

“This will delay recovery in revenues until 2023 and beyond,” Dewar wrote.

He signed off his email by inviting staff to a virtual gathering on March 3, at which he subsequently confirmed that a further 250 to 300 of them would be made redundant, following on from the 239 full-time positions culled last year.

The vice-chancellor again blamed the loss of international students (while taking a side swipe at the “unsympathetic” Morrison government).

La Trobe is no different from every other Victorian university in that it is hurting from the closure of Australia’s borders.

But it was already struggling to make the most of the boom times the others enjoyed before the pandemic hit.

Victoria’s universities enjoyed the biggest increase in student numbers in the country in the five years before 2020, as enrolments grew by about 20 per cent.

But La Trobe largely missed out, increasing its equivalent full-time student load by just 3.77 per cent in that time, the lowest growth rate in the state.

Pre-COVID, the proportion of fee-paying international students at La Trobe was also Victoria’s smallest at 26.60 per cent, well below the statewide average of 44 per cent.

Yet La Trobe – the state’s fifth-largest university – is cutting somewhere between 490 and 520 full-time equivalent jobs, some 15 per cent of its workforce. On publicly available figures it is the biggest post-COVID redundancy toll of any university in the state.

Dewar said it was possible other universities would ultimately cut more staff than La Trobe this year.

“Most have said very little about revenue forecasts or the impact on staffing for 2021 and 2022, whereas we have been definitive and transparent from the word go,” he told The Age.

But Dewar’s honesty has not earned him the universal gratitude of staff, for whom 2021 is shaping up as a second round of “hunger games”, as one academic put it.

As La Trobe launched into another academic year, with thousands of fresh-faced first year students attending their first week of (mostly online) classes last week, morale among staff was desperately low.

“It’s bottomed out,” one employee said. “A number of people have said if we were all on campus there probably would be mass meetings and rallies.”

Staff are already “pretty tired”, even though it’s only March, another said.

“It’s death by a thousand lashes.”

The lack of campus activity at Bundoora has also hurt La Trobe’s finances, Dewar said. Student accommodation sits vacant, on-campus businesses have had a necessary rent holiday, even car parking revenue has evaporated.

Peter Hurley, policy education fellow at Victoria University’s Mitchell Institute, said the loss of international students was La Trobe’s biggest problem, even though it has comparatively fewer of them.

“Even though some non Group-of-Eight universities have a relatively small amount [of overseas students] they really rely on them because they don’t have ... a big research budget or a big reserve,” he said.

Universities such as La Trobe which are outside the prestigious Group of Eight must also work harder to carve out a distinct identity, or risk losing out to competitors, Hurley said.

“One thing you will see with prestige, it is certainly identifiable with student choice,” he said.

On one important metric of student choice – the proportion of year 12 graduates who select a university as their first preference – La Trobe is losing ground.

Its position as a university of choice has dropped steadily from 12.3 per cent of school leavers five years ago to 9.21 per cent this year, according to Victorian Tertiary Admissions Centre data.

La Trobe has sought to carve out an identity as a regional university, with campuses in Bendigo, Albury-Wodonga, Shepparton and Mildura.

But Andrew Norton, a professor in the practice of higher education policy at ANU, said La Trobe’s regional presence also helped to explain its sluggish growth.

“They have been struggling with their domestic numbers in recent years, a problem the others haven’t had and I think a lot of their grief comes from their strong exposure to the regional market,” Norton said.

Regional universities have also lost ground to a new rival against which they cannot compete on price: free TAFE.

With programs in disciplines such as nursing, education and social work that are the mainstays of La Trobe’s regional offerings, free TAFE has eroded enrolments at its four regional campuses by 10 per cent, the university says.

But though La Trobe is bleeding in many areas, it is not mortally wounded in the eyes of Australia’s higher education regulator.

The Tertiary Education Quality and Standards Agency has this year assessed La Trobe’s financial position as low-risk, just as it was in 2019, despite the damage the pandemic has caused.

Dewar said the university’s “realistic” reduction in size would help it emerge from the pandemic smaller but in a healthy state.

“There is no evidence of any weakness financially in the institution before COVID,” he said.

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2021-03-07 08:19:00Z
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