More dentists are great, no question. Any policy that can produce more qualified dentists and doctors should be supported.

Further, somebody willing to pay money to get into dentistry will have more motivation to finish presumably.

What I object to is the inherent bias of shifting the entry standard downwards for cash (it’s still a bell curve isn’t it?). If you want more dentists, I don’t see a problem with either shifting the standards (we have evidence that the 99.4 standard is apparently excessive for dentistry, since $60,000 will buy you 3.4 points).

The government is rolling in cash it refuses to spend on important areas like this. Instead, we get an old-australia policy of biasing the intake to those with wealth or access to it (note: I don’t think that is the intention of the policy, just the outcome). Funding medical/dentistry places is surely small change compared to a strange middle class welfare which gives with one hand and demands payment with the other.

The alternative (borrowing the money through the government FEE-HELP scheme) sounds OK unless you feel that graduating with more than $60,000 worth of debt is good social policy. Most of these people are young and that is an awful lot of money.

I can’t prove it’s discriminatory, personal experience suggests it probably is. I’d be interested to know what the correlation is between entry scores and regional students who might be more willing to work where there is a scarcity of doctors. If you want to bias the intake, how about attempting to influence both the scarcity and distribution at the same time?

I will say that not all federal government decisions in these areas have been misguided (new medical school up here at Armidale is excellent policy, even if the majority of the graduates still end up back in Sydney), it’s a start at addressing the problems in a rational way.

“Students can obtain a full-fee place with marks below the entry score for a Commonwealth or HECS place. The entry score for a HECS law place at Melbourne was 99.4, while the fee-paying score was 96.

“Opposition education spokeswoman Jenny Macklin said the student figures made a mockery of the Government’s claims that no more than 35 per cent of students would pay full fees.

“People who can pay $96,000 to study law at Melbourne University, now have more than twice the chance of getting in as those who don’t have the money to pay full fees,” she said.

http://www.theage.com.au/news/National/Dramatic-lift-in-fullfee-uni-students/2005/02/23/1109046987717.html

Why exactly should your parents money be the deciding factor in whether you get a place in a highly sought after vocational degree like dentistry?

And please spare us the stuff about ‘dullard rich kids’, since at places like Melbourne (the largest enroller of such students) many of them come in on ENTERs of 95+, and the dumbest of them could walk into almost any course at most other Australian universities.

Such prejudice!