Beyond casualisation: pathway colleges at the corporate edge of the Australian research university

Abstract The casualisation of academic work in Australian higher education is increasingly well analysed, yet pathway colleges remain less well understood within that discussion. Existing studies describe pathway educators largely through liminality, unstable professional identity, and racialised or linguistic misrecognition, producing an image of a marginal and precarious workforce. Drawing on publicly available legal and industrial documents, and treating Monash College as the clearest documented case rather than a representative sample, this article explains how that condition is organised through corporate and legal form. Pathway labour is a specific labour form at the corporate edge of the research university — the zone where the university’s legal perimeter meets the subsidiary through which its credentialled but prestige-deficient teaching is externalised. The form is analysed in four ways: highly qualified teachers occupy degraded positions; separate legal personality lets universities retain brand, revenue, and student pipeline while holding the employment relation at a distance; enterprise agreements stratify conditions within the same corporate structure; and institutional injury is delivered through lawful and procedurally correct arrangements. The analysis carries determinate implications for the standing pathway teachers should hold once the corporate boundary is set aside, and locates reform in the legal form itself. Although documented in Australia, the corporate edge recurs wherever universities externalise credentialled teaching through separate legal entities, and offers a transferable unit for analysis across international higher education.