Author: Andrew Norton

Voucher confusion

~ Andrew Norton ~ 4 Comments

According to a news report in this morning’s Higher Education Supplement, the head of the National Centre for Student Equity in Higher Education, Trevor Gale, believes that vouchers may concentrate educational disadvantage:

Professor Gale argued notice should be taken of schools research from the UK regarding choice. “When the rule that students had to attend the local comprehensives was lifted, students from lower SES didn’t have the mobility or resources to exercise the choice,” he said.

“It suggests when you introduce market choice imperatives into the policy agenda you increase the concentration of disadvantaged groups in some schools and make it hard for students to access most elite schools. I think we will see more disadvantaged students represented in newer universities and less in the Group of Eight.”

There is an obvious mistake here, though one which highlights that vouchers in higher education are less radical than vouchers in school education. While in schools systems it is common for both demand and supply to be regulated (ie the state tells parents where to send their kids to school and controls the school), in higher education supply has been regulated but not demand. Prospective university students can apply anywhere they like. Indeed, the effects of a voucher system will not be obvious to applicants for public universities (prices would drop at private providers, so the change would be noticed there).

So any relative unwillingness of low SES students to travel is already built into the current applications system and won’t be changed by a voucher system.

Of course I would like to see proof that this unwillingness exists for higher education. The kids who have survived unfavourable social circumstances and the public school system, and have reached the point that they are candidates for university entry, are likely to be very different to the parents who are too lazy or incompetent to find their child a decent school.

What’s going on with science applications?

~ Andrew Norton ~ 24 Comments

Back in October, early Victorian university applications suggested that demand for science was well down, despite the government cutting the cost of science courses. But reports in today’s media say that science applications finished 19% up on last year. With overall applications up only 6%, that endangers my prediction that a price change would have little effect. The history of applications data is that it is rare for a discipline to gain or lose more than 1% of market share in a year.

The complicating factor this year is that several University of Melbourne undergraduate courses that draw on science-related interests and aptitudes – computer science, information systems, dental science and medicine – were offered for the last time in 2008, and we would expect that people aiming for those professions would now enrol in the new science or biomedicine undergraduate courses. And both show significant increases in applicants.

My other prediction of little supply-side response is also complicated by changes at the U of M, but without Melbourne offers are up 4% on last year. That is consistent with normal year-to-year movement.

ENTER scores are stable at Monash and Melbourne, the two big Victorian players in undergraduate science. Monash’s clearly-in ENTER was up 0.2 to 75.2, and Melbourne’s was stable on 85. So added demand is not doing much to push up the ‘price’ in ENTER scores of science courses.

I think my prediction that final science commencing enrolments will fluctuate within the normal range is looking ok. But if we see a similar pattern of increasing demand for science in other states, which do not have the U of M complication, then maybe the cut in price did affect demand.

Atomistic progressives

~ Andrew Norton ~ 12 Comments

Communitarians sometimes criticise liberals for supporting ‘atomistic individualism’. In a Cato paper, Tom Palmer gave examples:

[Classical liberals] “ignore robust social scientific evidence about the ill effects of isolation,” … I am quoting from the 1995 presidential address of Professor Amitai Etzioni to the American Sociological Association …

More politely, Sen. Dan Coats (R-Ind.) [has] excoriated libertarians for allegedly ignoring the value of community. Defending his proposal for more federal programs to “rebuild” community, Coats wrote that his bill is “self-consciously conservative, not purely libertarian. It recognizes, not only individual rights, but the contribution of groups rebuilding the social and moral infrastructure of their neighborhoods.”

Yet in current politics, it is ‘progressives’ who put individual rights above the contribution of groups – especially if those groups are not politically approved by the left of politics. Victorian Attorney-General Rob Hulls this week gave the strongest signal yet that single-sex private clubs would become illegal, unless they received a specific exemption from the Victorian human rights commission:

“Ideally, all private clubs should demonstrate they are set up in a manner which is consistent with the equal opportunity … (so) clubs like the Athenaeum should have to demonstrate that they are set up in a manner which promotes equality.”

