Author: Andrew Norton

How bad is my quality of life?

~ Andrew Norton ~ 10 Comments

According to this Bankwest quality of life ranking, the Melbourne local government area, which includes Carlton, has the lowest quality of life in Victoria, and one of the lowest rankings in the whole country.

But I don’ t want to live anywhere else. Am I mad, or is this research bad?

To be sure, city living is not perfect. It can be a bit noisy. In Carlton, the presence of public housing, charities, and hospitals serving the mentally ill means that observance of the social niceties is not as high as it might be in Ku-ring-gai, the top ranked local government area in the country. And of course deeply unsound political views prevail (though it is not as bad as the city of Yarra across the road).

But inner Melbourne has a huge amount going for it too. The mix of cafes, bars and restuarants is the best in the country. There is a an excellent selection of shops. I’m not a sports fan, but for those who are there is an unmatched concentration of sporting venues around the CBD. There are beautiful 19th century gardens (including one just down the street from me). There are plenty of cinemas and theatres. There are two good universities in or near the CBD.
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Should universities certify knowledge?

~ Andrew Norton ~ 8 Comments

In his usual provocative way, last week Charles Murray – promoting a new book – argued that

Young people entering the job market should have a known, trusted measure of their qualifications they can carry into job interviews. That measure should express what they know, not where they learned it or how long it took them. They need a certification, not a degree.

As Murray notes, certification already exists for some professions, but he wants it extended to more occupations. On Murray’s account, reliance on degrees instead of certification is inefficient, because the necessary knowledge to pass a certification test could be acquired in less time and at lower cost than years at university, and works against equal opportunity, because the absence of any common metric for measuring knowledge relevant to many occupations means that employers fall back on high-prestige university brands as proxies for certification. According to Murray

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Should universities self-accredit?

~ Andrew Norton ~ 16 Comments

It’s a pity the terms of reference for the Senate’s academic freedom inquiry were confused and implicitly threatening interference in academic affairs, because this has brought out the reflexive defensiveness of academics, rather than encouraging them to reflect critically on university practices.

An op-ed in this morning’s Age by University of Sydney academic Ben Saul is a case in point. While he correctly, in my view, argues that students with views contrary to those of academics are rarely treated unprofessionally, his argument on existing mechanisms for controlling bias or prejudice among academics will not reassure sceptics.

For research, he argues that peer review ‘maintains rigorous academic standards’. But peer review is a far from failsafe mechanism. The editors and others who send manuscripts out for peer review may not know the best people to contact, or may not be able to persuade them to act as referees. So expertise may be lacking. Partly because it is anonymous, academics (and others) put very varying levels of effort into it. I’ve come across plenty of refereed publications with multiple factual errors, particularly when I was working on ‘economic rationalism’. Unfortunately, very few academic students of economic rationalism knew very much about economics. With authors and referees as ignorant as each other, errors went undetected.

But at least peer review for research is better than what happens with course materials. Saul tells us that:
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Does staff turnover cost 10% of GDP?

~ Andrew Norton ~ 7 Comments

According to reports in today’s Fairfax papers

STAFF turnover is costing Australian businesses $100 billion a year in lost productivity, training and recruitment costs – and generation Y is copping much of the blame. …

A new study shows staff turnover for workers in their 20s is running at 40 per cent a year. The rate for all workers is 18 per cent.

$100 billion is about 10% of GDP, and more than double all of education’s contribution to GDP. It doesn’t seem very likely that staff turnover has such a negative effect on the economy, particularly as there is also a balancing positive effect in achieving a better match between jobs and workers.

And if 18% of all workers are replaced each year at a cost of $100 billion it means that every job change costs about $52,000. Maybe some high-level job turnover has costs at that level, but in the industries where staff churn is greatest, accommodation, restuarants, cafes and retail, I’m sure it is a very small fraction of that, given the relatively low levels of skill typically required and the fact that employees will bring skills from previous jobs to new jobs.

Gen Y is being unfairly blamed too. Continue reading “Does staff turnover cost 10% of GDP?” →

The sociology of the climate change debate

~ Andrew Norton ~ 61 Comments

John Quiggin and other vigilant bloggers swarmed on this climate change ‘denialist’ article by American historian Arthur Herman, who was in Australia recently as a guest of the CIS (to talk about the Enlightenment rather than climate change).

Quiggin argues that ‘just about everyone on the political right [has signed] up to a set of beliefs that are dictated entirely by political tribalism’.

This is a little tough but tribalistic explanations surely explain much – on both sides of the debate. Very few people are in any position to assess the science, and so the issue has to be judged via various heuristics, such as expert views, personal observation and experience (a long drought), and the views of other members of one’s social group. These heuristics help explain why an emissions trading scheme has majority support despite minimal public knowledge of even what it is, much less an informed personal assessment of whether or not it is likely to work.

