The National Bureau of Economic Research has recently released an interesting paper on early subject specialisation at university (similar looking ungated papers here).

Author Ofer Malamud takes advantage of differences between English and Scottish higher education to examine an interesting natural experiment in early versus late specialisation. In England, students generally choose a specialised field of study on admission to university. In Scotland, however, they choose a specialisation after two years of more general subject choice. However, graduates of both university systems enter a common UK employment market.

Malamud finds that Scottish graduates are more likely to work in occupations related to their course specialisation than English graduates. He theorises that the Scots use their early years to discover their talents and interests, and therefore make better choices of specialisation. The English, by contrast, may complete the specialisation they started, but because some chose the wrong field they are more likey to look for work in other areas.

Though the findings are interesting, I don’t think there are any major public policy implications. Continue reading “Should students specialise early or late?” →

The latest issue of ABS Education and Work, out today, shows that we are charging towards Julia Gillard’s target of 40% of 25-34 year olds having a university qualification by 2025. Only last May, the government’s higher education policy document said:

The current attainment rate for bachelor degrees for 25 to 34 year olds stands at around 32 per cent, and under current policy settings this is likely to rise only slightly, to around 34 per cent by 2025.

But Education and Work says that we had reached 34% (34.6%, to be precise) as those words were being published. There could be some sampling error involved, but the combined effects of more educated younger cohorts aging, continued mature-age education, and a large migration program heavily biased in favour of graduates means that a reasonably strong growth rate was always likely. If government forecasters using 2008 data can’t predict what will happen in 2009, what hope have they of being right about 2025?

Education and Work also brings bad news for the argument that we are very short of graduates and must produce lots more. Last year, 26.3% of graduates with jobs were working in occupations that did not require a degree. This year, it has gone up to 27.4%. Graduate unemployment has gone up from 2.1% to 3.4%. Admittedly, 2008-09 was not a good period for the labour market overall. But if the boom years up to 2008 couldn’t do much to utilise our graduates better, it suggests our policymakers should be cautious about promoting a large expansion in university enrolment.

While international candidates are aware of specific skill shortages areas via DIAC and courses to suit outcomes, when will Australian students follow suit?

– commenter Andrew Smith, 21 October

The answer to Andrew’s question is: already. Because we have university applications data by field of study we can track whether would-be students respond to labour market trends.

In looking at this issue, I classified courses as in-demand if they satisfied two conditions. First, they had to lead to occupations on the skills shortages list. Second, there had to be a tight graduate labour market, which I classified as 5% or less of recent graduates looking for work in the Graduate Destination Survey.

All the disciplines that satisfied these tests showed an increase in applications, while all other disciplines put together showed a decline: Continue reading “Do Australian applicants take note of skills shortages?” →

According to a report in this morning’s Australian,

AUSTRALIA’S academics are disillusioned by corporate management cultures at universities, threatening to drive many away from the profession and worsen a looming staff shortage as thousands of them approach retirement.

According to the survey on which the story is based (which I presume will appear here) 28% of Australian academics have taken concrete action to change jobs to an industry other than higher education.

What we don’t know is how many succeed. My calculations based on the ABS labour mobility survey suggest that education (which includes schools and vocational education) in 2007-08 had the lowest annual rate of labour loss of any Australian industry, coming fractionally below health on 3.5%.

While I doubt that corporate (sic) management culture has much to do with exit – since for all their complaints academics have less management direction than any industry I can think of – higher education is poorly placed to deal with its personnel issues. Continue reading “The real causes of academic staff problems” →

One of the gaps in the Australian higher education information market is institution-specific earnings information. Is it worth spending more to go to a particular university?

It’s always going to be a difficult question to answer, as field-occupation specific and individual charateristics are likely to be the more important factors. But it would be useful to have some more salary data.

One method of getting the data is shown by this US initiative, PayScale, written up in the New York Times earlier this week.

Payscale gets it data by providing another labour market service, helping employeers and job seekers test the market worth of various occupations. It has used the information on degree source, field of study, occupations and salaries to create lists of the top earning jobs and colleges.

They claim to be drawing on 1.2 million users of their site. As the NYT points out is not a random sample, but I would have thought that the main likely bias – it would undersample those content in their jobs – is unlikely to lead to misleading results for those wanting to test their earnings potential.

It will be interesting to see if anyone sees potential for a similar site here. PayScale works for Australia, so when they have enough Australian entries it would be good if they published a similar report on earnings by university here.

In the Graduate Pathways Survey report, authors Hamish Coates and Daniel Edwards say:

…some commentators on graduate supply and workforce projections argue that the solutions to filling the skills gaps are not in boosting the training effort in Australia, but instead making sure all those who have university qualifications are utilising their skills sufficiently. Research by Norton (2007) indicates that a large number of graduates in Australia are not currently employed in ‘graduate occupations’. Norton argues that if these people’s skills were utilised, there would be no shortfall in highly skilled workers in most occupations in Australia. While this argument relating to the ‘over-qualification’ of the Australian population is not well supported generally, it is an issue of relevance that is addressed in this research project. (emphasis added)

If by ‘not well supported’ they mean that not many other people argue this they are right, but this is mainly because there is little overlap between the labour market literature and the higher education policy literature. Unfortunately, I pretty much have the issue of how we allocate university places between disciplines to myself. The only two other positions in the debate are what happens politically – ad hoc allocations of new places if employers scream loudly enough – and the position adopted by Bob Birrell and the Bradley report, which is to flood the labour market with graduates and hope that the sheer numbers make skills shortages unlikely.
Continue reading “Did I make a ‘not well supported generally’ argument?” →