˾ CEO Luke Sheehy
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Thank you.
And can I begin by acknowledging the Traditional Owners of the land on which we meet today.
I pay my respects to Elders past and present and acknowledge any Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people joining us today.
It’s wonderful to be here at Swinburne University of Technology – one of ˾’s fantastic 38 member universities – and to have this opportunity to speak with so many leaders from across the arts, social sciences and humanities.
And congratulations to DASSH on 25 years of championing disciplines that help us understand not only where the world is going, but the people and societies shaping where it goes next.
The theme of this conference asks us to think about the future-facing university.
That’s a particularly useful question right now.
Technology is changing how we work, teach and learn.
The skills Australia needs are changing.
The students coming through our doors are changing.
Public expectations of universities are changing.
And, in Australia, the policy architecture around universities is changing too.
So being “future-facing” can’t simply mean adopting the newest technology or designing courses around the latest skills shortage.
It has to mean something bigger.
It means asking what knowledge, capabilities and institutions Australia will need over the decades ahead.
It means preparing students for careers none of us can fully predict.
And it means giving people the capacity not simply to respond to change, but to shape it.
There’s something fitting about having that conversation here at a university with “Technology” in its name.
Because our future will not be shaped by technology alone.
It will be shaped by people.
By whether communities trust new technologies.
By how governments regulate them.
And by the choices we make about who benefits from change and how we bring people with us.
Those questions take us straight to the disciplines represented in this room.
The arts, social sciences and humanities help us understand people, institutions, culture, behaviour and ideas.
So, the question I want to explore today is this: What sort of university system does Australia need if we are going to shape the future, rather than simply react to it?
I’m looking forward to the discussion shortly.
To help set it up, let me offer a few thoughts from where I sit.
Universities should respond to the needs of the economy and prepare graduates for rewarding careers.
But a university is not simply a conveyor belt between school and the labour market.
The world changes too quickly for us to guess which occupations will be in shortage in five years and build the system around that forecast.
Our task is bigger: to build national capability, develop people who can think, adapt and keep learning, create new knowledge and help Australia navigate change with confidence.
There is probably no better place to start than artificial intelligence.
Every university – and every dean – is grappling with it.
Our students are certainly grappling with it, although perhaps with varying definitions of the word grappling.
AI is changing how knowledge is produced, accessed and applied.
It’s changing assessment, research and almost every workplace our students will enter.
But there is a trap in the way we sometimes talk about technological change.
We assume that because the technology is becoming more sophisticated, the capabilities we need must become more technical.
But I think the opposite is also true.
As technology becomes more powerful, human judgment becomes more valuable, not less.
When a machine can generate a plausible answer in seconds, the premium shifts to knowing whether it’s the right answer.
Whether the evidence is reliable.
Whether the question was framed properly.
Who benefits, who might be harmed, whether it is ethical and whether another human being will trust it.
Those questions draw directly on the disciplines represented in this room: critical reasoning, communication, interpretation, creativity, ethics, historical understanding, cultural literacy and an understanding of institutions and human behaviour.
We sometimes call these “soft skills”.
I think that phrase does them a profound disservice.
They are enduring human capabilities.
And they are becoming harder currency in a more technologically sophisticated economy.
This is why I reject the idea that there is some contest between HASS and STEM.
Australia needs brilliant engineers, scientists, computer scientists and medical researchers.
But take almost any major challenge confronting the country – AI, cybersecurity, the energy transition, climate adaptation, housing, national security or social cohesion.
None can be solved by technical capability alone.
We can have the engineering solution and lose the community.
We can have the innovation and get the regulation wrong.
Take the energy transition.
Of course, we need engineers and scientists.
But whether a community accepts new transmission lines, a new mine or changing land use is not principally an engineering question.
It’s a question about trust, politics, economics, history, culture, community engagement and social licence.
You can invent the technology and still fail the transition.
Technical capability tells us a great deal about what we can do.
The disciplines represented here help us ask what we should do, why we should do it and how we bring people with us.
And we can see that happening right here at Swinburne.
This university’s Governing Tech program brings together social science, law, ethics and computer science to examine how public values can guide AI and emerging technologies.
That’s future-facing – not HASS sitting on the sidelines of technological change, but helping shape the technology, the rules around it and the society in which it operates.
That brings me to graduates.
Australian higher education policy has spent an extraordinary amount of time asking whether students are “job-ready”.
I think there is a better test.
Are they change-ready?
And I know something about this from my own experience.
I studied music.
If you had asked me then what job that degree was preparing me for, I’m fairly confident “Chief Executive of ˾” would not have been high on the list.
But here I am, leading the peak body representing 38 wonderful Australian universities.
My career has taken me through government, policy, advocacy, international development and higher education.
I don’t spend much of my working day practising scales.
But the things I learned through that education travelled with me.
