9 hours ago
Hundreds of university courses within teaching, languages, archaeology and media are among those being slashed as the tertiary sector pushes back against “confused” government policies.
Almost half of Australia’s universities have restructured in the past year, leading to the merging or disbanding of more than 50 schools of study and drastic reductions in course options for students, particularly in the humanities.
The University of Wollongong is cutting a string of disciplines including cultural studies, languages, archaeology and linguistics, while the University of Tasmania will merge its school of humanities and social sciences, combine politics and international relations into a single major, and no longer offer German.
Southern Cross University is discontinuing undergraduate degrees in contemporary music, art, design and digital media.
Australian University, which on Wednesday said it would announce no further involuntary redundancies as part of its ongoing “Renew ANU” process, has so far proposed merging or shutting the schools of music, sociology, crime and social justice, political science, international relations and public policy.
It will also close the Australian Dictionary Centre, the Humanities Research Centre, the Centre for European Studies and the ANU School of Music.
Its vice-chancellor, Prof Genevieve Bell, said the university was facing an “incredibly challenging period”, adding: “Living outside our means is not a responsible financial position.”
Guardian analysis based on data provided by every university bar the ANU forecasts the total figure of job losses to occur by 2027 at around 2,400 across 15 institutions. About 143,000 people worked in the sector as of 2024, according to the Department of Education – equating to a cut of about 1.6% of the workforce.
About 847 staff have already been made redundant nationwide, including 218 at the ANU and 259 at the University of Southern Queensland.
The proposed cuts across the sector include up to 400 positions – or a 10th of the workforce – at the University of Technology Sydney (UTS). Last week UTS temporarily paused student enrolments for nearly a fifth of its courses in business, design, engineering and IT, health, law and science as it pursued $100m in cost cuts.
That followed the release in June by Macquarie University of a draft proposal showing 42 full positions in the faculty of arts and 33 in science and engineering would be cut alongside almost 40 mergers and curriculum reductions, discontinuing majors in politics, gender studies, media and performing arts.
A spokesperson for Macquarie said the proposals were in response to “long-term challenges shaping higher education” and more detail would be made public soon.
The CEO of Universities Australia, Luke Sheehy, said universities were “understandably” in a difficult financial position because of a decade of “successive and consistent” changes to policy and funding settings, with research investment falling to a record low.
“Chronic underfunding and confused policy settings are holding universities back,” he said. “We’ve called for … increased funding for research, a fairer student funding system that doesn’t punish students or universities, growth for our international education sector and financial support for campus infrastructure.”
The University of Newcastle needs to save $20.6m annually while Charles Sturt University (CSU) has announced it will cut its operating budget by $35m by the end of 2027. The exact number of job losses at each institution has not been announced.
“As distressing as this decision is, it should not come as a surprise,” the vice-chancellor of CSU, Prof Renée Leon, said. “In recent years, the Australian university sector has been in crisis … jeopardised by needlessly restrictive and unsupportive government policies.
“Charles Sturt has been hard hit by the loss of international students and has no indication from government that it will receive a fair share.”
The president of the Tertiary Education Union (NTEU), Dr Alison Barnes, said the cuts would have a “devastating impact”. She said they followed 4,524 redundancies during 2020 and 2021.
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“It’s a shortsighted strategy,” Barnes said. “In almost every case [the cuts] are completely unjustified. No consideration is given to the enormous damage this does to the institutions, the colleagues that are left behind and the student experience.”
Barnes said the fact the federal government recently increased the international student intake for 2026, and has flagged that a new funding model will be established under the recently commenced Australian Tertiary Education Commission, showed that bad management – not policy settings – were driving cuts.
“Vice-chancellors [are] taking home an average of $1m a year,” Barnes said. “Poor workforce planning is a symptom of the broken governance structures that unaccountable university leaders operate under.”
The minister for education, Jason Clare, said the federal government would be advised by an expert council on university governance when he met with his counterparts in October, which would address the remuneration of executives.
On Tuesday, he announced that the commonwealth would strengthen the powers of the tertiary sector’s regulator for the first time since its establishment.
“If you don’t think that we’ve got challenges with university governance, you’ve been living under a rock,” Clare told an AFR summit on Tuesday.
Other vice-chancellors said existing policy settings, including the Morrison-era jobs-ready graduate (JRG) program, which increased the cost of humanities degrees, urgently needed an overhaul.
At the University of Canberra, where 200 positions and some strategic programs have been cut, the vice-chancellor, Bill Shorten, said it was “imperative” the federal government scrapped the JRG program and improved university funding.
“When humanities students of 2025 are paying double that paid by a student who graduated in 2019, and [they are] facing the additional challenges of cost-of-living and placement poverty … it is hardly a draw card,” he said.
A spokesperson for Western Sydney University also called for the JRG package to be scrapped. WSU expects to cut 300 jobs and have an $80m deficit next year.
“The cost of degrees is limiting access and participation, disproportionately affecting … students from low socioeconomic backgrounds,” they said.
