The activation, appropriation and practices of student-equity policy in Australian higher education

Abstract

Current national reforms in Australian higher education have prioritised efforts to reduce educational disadvantage within a vernacular expression of neoliberal education policy. Student-equity policy in universities is enmeshed in a set of competitive student recruitment relations. This raises practice-based tensions as universities strive to meet specific institutional targets for low-socio-economic status (SES) and Indigenous student participation, whilst broadening participation more generally within the sector. This paper seeks empirically to trace the activation and appropriation of federal policy through two sites of higher education policy practices: a state government-sponsored equity practitioner body and two differently positioned universities, Dawson and McIllwraith, as they engage with low-SES schools. Working together Dorothy Smith’s insights into the textually mediated activation of local practices, Levinson and colleagues’ concept of the local appropriation of authorised policy, and Bourdieu’s notion of the contested field, we demonstrate that the generation of state level and institutionally specific policies for student-equity practices not only articulates to federal policy, but also appropriates the ruling relations of mandated policy. Further, the scope of these creative local appropriations is organised within a hierarchical academic field through which particular institutional imperatives, as well as the needs of low-SES students, are negotiated. The analysis demonstrates the vernacularisation of policy in the national rearticulation of global discourses, in appropriation at the level of the state body and in the practices of equity workers.

Keywords:

• higher education
• equity policy
• institutional ethnography
• student recruitment
• university outreach

Notes

1. ‘Widening participation’ in the contemporary Australian higher education context refers to activities aimed at expanding the participation of students from low-SES and/or indigenous backgrounds. Federal policy calls, in part, for university outreach into schools in low-SES areas in order to build ‘the aspirations, awareness and achievement’ of these students (ComLaw 2012.80.5b).

2. Dawson seeks to position itself within the world’s ‘top 400’ institutions as ranked by international rankings agencies, and also within the ‘top 5%’ of Universities within the world. More locally, they seek to position themselves as number 2 in the field within the state.

3. See Harvey (2005) for an analysis of neoliberalism and Ball (2013) for an account of neoliberal education policy. Neoliberalism gives priority to the individual over the collective, to the market over the state and sees the greatest public good achieved through the maximising of private interest and ‘self-capitalising’ individuals.

4. It is important to note that we are not able to explore further here the complicated intergovernmental policy relations and structures in Australia that mediate federal goals and state policy and practices. The HEPPP targets for the higher education sector are related to state targets for vocational training and tertiary education, in addition to a number of other National Partnership agreements. Although higher education policy is primarily a federal policy domain, its enactment at the state and institutional levels is non-linear, contested, uneven and messy.

5. Epistemologically, Institutional Ethnographic methodology eschews the ‘bird’s eye’ or logocentric view from no-where overlooking the social world, and instead insists upon locating the researcher’s stance within the social and institutional relations within which both s/he and the informants together are (albeit differentially) situated. Dorothy Smith andinstitutional ethnography assume this ‘standpoint’ theory or ‘partial perspective’, which holds that a localised position within the social relations situating the researcher is the only possible entree into an understanding of social processes. This theory trajectory has been articulated variously by feminist scholars such as Collins (1990), Haraway (1988) and Harding (1991). For a summary, see Longhofer, Floersch and Hoy (2012).

6. These individuals are positioned differently within their respective institutions, both organisationally and in respect of institutional power. The Chair exercised considerable influence in their own university, within the Group, and also in the federal higher education policy field.

7. McIllwraith has had some relationships with low-SES schools in the past, and variously positioned staff have demonstrated ongoing commitment to student-equity initiatives. What is argued here is that the current HEPPP policy and the preceding Bradley Review have forced the university to respond more systematically to these concerns than was previously the case.

8. Under formulas that were operative between 2010 and 2011, each low-SES student attracted what amounted to approximately $1800 in extra government funding. Since the last Federal budget in May 2012 this figure has been cut to approximately $1400 per student. http://www.budget.gov.au/2012-13/content/bp2/html/bp2_expense-15.htm.

9. The different habitus of the director and equity practitioners at McIllwraith, and their different positioning within the university, are important to understanding the appropriation of national policy to the logics of practice of McIllwraith.