Australian University Staff Shedding During Pandemic

In "Australian University Staff Job Losses Exceed Pandemic Financial Outcomes" (09 May 2022), Frank Larkins from University of Melbourne carries out an analysis of job shedding during COVID-19. He concludes that "... staff losses were greater than warranted based solely on 2020 financial results ...". Of course, universities may have been anticipating an uncertain future, and so making cuts in anticipation of further problems. 

Not surprisingly, Larkins found that casual staff were most impacted, being the full time equivalent of two-thirds of cuts. However, if universities were making long term structural changes, reducing casual staff didn't make a lot of sense. Casuals have a low separation cost, not receiving the benefits permanent staff do. So if long term change to respond to an uncertain future, it would have made sense for universities to reduce permanent staff, particularly non-academic professional staff. The casual workforce could be retained in the knowledge it could be quickly reduced, if required.

The underlying cause of the changes might be the artificially high casual academic staff pool available. Universities have to compete with other industries for professional administrators, HR, computing, marketing and accounting staff. If offered a low pay casual job, potential employees could choose to not work at a university. However, in contrast academics have only a very limited range of non-university employers (some research organisations and government). Those wishing to be academics therefore have a choice between a low pay casual employment, or none at all. Universities were then able to discard casuals, knowing a pool would be available if need increased.

From an economic and human welfare point of view, having a large pool of underemployed academics is not good. The solution, for government, would be to end preferential subsiding of research doctoral degrees, to reduce the excess supply of PhD graduates. 

An Approach to Sessional Teaching Staff

Recently I was asked about an approach to sessional teaching staff at university. These casual staff are called tutors, teaching assistants, or graduate teaching assistants. They may be undergraduate students in the later years of their study, postgraduate students, retired academics, or working professionals who teach part time. I have occasionally carried out this role, studied the topic as a student of teaching and helped train tutors. I have come to the conclusion there is an inherent problem which needs to be solved by universities: university teachers are not required to be qualified to teach. I suggest this could be best solved by offering teacher training as part of degree programs, and would remove many of the problems with recruiting and administering tutors.

Offer teacher training as part of degree programs

University teachers are required to be qualified in the area they are teaching. Tutors who are students are typically at a later stage of their studies than those they teach. Such students make good teachers, as they can relate better to students than someone who has not been a student for decades. However, these tutors typically receive, at most, one day of training in how to teach, and there is not time before classes start to give them more training.

The solution to under-trained tutors, I suggest, is to offer concurrent training as part of their formal degree program. Students who wished to be tutors would be required to enroll in a teaching course as part of their degree, and would undertake this study at the same time they are teaching. Tutors would be required to complete at least a one semester course (one quarter full time study: about 100 hours study). Students would pay the normal course fee for this course and receive credit towards their degree.

Those who are not students would be required to undertake the same teaching course as the students, unless they already had some form of teaching qualification (such as a Cert IV T&A, or a Grad Cert in Educaiton). Those who were not students would not have pay the course fee, but have the option to do so if they wished to receive a certificate of completion, and credit towards further study.


Such a teaching course would be blended, with optional face-to-face classes, and would model good teaching and assessment practices. Much of the value of this would be from experiencing how to teach.