Labor’s unscientific plans to boost science
I knew that sensible Labor higher education policy could not last. Today’s policy announcement on maths and science education contains another HECS remission initiative that could be worthwhile, by encouraging graduates with science or maths expertise to enter teaching. But another proposal is a waste of money:
Labor
January 31st, 2007 18:42
“The press release (which is all we have) is rather vague…..”
Talk about shooting yourself in the foot…….Judas Priest, Andrew…..couldn’t you at least wait for the release of the policy document before making yourself look the….[civility breach!].
February 1st, 2007 06:14
Andrew,
Is it really true that the number of places is simply set by the *government* bureacracy? At least where I work, maths and stats is conglomerated into other departments (which is common). Whether a course then gets run, whether funds are used to promote it etc. is then based on demand. Since there is never enough demand for pure maths/stats courses, the places simply get distributed into other (non-maths) areas where there is that are in the same funding group (or for that matter, simply more popular/cheaper courses). Thus there is a decent component that gets set based on demand that has nothing to do with the number of places set by the governement. I’m sure this must be pretty common in all of these conglomerate departments.
February 1st, 2007 08:45
Conrad - Universities sign funding agreements with the Commonwealth in which they agree to numbers of places in each of 12 funding clusters. Maths and stats have their own cluster, while science shares one with engineering and surveying. There is no problem with shuffling within a cluster.
This is a new system, having only started in 2005. As yet, there are no specific penalties for not meeting a cluster-level target, though if the total value of places (across all clusters) is less than 99% of the agreed amount the university will have to repay some of its funding, and there are penalties if total enrolments exceed the agreed total by more than 5%.
In 2005, the legislation waived all penalties. So we are really yet to see what the government will do if actual 2006 numbers are significantly different from the ‘agreed’ numbers.
New places, however, are prescribed down to campus and course level, so no scope for shuffling.
February 1st, 2007 09:22
Sorry to go a bit off-topic, but I find it interesting that there is an excess supply of science students/graduates and an undersupply of science teachers. I wonder what is going on here. Is it that science graduates have a greater aversion to teaching than humanities/social science graduates? Or could it be that the excess of science graduates is still less than the excess of humanities graduates? I suppose the answer could inform debate on whether the HECS remission scheme is likely to work.
February 1st, 2007 09:55
Rajat - To become a science teacher requires an additional qualification if you did not study science as part of an education or teaching degree to begin with, so that means more time and expense to get a job that probably does not pay as well as the alternatives.
February 1st, 2007 10:07
But, Andrew, isn’t that the case for teachers of all subjects?
February 1st, 2007 10:26
Rajat - As I understand it, 3 year Bachelor of Education courses take students straight from Year 12, while Dip Eds or Bachelor of Teaching are typically taken by people who have degrees in another field and want to become teachers.
February 1st, 2007 14:11
There are several ways to get teaching qualifications - you can do a 3-yr Batch. of Education straight out of high school, which generally qualifies you to teach primary school, or you can do a degree in whatever (usually arts or science, with two majors) and then a 1-yr Diploma of Education, which qualifies you to teach high school in your chosen subject area.
There are also now one-year Dip Eds to convert other degrees to primary teaching, but they’re not common.
So, IN THEORY, this hecs reduction removes the comparatively higher cost for science rather than arts grads to do their Dip Ed, as it will cost them the same in total.
I would suggest a better option would be to reduce the hecs of the Dip Ed, rather than the original Science degree.
February 1st, 2007 15:27
Thanks, that makes sense — although I’m not sure why you think shuffling isn’t occuring under this method — its just shuffling via name change, like calling statistics “quantitative methods in the behavioral sciences” or building this stuff into other courses as an even better disguise “Experimental design and methods”. I guess what will be interesting to see then is if the maths/stats people start getting undissolved if universities think they can get higher enrolments because of the change despite the lower funding (or possibly higher, if the cluster gets promoted).