Category: Higher education

Peter Karmel, RIP

~ Andrew Norton ~ 2 Comments

Peter Karmel, who died this week, was one of the most distinguished Australian educational leaders of the second half of the twentieth century.

He was perhaps best known for his report on schools in 1973 for the Whitlam government. Disputes still alive today have their origins in decisions taken following that report, from recurrent federal grants to state schools to graded funding to private schools. The Karmel report recommended funding based on the needs of the school, which survived until the Howard government replaced it with a funding formula (at least until it broke down from so many exceptions) based on the income of parents. However, the idea that for private schools – though not for public schools – grants should be adjusted based on some measure of income or wealth has survived.

His main career, however, was in universities. He was Vice-Chancellor of two, Flinders and the ANU, and served in the late 1970s and early 1980s as chair of the Commonwealth Tertiary Education Commission, an intermediary agency between the universities and colleges of advanced education and the government. Such bodies fell out of favour during the previous Labor government, though Karmel and others continued to call for their restoration.
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The Bradley report’s OECD cringe

~ Andrew Norton ~ 25 Comments

The Bradley report’s authors display the OECD cringe, an attitude that OECD statistics set the benchmarks Australia should follow, regardless of whether those statistics are meaningful or whether other countries get better outcomes. It is the modern-day version of the old cultural cringe, that whatever was English set the standard Australia should follow.

Some examples:

* concern about a drop in Australia’s tertiary attainment levels relative to other countries (at pages 9, 18), ‘notwithstanding classification issues’. In fact, those classification issues are serious. And as I have pointed out, the same OECD publication that reports these attainment levels also shows that high levels of attainment correlate with high levels of graduates in low-skill jobs (though the extent of these correlations will be lower than reported, due to the data issues).

* increases in public funding to be in the ‘top group of the OECD’ (6). Yet there is no evidence that public funding is better than private funding, and the OECD does not claim that there is.
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Bradley’s social justice mindset

~ Andrew Norton ~ 10 Comments

The term ‘social justice’ doesn’t appear anywhere in the Bradley report on higher education policy, but the idea is everywhere in the section on ‘access’. Advocates of ‘social justice’ believe that they can describe in advance what a just society would look like; the actual interests and preferences of the individuals involved typically do not count for much.

The social justice mindset is behind the targets for ‘under-represented’ groups set out by the Bradley committee. They believe that by 2020 the proportion of students from the lowest 25% of socieconomic postcodes should be 20% of the university population. It’s currently in the 15-16% range. They don’t even attempt to defend this figure; like many other numbers in this intellectually weak report it seems to have been taken out of the air as sounding about right.
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How high is Australia’s uni drop-out rate?

~ Andrew Norton ~ Leave a comment

The report of the Bradley review of higher education policy says that Australia’s university completion rate was 72% in 2005. For this they rely on the OECD’s Education at a Glance publication.

The reason the review report doesn’t use an Australian source is that we actually don’t know what our completion rates are. The attrition rates occasionally published by DEST/DEEWR on a year-to-year basis count someone taking a year off or changing institutions as a ‘drop out’, but someone dropping a course but staying at the same institution in another course as a retention.

The OECD calculates its drop out rate by taking completions as a % of commencements n years earlier. But this is far from straightforward in the Australian statistics, since some people will be counted as ‘commencing’ more than once if they change courses. There used to be a ‘new to higher education’ commencing figure, but unfortunately it no longer seems to be published. But if I remove from the 2005 commencers those admitted on the basis of previous higher education and age the cohort three years I get a completion rate of 87%. Of course this is also highly problematic because some courses are longer than 3 years, and many people take more than 3 years to complete a 3-year course (and many of the people who completed a course will not have enrolled in that particular course originally). But it highlights how statistical factors influence results.
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The price is wrong

~ Andrew Norton ~ 19 Comments

As I feared, the Bradley higher education report undermines its voucher proposal by failing to fix the price signals.

Indeed, it is worse than not deregulating fees, bad as that is. The Bradley committee haven’t even given any serious attention to how public funding could help make a voucher system work. Universities aren’t going to rush to enrol additional students under a voucher scheme if the price isn’t right. Indeed, if the price is wrong their response might be the opposite one: to use the lifting of regulation to shed uneconomic students.

The one study we have on university expenses relative to income for Commonwealth-supported places suggests that in half the disciplines they looked at universities lost money. This study has (acknowledged) data problems, but that finding is consistent with the observed behaviour of universities in trying to cut costs and recruit profitable fee-paying students. And a few of the disciplines in question did get some extra funding in the 2007-08 Budget. However, it suggests that an economically rational university would not be rushing to take extra students across a wide range of fields of study.
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Did Nelson support vouchers?

~ Andrew Norton ~ 1 Comment

Much more on the Bradley review of higher education policy to follow, but first a postscript to the story of Brendan Nelson’s seemingly endless capacity to believe contradictory things. According to a report in The Australian,

THE former Opposition leader Brendan Nelson was on the line last week when The Australian broke details of the Bradley review…. [He] liked what he’d read in the morning’s paper.

