When a university says it might "exit the market entirely", believe it

The Psychology Board has been pitching its five-year psychology degree to Canberra as a silver bullet: a streamlined pipeline designed to flood Australia with desperately needed mental health professionals.

There’s just one small problem. The institutions actually responsible for building that pipeline have run the numbers, and they are warning they may turn off the tap.

In its consultation submission, the University of Western Australia included a line that should make every policymaker in Parliament House break out in a cold sweat. It warned that under the proposed model’s financial and structural constraints, training providers “may exit the market entirely”.

They did the maths

Let’s be clear-eyed about this. Universities are not charities. They are self-interested institutions, fiercely defensive of their revenue streams and funding models. But precisely because they care about their balance sheets, when a major university tells a regulator that a model is financially unviable, you can be certain of one thing: they did the maths.

If you force universities to deliver an underfunded, placement-heavy undergraduate degree without fixing Commonwealth funding or funding clinical supervisors, they aren’t going to absorb the loss out of civic goodwill. They will cut their losses, shrink or close their psychology programs, and move those resources to degrees that actually make financial sense.

With this kind of feedback, pressing ahead with the preferred model as if nothing has been said is absurd.

The redesign was advertised as a way to create more psychologists, faster. Yet it is built on economic conditions so hostile to universities that it risks shutting down existing training capacity, leaving Australia with fewer psychologists than we have today.

You can’t mandate a supply-side expansion while burning down the factories that produce the supply.