Author: Andrew Norton

Would more student income support improve academic results?

~ Andrew Norton ~ 38 Comments

In addition, I’m not convinced that if all university students in Australia received free education and enough income support to live comfortably that the majority would spend all that extra time studying.

– backroom girl this morning.

In her doubts, backroom girl goes against some higher education orthodoxy. 43% of Australian students in a survey released last year agreed with the proposition that ‘work commitments adversely affect my performance in university’. The Vice-Chancellors have called for more Youth Allowance to ‘ensure optimal educational outcomes’.

It certainly seems plausible that if students worked fewer hours they might optimise their educational outcomes. But like many plausible-sounding ideas in higher education, the evidence for it is mixed at best.
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What if the national curriculum was Victoria’s?

~ Andrew Norton ~ 28 Comments

The ABS literacy levels by state data published today confirm what the OECD PISA study released in December found – that young Victorians’ literacy levels are well behind what their contemporaries in other states are achieving.

Victoria 15 to 24 year olds are a full 10 percentage points behind (51%/61%) their equivalents in New South Wales in achieving levels 3, 4 or 5 in prose literacy. As I noted when the summary literacy report came out last month,

…level 3 skills [are] regarded as the ‘minimum required for individuals to meet the complex demands of everyday life and work in the emerging knowledge-based economy’.

The Victorians are also behind the Western Australians (57%; WA was slightly ahead of NSW in PISA), the Queenslanders (53%), and are about level with the South Australians (who round from the other direction to be also 51%). Only the Tasmanians on 49% are lower, but they have the excuse of a relatively low SES population.
Continue reading “What if the national curriculum was Victoria’s?” →

Another ‘free education’ puzzle

~ Andrew Norton ~ 41 Comments

The next issue of Policy is going to run a series of short articles by CIS researchers on social policy myths. I’m writing about the myth that university charges deter students from low-income backgrounds, one which our new leader believes. There is the associated belief that Whitlam’s free education opened the university system. In December 2006 I reported on our now PM and Deputy PM on this subject:

According to Rudd, he “was inspired to improve the quality of and access to education because he was the first member of his family to attend university, largely because of the Whitlam government’s free tertiary education policies.”

Julia Gillard was reported as saying, “…courtesy of the Whitlam government, I then went to university and obtained two degrees. I fear that it is harder today for a girl from a working class background to make that journey than when I was young.”

In a book chapter published last year, ACER researchers Gary Marks and Julie McMillan analysed data from a dozen social surveys conducted between 1984 and 2001 with questions about both the respondent’s education level and his or her parents’ occupational group. Consistent with previous research, they found that working class people in the ‘free education’ cohort born between 1960 and 1969 had much lower rates of university qualification than the HECS cohort born after 1970 (though the oldest in that group would have had at least some free university education).

Though that was unsurprising, something else did seem odd: the 1960-69 free education group had lower overall rates of degree achievement (9.1%) than people born between 1950 and 1959 (11.4%), even though only those born in 1957 or later could have enrolled as school leavers in the Whitlam free education period from 1974 onwards. Continue reading “Another ‘free education’ puzzle” →

Should university admission be by lottery?

~ Andrew Norton ~ 25 Comments

Back in the 1980s, some on the left used to call for university admission to be conducted by lottery. Anyone who applied for a course would be selected at random. The left thought it would make it easier for working-class people, who do relatively poorly in admissions systems based on academic merit, to go to university.

At the time, I thought lottery selection of university students was a crazy idea. But now I am not so sure, and nor is the University of Sydney medical school, which is considering using a ballot to choose its students.

The University of Sydney’s problem is that the different admissions tests used for medical schools don’t seem better than each other in predicting future academic performance (here is one study, pdf). This is not an isolated issue. Other published studies, based on larger groups of students, have found correlations usually of around .3 or .4 between school and university academic results. That’s a lot more than 0, but also a lot less than 1. Several researchers have found that, for a given Year 12 score, students from standard government schools do better in their first year of university studies than students from private schools and selective government schools.

So if getting the best students is the goal, our admissions systems are only modestly good mechanisms for achieving it. Effectively, there are so many unobserved factors affecting results that, as a means of selecting the best students, our current methods already contain a random element.
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Partisan pessimism

~ Andrew Norton ~ 12 Comments

Newspoll regularly asks voters whether, in the next six months, their standard of living will improve, stay the same, or get worse. Their results always show that supporters of the political party in opposition federally are more pessimistic than supporters of the governing party.

As I noted a couple of years ago, at most times the causes of this are hard to disentangle. Some of it is probably real. Living standards of opposition supporters may genuinely be negatively affected by the government’s policies – eg Labor supporters relying on handouts that may not be so readily available under the Coalition; Liberal supporters suffering from increased tax and regulation under Labor. And people whose living standards have declined may blame the government, and therefore appear as supporters of the opposition in the polls.