On this view, it is not enough that there are significant opportunities in society. Every formal institution within that society has to ‘promote equality’. And any organisation of people based on some characteristic the flipside of which makes people with any of wide variety of characterstics ineligible for membership is not permitted unless approved by the state. It is in effect a draconian attack on freedom of association and civil society.
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Is Coles branding misleading?

~ Andrew Norton ~ 5 Comments

Yesterday in its ‘essay’ section, the SMH published an article by Robert Laughlin criticising how easily patents are granted, thus locking up knowledge that in Laughlin’s view ought to be available for others to use. I have some sympathy for the view that intellectual property rights have gone too far, with the benefits (and there are some) not being sufficient to compensate for the costs. This is why I am inclined to think that parallel book importation laws should be relaxed.

So it was a little ironic that the lead news story in the same paper was an attack on Coles for supposedly misleading consumers by using a tick symbol on its products (which I notice Coles has trademarked, with a circle around it), which it is alleged is too similar to the Heart Foundation tick for healthy foods. While Coles is changing the tick, the paper claims that this is in reaction to “alleged misleading and unethical practices.”

But surely a tick is common sign for something being correct or good, which hasn’t been (and shouldn’t be) appropriated by any group or cause for its exclusive use?

The argument against Coles seems to be that in its contextual use on food it is too easily confused with the Heart Foundation tick. But in the context of a Coles supermarket it’s pretty clear that it is part of the store’s branding, and not a sign that the product is good for the heart. On a quick wander around my local Coles this morning, I noticed the Coles tick on laundry detergent, toilet paper, and an iron. Few customers are likely to think that consuming these products would be good for their hearts.

While the SMH did find an 84-year old who says he was confused by the tick, I don’t think this is enough to justify forcing Coles to change its logo or to give it a page one beating up.

How much will Bradley vouchers be worth?

~ Andrew Norton ~ 8 Comments

In an article I wrote for the Higher Education Supplement last week, I estimated that the per student funding increase from the Bradley review could be as low as 1-2% for most disciplines. I now think that this is an underestimate.

The difficulty is that though prices for student places are a critical element of a voucher scheme, the Bradley report doesn’t recommend either actual prices or a price-setting mechanism. The only specific proposal on prices is that teaching and nursing courses get the 25% increase in student contributions they missed out under the Nelson reforms in 2005.

So any estimates of prices rely on inference and assumptions. The committee recommends a 10% increase in teaching and learning funding, but also two clawbacks on teaching and learning funding. 4% of teaching and learning funding would go to social inclusion programs, and another 2.5% to a ‘performance’ fund that could include the results of teaching surveys, graduate outcomes etc. Because these clawbacks would be distributed based on criteria either than student enrolments, I take the view that this funding should not be counted towards voucher values.
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Who should receive university economic rents?

~ Andrew Norton ~ 22 Comments

In the Higher Education Supplement this morning, Griffith University economist Ross Guest considers what should be done with ‘economic rents’ that prestigious universities can extract by charging high fees. Rather than imposing price control as the Bradley committee suggests, Guest says that:

The efficient way of dealing with economic rents is to tax them; this is how we deal with resource rents earned by mining companies, for example. So why not tax any excessive economic rents earned by institutions and use the tax revenue to offer means-tested subsidies to students?

I think it is pretty clear that some universities charge fees for full-fee students that are well in excess of the cost of delivering the course. In my submission to the Bradley review (table 6) I showed that sandstone universities charge international students $6,000 to $10,000 a year more than Dawkins universities for similar courses. Some of that is probably genuine quality differences – better academics and facilities. But I think we can assume that there is some ‘economic rent’ here.

There seem to be three broad options:
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How newspapers report old news

~ Andrew Norton ~ 2 Comments

In the SMH this morning, there is a story on the rorting of Youth Allowance. With an added error*, it is the same story reported on this blog several weeks ago. We both got it from the Bradley report.

