After Federation University this week announced redundancies and a restructure to improve its post-COVID outlook, Australian Catholic University admitted there had been a small number of staff losses, including in Ballarat.

"There is no doubt that COVID-19 has had a heavy impact on the university's financial operations and we prepared a recovery management plan to address this," said ACU deputy vice-chancellor and chief operating officer Dr Stephen Weller.

"Over the last 12 months, ACU has used a combination of cost-saving measures and reinvestment of surpluses, with a focus on keeping staff losses across the university to a minimum. While acknowledging there is always some small movement of numbers each year, we have no plans for significant changes for staff or students at our Ballarat campus in the coming year."

Federal member of Ballarat Catherine King said the Federation University announcement was "incredibly disappointing".

"We don't want to see any job losses particularly at regional universities, and particularly at Federation University," she said.

"It's really clear that regional universities are under incredible pressure because of three things: firstly the Morrison Government's decision not to allow universities to have access to Job Keeper led to loss of a lot of revenue and a lot of people, then there has been no international students in the country so universities have had two years of not having that revenue, then there's been cuts to research funding at universities," she said.

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Ms King feared the cuts would reduce the opportunity for regional students to get a decent tertiary education in their local area.

"We need to make sure our overall training system, whether it's university of TAFE, is actually supported and that includes ensuring they get decent funding and good accessibility for regional universities going forward."

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