Ask most university leaders what a serious research institution looks like and you’ll get a familiar answer: broad, comprehensive, active across the full range of disciplines. For thirty years that answer has been right, because policy and funding rewarded it. That’s now changing, and the institutions with the most to lose are the ones that have been best at playing the old game.
I’ve worked on research policy in this country for about twenty years. In that time we’ve seen pieces of reform come and go: compacts, changes to the research block grant formula, the rise and fall of ERA. This is the first time I’ve felt the architecture itself shifting. ATEC, the institutional compacts process and TEQSA’s review of the Threshold Standards are, for the first time, giving universities permission to specialise. Most will benefit. A few will find it very hard.
The comprehensive research university wasn’t an accident. Three policy settings pushed the whole sector in the same direction. ARC and NHMRC funding, for a long time the only real research game in town, rewards discipline-based projects led by individual researchers. If you wanted more of that money, you needed researchers in as many fields as possible. ERA then evaluated institutions field by field, and breadth became a marker of standing. And the TEQSA Threshold Standards tied research to teaching: if you teach in a discipline, you research in it, to a defined level of quality.
Underneath that policy sat a business model. Academics were hired to teach across many disciplines and to research in them. Competitive grants funded whichever projects panels backed. But Category 1 grants don’t cover their full cost, so the overheads had to be recovered somewhere else. For two decades, that somewhere has been international student revenue.
Both halves of that arrangement are now under pressure at once. On the policy side, ERA is gone, and ATEC and the compacts create room for differentiated missions. On the revenue side, international student numbers are being constrained, and government is tightening control over which courses universities can teach and how many students they can take. The universities most reliant on Category 1 funding are the ones whose model has had the floor pulled out from under it.
The old model ranked every university on a single ladder of research performance. What I see emerging instead is three different games, played by different institutions against different competitors.
The first is partnership specialisation, and it’s where most Australian universities will play. Many have spent close to a decade shifting toward Category 2 and 3 income, pushed along by the 2017 changes to research block grants and the impact and engagement agenda. That has quietly reduced their reliance on Category 1 funding, and with it their reliance on international students to cross-subsidise research. They’re now well placed to make industry-, government- and user-facing research their core business rather than the exception. The condition is that they price it properly and get their overheads down.
The second game belongs to a small group of universities whose research is underwritten by a state government or the Commonwealth. These institutions can act like broad-based universities while drawing on a funding base nobody else has, and they still hold a healthy share of Category 1 funding for discovery research. In theory, they have the best of all worlds. They don’t need to specialise. Their game is to return visible, disproportionate value to the governments that back them.
The third game is the hardest. Australia’s largest research-intensives are home to much of the country’s discovery research, and competitive grant funding has been concentrated in them by design. They’ve been extraordinarily good at supporting brilliant individuals to do brilliant work. That strength is exactly what makes a pivot so difficult: it’s very hard to turn an organisation built around individual researchers toward serving external funders who expect defined value in return. So far, their response has been to seek more of the same, through more ARC and NHMRC investment and international schemes like Horizon Europe, which Australia has now formally joined. Over time, I expect them to compete increasingly on the global stage for talent, which means going from the biggest fish in a small pond to mid-sized fish in a very large one, up against institutions with far deeper pockets.
There’s an upside to all this. I’ve long thought the competition between Australian universities is the biggest source of wasted energy in the sector. When institutions are playing different games, they have far less reason to compete at every level.
Permission to specialise doesn’t mean every university will do it well. Across the institutions we work with, the ones making real progress share two things.
The first is an existing concentration of capability. The universities doing this well already have 60 to 80 per cent of their research activity clustered in a handful of areas. Sometimes that’s geography and the industries around them. Sometimes it’s the legacy of past leaders and their view of the world. Sometimes it’s a mix of strategic and opportunistic growth over a short period. Either way, the people, infrastructure and assets are already there.
The second is a vice-chancellor or DVC Research who is genuinely committed to that concentration, because they believe it’s how the institution creates the greatest impact for the communities it serves. Plenty of leaders nod along when we have this conversation. Far fewer step forward and act on it, because specialising means deciding what you won’t do. That takes a kind of bravery the old model never asked for.
Where specialisation is purely opportunistic, it rarely scales. You end up with a scattering of small, transactional industry engagements that keep things ticking over but never build into anything distinctive. The large, long-term partnerships that matter form where a university already has the capability to deliver on them.
That makes partnership management the single most important capability for any university right now. In last month’s article, we looked at who should actually run a major partnership, and the same logic applies here. At the moment, most research partnerships rest on individual relationships: a researcher and a collaborator, or someone in industry who went to university with an academic. Those relationships need to become organisation-to-organisation relationships, with real ownership and a deliberate path for how partnerships are grown, managed and renewed. Whoever does that well will thrive, whichever game they’re playing.
Three priorities follow for any research leader, whichever game their institution is playing. First, know which game you’re in. Partnership specialist, government-underwritten steward and international talent competitor are different strategies with different funders and competitors, and trying to play all three spreads resources too thin to win any of them. Second, specialise where you’re already strong. Map where your people, infrastructure and track record already cluster, and build long-term funding partnerships there, rather than chasing domains for their appeal. Pair that with honest pricing, so partnership research actually improves the financial position instead of adding unfunded overhead. Third, make partnerships institutional. Move from researcher-to-researcher relationships to organisation-to-organisation ones, with clear ownership and leadership backing that is visible enough to survive internal resistance.
For thirty years, Australian universities were rewarded for trying to be everything. The ones that thrive in the next thirty will be those that decide, deliberately and early, what they’re going to be.
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