Thanks to the feds and investment income

The Victorian Auditor General’s Office reports the state’s public universities improved their 2021 collective net result by $900m on 2020, to $1.2bn. Overall their net margin was 10.9 per cent, up from 2.9 per cent in  2020.

However 80 per cent of the improved result was due to Uni Melbourne and Monash U which particularly benefited from increased Commonwealth research funding, up by $110m (62 per cent) for Monash and $118m (58 per cent) for Melbourne. Both universities also had big investment lifts ($142m for Monash and $255m for Melbourne).

State-wide student numbers fell by 1.5 per cent, with a small increase in domestic EFTS outstripped by a decline in international student enrolments, from 116 000 EFTS in 2020 to 105 000 last year.

Only Uni Melbourne (“students took on more subjects”) and RMIT (more studying off-shore) defied the decline in internationals.

Staff numbers across the system fell year on year by 498 (FTE not heads) – way fewer than the 4036 FTE positions that went in 2020.

As to what’s next VAGO warns international enrolments will be “slow to rebuild and there is a risk they may never return to pre-pandemic levels.

And it counsels against leaning on the feds to fund operational expenditure too hard, for too long, “longer-term financial risks will emerge should this trend be prolonged.”

Ways to avoid this are “addressing Australia’s existing skills gap” and commercialising “research outcomes and discoveries.”