Universities will not lift productivity by pumping out more science and engineering graduates, a Canberra forum has heard.

Australian National University (ANU) economist Robert Breunig said homegrown inventions were not the ticket to economic prosperity. ¡°Ninety-five per cent of our innovation in Australia is adopting innovation from overseas,¡± he told the Universities Australia conference. ¡°It¡¯s coming up with new ways to solve problems.

¡°Who does that well? People that have a university education. People that can think nimbly. People who can think creatively. It¡¯s not about getting a STEM degree. It might be about getting a nursing degree.¡±

He noted that Treasury secretary Steven Kenny and University of Wollongong vice-chancellor Patricia Davidson had started their careers with nursing qualifications. ¡°I¡¯m not preparing people for careers,¡± said Professor Breunig, director of the ANU¡¯s Tax and Transfer Policy Institute.

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¡°I¡¯m preparing people to go out and deal with something that I can¡¯t even predict. I can¡¯t predict the jobs of the future. What I can do is create students who are literate, who are numerate, who know how to solve problems, who know how to think on their feet, who are open-minded, who are going to adopt other ideas. That¡¯s got to be the key way that universities are going to lead to productivity.¡±

While Australians¡¯ participation in higher education has surged over the past 15 years, domestic productivity has flagged. Western Sydney University vice-chancellor Barney Glover said average annual labour productivity growth had slowed to 1.1 per cent in the last decade, compared with a 60-year average of 1.8 per cent.

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The conference heard that this was partly because workforces in advanced economies like Australia had become more concentrated in sectors?such as health and social services, which were not ¡°high productivity¡± industries. This had diluted the statistical impact of mining, where productivity was about 10 times higher than the Australian industry average.

But the??had also been ¡°massively overstated¡±, the conference heard. ¡°We don¡¯t need to be the ones inventing everything,¡± said Cherelle Murphy, chief economist at EY Oceania. ¡°We do need to be the ones using it.¡±

Catherine de Fontenay, a commissioner with the Productivity Commission (PC), said delivering better graduates was the main way universities could improve productivity. ¡°Graduates who are going to be able to adopt innovation from overseas, are going to be able to innovate themselves ¨C those graduates are the main vector.¡±

Dr de Fontenay said that while boosting enrolments had been a big focus of the Universities Accord¡¯s final report, the effectiveness of teaching was just as important. ¡°The quality of our managerial skills [has] been a real handbrake on innovation and growth in a lot of firms,¡± she told the conference.

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¡°Universities have relatively weak incentives to provide quality in teaching. Academics [have] always had weak incentives to invest in teaching rather than research, [and] universities¡¯¡­ranking and the demand of students is primarily driven by research. The quality of the teaching has very little impact on their demand, their profits, their future growth.¡±

Dr de Fontenay said a??had reached ¡°somewhat different¡± conclusions from the accord panel on how to boost teaching quality at universities. She said the results of student experience surveys should be made ¡°more prominent¡± for students choosing where to study, and universities¡¯ online lectures should be made freely available to both potential students and regulators.

She said badly designed online education was a ¡°huge challenge¡± to teaching quality. ¡°[For] some academics, the main thing that drove them to teach well [was] the people awkwardly shifting in their seats in front of them. In a world where the cost of delivering a bad lecture¡­goes way down, because you don¡¯t interact with the students, then there are potentially some big risks.¡±

john.ross@timeshighereducation.com