But because the Bradley report is old news, we get this formulation:

There was “strong evidence” that the allowance was “quite poorly targeted and inequitable”, the authors of the Bradley review into higher education told the Federal Government.

Leaving vague when they told the federal government, and by what means they told the federal government.

If something is important, I don’t think there is a great problem in reporting it later if it was missed the first time. But I dislike media reports that make the original source unclear.

* The error is this: “The Government is considering a significant tightening of the payment to bring it in line with the Family Benefit payment. The change would mean some 27,000 students now receiving it would be ineligible.” In fact, this is a reference to making more students eligible (not ineligible) by lifting the amount parents can earn before students start losing their benefit. The added ineligibility would come from tightening the “independence” criteria.

Why do squatters get to stay so long in university property?

~ Andrew Norton ~ 18 Comments

Melbourne readers will probably have heard of a long-running occupation by squatters of Melbourne University-owned terrace houses in Carlton (disclosure: some of my colleagues have been involved in this issue, but I have not). The squatters call themselves the Student Housing Action Collective, and have rested their case for staying partly on the ‘homelessness’ caused by a very tight inner Melbourne rental market.

What’s interesting about this case, I think, are the assumptions it reveals about the relationship between universities and their students. Legally, this looks like a straightforward trespass case. Many of us would like to live in a Faraday St terrace house, but none of us have the right to do so without the landlord’s permission, and we would quickly be thrown out if we tried to move in. But in this case, the squatting has dragged on for many months.

Every party to this dispute has been acting as if the normal rules do not apply. The squatter-activists (the squativists?) correctly judged that the University would not just throw them out. The University has been negotiating with the squatters despite its strong legal case against them. The media has been reporting the story as if the squatters have a case for staying.

In an Age op-ed this morning, housing lawyer Chris Povey put his finger on the underlying assumption:

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Literary luvvie draws long bow

~ Andrew Norton ~ 27 Comments

The Lavartus Prodeo Agincourt Awards for the Longest Bow – designed to highlight arguments built on exaggerated and hence tenuous links – don’t seem to have continued beyond the initial nomination and my counter-nomination of the nominator (glass houses, etc).

However, the SMH published a worthy entrant yesterday. As regular readers may recall, the literary luvvies are campaigning strongly against unrestricted ‘parallel importing’ of books into Australia, which would allow booksellers to import any book even if it is, or will be, also issued by a local publisher. The issue is the subject of a Productivity Commission inquiry.

In the SMH yesterday, author and journalist Malcom Knox tries to draw a connection between claimed low readership of books in India and the fact that India is a ‘land of piracy’, and a further connection to say that this is relevant to Australia
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Did Katherine Wilson (aka Sharon Gould) hoax the wrong magazine?

~ Andrew Norton ~ 27 Comments

As Jason Soon and Don Arthur correctly predicted yesterday, ‘Sharon Gould’ is left-wing activist Katherine Wilson.

Jason and I have a bit of a history with Wilson, having been involved in a lively 2006 debate at Lavartus Prodeo on think-tanks and the significance (or otherwise) of who funds them. Wilson tried to wipe her past by getting LP to delete her posts and comments, but it all lives on in the National Library’s archives.

The pieces of the story are really starting to fit together now. Wilson knows the right is evil, but she hasn’t actually read very much of what they say, and is vague on the differences between the various right-of-centre groups and magazines.

For a hoax using gullibility for pro-genetic modification views – Wilson is an anti-GM activist – the target should have been the IPA Review. The IPA has published lots of pro-GM stuff over the years (eg this). The more conservative Quadrant contributors, as I argued on Tuesday, are much less likely to be pro-GM, and indeed likely to be worried about the way genetic science is developing (Quadrant doesn’t have much on its website, but this is the kind of thing I am thinking of).

Of course, IPA Review editor Chris Berg does not have Keith Windschuttle’s reputation as a footnote fetishist, but to make the political point on GM foods he should have been the target. Wilson hoaxed the wrong magazine.
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