Discipline, listening, interpretation, collaboration, creativity and, perhaps most importantly, learning how to learn.
Those capabilities have mattered far more to my career than any neat line between the degree I chose and the jobs I went on to do.
That’s the point: your degree doesn’t determine your destiny.
The knowledge and capabilities you develop through university can take you places nobody could have predicted when you enrolled.
We can’t tell an 18-year-old today exactly which occupational skills they will need in 2050.
What we can do is equip them to learn, adapt, exercise judgment, communicate, collaborate and apply new knowledge in circumstances we can’t yet predict.
That’s what I mean by change-ready.
And it’s why the conversation Megan Lilly and Jobs and Skills Australia are leading about skills matters.
We should be better at articulating the capabilities within qualifications so students understand what they have learned and employers can see what graduates bring.
But we shouldn’t confuse making skills more visible with reducing a university education to a bundle of tasks.
Knowledge matters.
Intellectual depth matters.
Being challenged by ideas and perspectives you would not have sought out yourself matters.
And disciplines matter.
A university education does more than train someone for their first job.
It prepares them for all the jobs that come after it.
That matters because Australia is going to need many more university-educated people in the future.
Last week, I called on the Albanese Government to adopt the Universities Accord’s target for 55 per cent of Australians aged 25 to 34 to hold a bachelor degree or above by 2050.
Not instead of the broader 80 per cent tertiary attainment target.
Alongside it.
We should be unapologetic about that ambition.
This isn’t growth for growth’s sake.
It’s about what Australia will need.
JSA projects almost two million additional jobs over the decade to 2035, with more than one million in occupations that typically require a bachelor degree or higher.
I’m sure Megan will have much more to say about that shortly.
But the direction is clear.
We need more teachers, health professionals, engineers and researchers.
But we also need policy thinkers, economists, psychologists, communicators, linguists, historians and people who understand communities, institutions and human behaviour.
And here is the unavoidable reality.
The next generation of university students will have to look more like Australia.
We can’t reach 55 per cent simply by enrolling more students from the same families, suburbs and schools that have traditionally sent large numbers of young people to university.
We need more students from the outer suburbs, regional and remote Australia, First Nations communities, low-income families and more people who are the first in their family to go to university.
Access can’t be the end of the conversation.
Students have to be able to afford to participate, be supported to succeed and universities need the resources to provide the quality they deserve.
If we leave talent behind, we leave skills behind too.
Equity and productivity are not competing agendas.
They are the same agenda.
And all of this is happening while Australian higher education is being remade.
The Universities Accord has set in motion the biggest reform program our sector has seen in years.
We now have the Australian Tertiary Education Commission taking shape as the new steward of the system.
We are moving towards managed growth funding, needs-based funding, mission-based compacts and a more joined-up tertiary system.
At the same time, universities are working through new governance expectations, changes to the Higher Education Standards Framework, research security, racism and social cohesion, and a broader debate about accountability and public trust.
There’s a lot happening.
˾ supports reform.
The Universities Accord was right to say the system needs to be better planned, better coordinated and capable of supporting the growth Australia will need.
We supported the creation of the ATEC and worked hard to improve its legislation.
If it’s going to steward the system, it needs the expertise and independence to take a long-term view, understand research as well as teaching, provide frank advice to government and work with universities as partners rather than become another layer of direction from Canberra.
But stewardship should mean partnership.
It shouldn’t mean trying to centrally design 38 universities from our nation’s capital.
Universities need strong governance, transparency and accountability, and there are areas where the sector has needed to lift its game.
But the answer to every problem can’t be another layer of reporting or another mechanism through which government reaches further into universities.
There’s an important distinction between accountability and control.
A strong university system requires the first.
It should be very cautious about the second.
Getting that balance right is part of the reform task now before us.
But reform requires priorities.
And amid all this change, one piece of unfinished business is impossible to ignore.
We are creating a new system steward, changing how universities grow, changing governance arrangements and standards, and looking again at regulation.
And yet Job-ready Graduates remains.
This is a line I wish I didn’t have to keep repeating: JRG has to go.
I don’t think we need to soften the language around this anymore.
It’s a failed policy.
It was designed on the theory that government could change what young Australians chose to study by changing the price.
Make some degrees cheaper.
Make others much more expensive.
And students would move.
They didn’t.
The policy failed on its own terms.
And there is a certain irony here.
Parliament has never suffered from a shortage of arts graduates.
Yet we continue to run a funding system that sends the message to the next generation that studying the humanities is a poor choice.
I’m not sure those two positions sit very comfortably together.
And the joke would be harmless if students weren’t paying the price for it.
Under JRG, many students now face more than $50,000 for a three-year degree.
At the same time, around $4 billion has been stripped from the university system since 2021.
Students pay more.
Universities receive less.
And the policy has not achieved the behaviour change it was created to produce.