These factors are least likely to apply as a new government begins; voters cannot blame its past policies for their current problems, and the inevitably slow-moving machinery of government means that few objective changes are likely to occur within six months. But as a Newspoll conducted in mid-December, and reported in the Australian this morning, shows this doesn’t stop reversals in who feels optimistic about their future living standards and who feels pessimistic.
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Pick the odd name out

~ Andrew Norton ~ 5 Comments

Alasdair Macintyre, Colin McGinn, Andrew Norton, Martha Nussbaum, … John Searle, Peter Singer

– from the contributors list in the 1st quarter 2008 issue of The Philosophers’ Magazine

Philosophically-inclined readers will realise that this is a case of a peasant mixing with the intellectual aristocracy, thanks to the egalitarian institution of alphabetical listing. I’m there at all because of my exchange of letters with Alan Soble over The Peel’s door policy, which in turn came about because someone at The Philosophers’ Magazine found this post from May. As I said earlier this month, I don’t think that debate went as well the public school debate with Andrew Leigh, but both seemed to have picked up audiences I would not normally get.

Would blind trusts solve the privacy vs. improper influence donations dilemma?

~ Andrew Norton ~ 8 Comments

Andrew Leigh asks if I have a view on his suggestion that Australia should create blind trusts for political donations.

There are several pages on this in Andrew L’s co-authored 2004 book Imagining Australia, with the idea also summarised in this SMH op-ed. Instead of giving money directly to political parties, as now, donors would give anonymously to trusts that would then pass on the money to the donor’s selected party or candidate.

The argument is that the parties would have no way of knowing for sure who their donors were, and therefore would have less of an incentive to improperly favour their financial supporters. The anonymity of donations would also get around the problem, which I have discussed in the past, of people being reluctant to get involved in politics because they fear negative consequences if they back the losing side.

Blind trusts are, I think, a more persuasive solution to the latter problem than the former. Given it would be near-impossible to prevent donors telling parties about their donations (in the book, it is acknowledged that donors could provide a receipt), as a method of limiting corruption it’s hard to see that this is much more than the pre-disclosure system with some added bureaucracy. Some donors would prefer to remain anonymous – if only to save themselves future pestering by party fundraisers – but those hoping for something in return for their money are likely to make sure that the relevant people know about their donation.
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What does GetUp! achieve?

~ Andrew Norton ~ 7 Comments

Commenter Matt Marks says that:

The Liberal High Command has totally underestimated GetUp! and I think you are doing the same, albeit to a lesser degree.

A low-level political statement [what I had claimed of GetUp!] does not involve TV ad campaigns, over 200,000 members on their email list and dedicated fundraising.

I think GetUp! is an innovative organisation and that clearly there is demand for the services it provides. I’ve never seen a three-party election ad before. It runs media-friendly stunts like putting political messages in fortune cookies. It’s using new technology to update old political tactics like petitions and letter-writing campaigns.

But unlike Matt (and commenter Spiros) I’m not yet convinced that GetUp! is a model well-adapted to shifting votes or influencing policies in Australia.
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Should political activity be further regulated?

~ Andrew Norton ~ 11 Comments

In his speech to the National Press Club yesterday, Liberal Party federal director Brian Loughnane said this about the role of the ACTU and GetUp! in the campaign:

The ACTU spent over $14 million on television advertising in the twelve months before election day. This was more than either of the two major parties spent on television in the campaign…

For the first time in our history, a third external force has intervened in our political process with resources greater than either of the major political parties. I believe this is an extremely unhealthy development. If disclosure of campaign spending is to mean anything in this country, the ACTU should be required to publish a report setting out details of how the $30 million it allocated to the campaign was spent.

…The intervention of GetUp! in the campaign is another example of this phenomenon. GetUp! was well resourced and has strong international connections. It is perfectly entitled to play in the game, but it should also be subject to proper levels of scrutiny.

Actually, direct election campaign spending by the ACTU and GetUp! will have to be disclosed, and GetUp! also warns donors that their identities may be disclosed. Loughnane seems to be suggesting that these rules go even further and apply to spending outside of election campaigns.

This would be a highly undesirable development. Continue reading “Should political activity be further regulated?” →

A happily wrong prediction

~ Andrew Norton ~ 7 Comments

On Thursday 22 November, when explaining how I was going to vote, I said:

In the Senate, I am going to put my friend Scott Ryan first, though as he is third on the Liberal ticket I don’t like his chances of becoming Senator Ryan this time around.

Happily, I was too pessimistic. This morning, the Australian Electoral Commission confirmed that Scott had been elected to the Senate.

Another advantage of this is that I had been disqualifying Scott, who lives in Carlton, from any claim to be a second Carlton classical liberal on the grounds that as a Liberal Party candidate he was bound to support its big government policies (as a mere Liberal Party branch member I can say what I like). So the wisdom of Victorian voters in making Scott Senator Ryan has also allowed me to keep my blog title. Somehow ‘Observations from one of Carlton’s classical liberals’ doesn’t sound right.