In fact he was gobsmacked by Denise Bradley’s embrace of a voucher-style demand-driven funding system, which was something both he and a fellow former education minister David Kemp had favoured, and thought the consolidation and merger of regional universities was inevitable.

But if he favoured a voucher scheme, why did he do the exact opposite and introduce unprecedented government control over the distribution of university places? In the case of new places, this was often down to the detail of precise numbers of students in specific courses at designated campuses.

Did Cabinet reject a voucher scheme for a second time??? Or (as I have long suspected) did Nelson just not understand the bureaucratic monster of a reform package that his department created for him?

The voucher battle begins

~ Andrew Norton ~ 13 Comments

With ‘vouchers’ for universities seemingly on the political agenda, there are polarised views of their likely effects. I am saying that if the price signals are right they could bring supply and demand for university places into better alignment.

But critics warn that deregulation could produce a mismatch between what students demand and what the economy needs. It could also encourage providers to invest only in higher-demand and low-cost courses.

This is a bit like saying we need government schools because otherwise kids from poor families would get a bad education – using a failing of the current system as an argument in its favour. The Weekend Australian did not use what I told them about how for years a chronic oversupply of science places has existed alongside chronic undersupply of places in health-related courses, despite serious labour shortages in the health professions.

The applications data shows that demand for courses shifts towards labour market shortages (see figure three in the University of Melbourne submission to the Bradley review). The blockage in the system is in supply, which is largely controlled by the government. In practice, the government’s only steering mechanism has been new places, rather than redistributing existing places. If there are no new places, inertia prevails.
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Academic quality control

~ Andrew Norton ~ 5 Comments

I’ve had a lot on over the last week and didn’t get to read the report of the Senate inquiry into academic bias until last night.

I was rather surprised to find that my post on the subject, along with comments from Conrad, Leopold, and Andrew Elder in the comments thread, appears to have influenced the majority (ie, Labor) report. They describe my argument that this issue is about the professionalism of staff, and not the academic freedom of students, as a ‘fair summing up of the issue’.

Alas, the minority report from Coalition Senators suggests that the Nelson-Bishop micromanaging mindset is alive and well in the Opposition, recommending that a Charter of Academic Freedoms for students be imposed on universities as a condition of funding. Even if we take all the Liberal student and Young Liberal allegations at face value, we will only have a small number of cases, and as the majority report noted, there is no sign that they have pursued existing avenues of complaint. I can’t see that yet another layer of bureaucracy is needed.

And clearly Coalition Senators have not have learnt their lesson on political donations, proposing that universities now be caught in the disclosure net, with universities required to reveal donations over an unspecified level. This seems to be in response to a complaint from Jewish organisations about Arab funding of research centres. But I can think of at least one instance in which this rule would have stood in the way of an 8-figure sum being donated for medical research.

The lack of external quality control of courses and teaching at universities is an issue, but it needs to be approached carefully and systematically, rather than creating yet more ad hoc rules which cause more problems than they solve.

Do international students take uni places from Australians?

~ Andrew Norton ~ 11 Comments

In a Weekend Australian opinion piece attacking the government’s ending of undergraduate full-fee places at public universities, Glenda Korporaal says that

Far from creating a warm, multicultural glow, the over-reliance on foreign students has led to an undercurrent of resentment among many young Australians, who feel these students are depriving them and their mates of places at good universities (italics added)

In a reform of the last Howard Budget, universities no longer have absolute limits on the numbers of local students they can enrol. However, government policy still provides strong financial disincentives to take domestic undergraduates.

Up to 5% more than their quota number of student places, universities receive roughly the same as they would for within-quota students (ie the government subsidy plus the student contribution amount). Over that, they get the student contribution amount only. In most cases, international student fees will be significantly higher than either amount – twice as much or more than for within-quota students in some courses in the ‘good’ universities.

So now the key problem is less quantity constraints than price control. Australian students are not allowed to compete on price with international students. They are priced out of the market – not through prices being set too high, as the left supposes, but through prices being set too low.
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Over-qualified workers

~ Andrew Norton ~ 24 Comments

NATSEM research released yesterday confirmed that on average higher education pays off. Compared to someone with Year 12 education only, the average graduate will have lifetime earnings of $1.5 million more, after deducting forgone earnings while studying.

But the annual ABS Education and Work survey, released today, again suggests that this average may conceal large variations in actual graduate outcomes. Despite the good-as-it-is going-to-get economic conditions (the survey was carried out in May), 26.3% of graduates were working in jobs that the ABS occupational classifications system says require vocational or no post-secondary education rather than higher education. That’s only .2% lower than last year.

Work I have done on data from the 2006 census suggests that it is the generalist degrees, and particularly arts (with the exception of those with degrees in ‘philosophy and religious studies’), that drag down the average. About 40% of other Arts graduates are in jobs that don’t require higher education.

There are still big gaps in our knowledge about this group of seemingly over-qualified workers, particularly on the extent to which their employment outcomes are either wanted or, if not wanted, temporary.