That’s a pretty extraordinary trifecta.
We say the future workforce needs people who can think critically, communicate, understand human behaviour, navigate cultural difference, interrogate information and exercise judgment in a world awash with AI-generated content.
Then we impose some of the highest student charges on many of the disciplines that cultivate those capabilities.
That’s a policy contradiction if I’ve ever seen one – coming at the expense of the serious workforce policy we need.
And there’s a broader contradiction for government too.
The government deserves credit for cutting student debt.
That was meaningful cost-of-living relief.
But we can’t keep cutting yesterday’s student debt while leaving in place the policy that creates tomorrow’s.
Eventually, you have to turn off the tap.
Replace JRG.
Reduce the burden on students.
Restore sustainable funding for teaching.
And fully fund any reduction in student contributions so universities aren’t simply asked to absorb another cut.
Because a cheaper degree delivered through a poorer university system is not reform either.
There’s also something more fundamental at stake.
The premise of JRG was essentially that government knew better than students what they should study.
I don’t accept that.
Governments should plan for workforce need.
Universities should respond to it.
Students should have good information about employment prospects.
But choosing what to study should be informed by their abilities, interests and aspirations – not an artificially engineered price signal designed in Canberra.
If we had applied that logic to my own education, perhaps somebody would have looked at a young bloke wanting to study music and told him to choose something more “job-ready”.
I’m rather glad they didn’t.
If 55 per cent is the ambition – and I hope government listens – we need a funding system capable of getting us there.
One that is fairer for students, sustainable for universities and based on what it actually costs to provide a high-quality education.
The same argument applies to research.
Australia needs to lift its research effort, strengthen links between universities and industry and turn more discoveries into businesses, jobs and productivity.
But invention is only part of the story.
A breakthrough only delivers value if it can be translated, adopted and put to work.
And that rarely happens within the boundaries of a single discipline.
You can see that across our universities.
At the University of Queensland, the Institute for Social Science Research works with governments and communities across housing, education, employment and Indigenous affairs – turning social research into evidence that can inform better policy.
At La Trobe University, the Centre for the Study of the Inland brings together researchers from the humanities, social sciences and environmental sciences to tackle complex challenges facing rural and regional communities.
Different institutions, different challenges, same proposition.
Take a problem that can’t be solved through one discipline alone, bring different forms of knowledge to it and turn that knowledge into something communities and decision-makers can use.
That’s what a strong research and innovation system should do.
There’s one final dimension to the future-facing university.
Universities are economic institutions.
We educate the workforce, undertake research and support industries and communities.
But universities are also civic institutions.
Our campuses bring together people from different backgrounds, countries, faiths and political traditions.
Universities test evidence, challenge accepted ideas and expose people to arguments they disagree with.
That’s part of their purpose.
A healthy university should be a place where ideas can be contested, assumptions challenged and difficult questions debated.
But that freedom comes with responsibilities.
The community is entitled to expect universities to be well governed, safe, responsible with public resources and serious about racism, antisemitism and all forms of hatred.
Accountability matters.
But so does autonomy.
Universities can’t fulfil their public mission if the pursuit of knowledge is directed according to the political preference of the day.
Academic freedom and institutional autonomy are characteristics of a healthy democracy.
History helps societies understand themselves.
Political science helps us understand institutions.
Economics and sociology help us understand incentives and communities.
Languages connect us with the world.
Philosophy asks us to examine what we believe and why.
The creative arts allow societies to imagine themselves differently.
These aren’t luxuries – rather, they’re part of the infrastructure of a capable, cohesive democracy.
So, if we’re serious about being future-facing, the task is clear.
We need universities that prepare people for change.
Universities that value deep knowledge as well as transferable capability.
Universities that build bridges across disciplines without flattening them.
Universities that open the door wider so the students walking through it look more like Australia itself.
And universities with the funding, freedom and accountability to think beyond the next workforce shortage, budget or election cycle.
Universities don’t simply mirror the labour market.
We help shape it.
We don’t simply respond to technological change.
Our researchers create it, interrogate it and help society determine how it should be used.
And we don’t simply prepare people for the world as it currently exists.
We give them the knowledge and capability to change it.
The students entering our universities today will take paths none of us can fully predict either.
Our job is to give them the strongest possible foundation for whatever comes next.
That means reaching 55 per cent university attainment by 2050.
It means getting the current wave of higher education reform right.
And it means finally replacing Job-ready Graduates with a funding system that is fairer for students and sustainable for universities.
Because Australia’s future will not be built through technical capability alone.
It will be built by people who can think, question, interpret, communicate, create, adapt, exercise judgment and work with people who see the world differently.
We need more of those people, not fewer.
And that’s why, in the age of technological change, the arts, social sciences and humanities aren’t becoming less important.
They are becoming more important.
Thank you.
