Virus has exposed failures in 'business model'

The University of Melbourne's Centre for the Study of Higher Education has found the fallout from the virus will result in 9.5 per cent of the tertiary workforce being lost.

That equates to thousands of jobs and we have seen already on the Border that positions have been shed at Wodonga's La Trobe University campus and Albury's Charles Sturt University base.

That means less courses will be offered face-to-face and some will go altogether.

In recent years, universities across Australia have come to rely on overseas students and the inability for them to travel or to now afford courses has produced a chilling result.

La Trobe alone is forecast to lose up to $520 million in revenue and the sector as a whole faces a $3.8 billion blackhole.

This paints a grim picture for the future of research as well as course provision.

It also comes against a background of the federal government pushing legislation through the Parliament to change the fee structure for degrees.

The government has put up a bill which it states is designed to have graduates better ready for jobs, but at the same time it increases fees for humanities courses and decreases them for STEM subjects.

However its progress is now uncertain with Tasmanian senator Jacqui Lambie this week saying she would not support the bill because it "makes university life harder for poor kids and poor parents".

Given the hurdles regional students face in having to move to capital cities to pursue qualifications there is obviously added upfront costs.

Senator Lambie hit the heart of what faces universities when she said "they've got to stop being a business model and go back to being a teaching institute for our children".

That is the dilemma, these institutions have relied on cash from foreign students under a set-up that has collapsed and now need to recast themselves in a world where the government has given the impression it does not value their expertise.