It would not have been hard to guess what preconceptions someone like Arthur Herman would bring to this issue. In the 1990s he published a book called The Idea of Decline in Western History, which gives us 400 pages of prophets of doom before it even gets to environventalism. To Herman, the climate change apocalyptics must look like just another in a long line of doomsayers, with the same (minimal) prospects of being proven right.
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Do law students outnumber lawyers?

~ Andrew Norton ~ 2 Comments

“I was under the impression that there were as many people in law schools as there are lawyers.”

– commenter Conrad, 14 August 2008.

This factoid has been around for a long time. As long ago as 1996 an article (pdf) could open by saying that

we are often reminded of the startling fact that there are more students currently studying to be lawyers than there are lawyers practising law,

though it did not actually examine whether that assumption was true.

Working out how many law students we have is not straightforward. The published student statistics report for law only in ‘load’, which means units of study coded as law. People who are not enrolled in law degrees do law subjects, eg commerce students take business law units. But with this caveat, in 2007 law units were equivalent to 24,979 full-time undergraduate students. Another way of estimating numbers is through the offers and acceptance data. In 2008, 5,672 persons accepted a place in a law course. But none of these numbers can account for JD programs, which are professional entry qualifications taught as postgraduate degrees (for which universities can charge full fees – expect to see these expand as the government’s ban on undergraduate full-fee places starts to bite).
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Will markets foster higher education diversity?

~ Andrew Norton ~ 19 Comments

One of the more curious claims made in submissions to the higher education review is that markets will drive homogenisation rather than diversity. In my submission (pdf), I identify four market design problems that I believe limit diversity:

* access of foreign-owned providers to the FEE-HELP loan scheme is made very difficult (I expand on this here)

* Commonwealth-supported places are not available to most private providers of higher education

* student contribution amount regulations means that all public universities have to operate at the bargain-basement end of the market (though the effect of this has been alleviated somewhat by international student fees)

* a rigid quota system of allocating student places limits the scope for disciplinary specialisation
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Should scholarships be exempt from Centrelink income tests?

~ Andrew Norton ~ 9 Comments

One popular theme in the submissions to the Bradley review of Australian higher education policy is that scholarships paid by universities ought to be exempt from Centrelink income tests. The problem is that if the scholarship gives a student on Youth Allowance more than $118 a week it will be caught by the YA income test, and so the scholarship saves the government 50c in the YA dollar. The universities reckon that this provides a disincentive to provide income-support scholarships.

While the frustration of universities is understandable, there should be no special treatment of scholarship income. The main function of scholarships is positional competition between universities. Mostly they compete for the very bright students. Often these students come from privileged backgrounds, but even when they do not their high intellectual ability means that they are likely to do very well in life whether they get a scholarship or not. The public policy case for sending special extra financial rewards their way, through exempting them from welfare reductions that all other students must suffer, is very weak. Indeed, exemption would be a particularly egregious example of the generally regressive nature of higher education subsidies. Continue reading “Should scholarships be exempt from Centrelink income tests?” →

Could we have a real ‘education revolution’?

~ Andrew Norton ~ 5 Comments

Submissions to the Bradley review of higher education policy are now appearing on the DEEWR website. As a veteran of such reviews – this is the third comprehensive review I have been involved with in just over a decade – my expectations of its outcomes are modest. I have two failures behind me.

But in The Weekend Australian yesterday there was some sign that the government is thinking seriously about the structural issues that keep the education system so far below its potential. In a page one story, they report a proposal to use federal incentive payments to get funding for vocational education to be based on student demand (aka vouchers) rather than institutional grants.

If vocational education, why not higher education? There are no states to deal with, just a Senate in which Labor would get an overwhelming majority if a party that has no ideological grounds for opposing student choice voted with it (despite its failure to implement it while in office).

I’ve yet to read more than a handful of submissions to the review, but both the University of Melbourne submission (pdf) and my own submission (pdf) explain how the current system of centralised allocation is highly dysfunctional.
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HECS deters theory fails to predict, again

~ Andrew Norton ~ 6 Comments

…we can be pretty confident that the significant increase in the number of places in the last few years will continue to increase low SES shares of commencing students. There is a leading indicator of this in the statistics on accepted offers by Year 12 score, with the below-70 group continuing to increase its share of the total.

– my prediction of 17 July.

Fortunately, not one for the ‘corrections and clarifications’ category. As predicted, the 2007 ‘equity’ enrolment data released today (in the ‘appendices’) shows that low SES commencing students are indeed up between 2006 and 2007. Overall, the increase is about 5%.

Unfortunately more detailed comparisons between 2006 and 2007 are complicated, because the definition of low SES – a postcode in the bottom 25% – changes with each census. The total numbers for earlier years have been recalculated with 2006 census data, but not the institutional numbers.

Changes in the private provider category have also complicated things – not only are more institutions listed as they acquired access to FEE-HELP, but these providers are now reporting all students, not just those getting FEE-HELP. If I revise upwards their 2006 low SES numbers by the overall upward revision (just under 1%), the absolute number of low SES commencing students recorded at private providers is up by about 380, but the percentage of all their commencing enrolments who are low SES has declined by 1.1% to 11.8%.
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