Category: Higher education

Whingeing academics

~ Andrew Norton ~ 37 Comments

According to a report in this morning’s Age, a National Tertiary Education Union survey of university staff presents ‘a bleak picture of education quality and morale.’

The trouble with these surveys is that academics are always complaining, so it is difficult to know whether this is ‘whingeing as normal’ or whether there is anything unusual going on. It is always worth checking academic impressions against what evidence we possess.

The Age reports that more than half of academics do not believe that their university offers a better education than five years ago. Yet that is not the perception of students. The Course Experience Questionnaire continues to record improvements in satisfaction with teaching, and indeed most aspects of university life are showing long-term increases in satisfaction. The one clear exception is the ‘appropriate assessment’ scale, which is designed to explore whether ‘assessment promoted deeper forms of learning’. The questions in this scale are to do with whether more than a good memory is needed to do well.

An anonymous academic claims that

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Who should decide how campus services are delivered?

~ Andrew Norton ~ 17 Comments

Over at Lavartus Prodeo, Paul (no relation) Norton offers an argument against the government’s position that student amenities fee money go to the universities. Instead, he wants to

restore the role of democratic student management of services and funds, but strictly subject to certain institutional safeguards and accountability mechanisms which have been largely missing from the governance structures of student organisations hitherto.

His argument for this is essentially anecdotal, that at a couple of Queensland universities of which he has direct experience a student run entity performed better than a university management controlled entity.

He may well be right about these examples, but his post is an instance of a general problem with this debate: almost every participant is trying to turn their personal idea of how student affairs ought to be organised into a model all universities must follow.

NUS wants to get their hands back in the till; Liberal students are adamant that NUS hands should be kept out of the till. Some want democratic student control of student services; others think that university management should be in charge of delivering those services.
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Engineering student, 19, only person making sense

~ Andrew Norton ~ 3 Comments

There are plenty of VSU stories in the papers this morning – eg here, here, and here. But only when The Australian went and did a campus vox pop, instead of asking established players to recycle their arguments, did someone point out the obvious solution:

…engineering student Phuong Nguyen, 19, said that although she did not mind paying the extra money, she did not see why campus services should be paid for separately, because “they might as well put up the uni fees”.

Indeed, they might as well.

The return of the amenities fee

~ Andrew Norton ~ 19 Comments

The VSU debate is back on. Youth Minister Kate Ellis has announced that from mid-2009 universities will again – subject to Senate approval – be able to charge students for non-academic amenities. There are, however several significant differences from the pre-VSU situation:

* the amenities fee will be price capped, at $250
* there will be a new income-contingent loan scheme, SA-HELP, to help students pay for it
* what universities provide students will be regulated for the first time, with ‘national benchmarks relating to the provision of student support services’ and ‘new representation and advocacy protocols’
* actual membership of student assocations will continue to be voluntary

The Coalition is already brawling over it, with the Liberal students running a Save VSU Facebook group, Barnaby Joyce threatening to again cross the floor on the issue, and Shadow Minister Chris Pyne opposing money going to political activities, but leaving open the possibility of supporting a proposal that funded amenities only.

The government’s position is no more coherent. Continue reading “The return of the amenities fee” →

Why neither right nor left support meritocracy

~ Andrew Norton ~ 15 Comments

Charles says he believes in meritocracy, and Shem too thinks that admission to university should be based on merit. Polling the CIS did a few years back shows that most Australians also like the idea of meritocracy.

Meritocracy is a theory of desert; that if you have some characteristic – usually linked to ability – you deserve a position associated with that characteristic, most commonly places at educational institutions and particular jobs. Meritocracy’s Wikipedia entry states that this is in opposition to allocation by

wealth (plutocracy), family connections (nepotism), class privilege (oligarchy), cronyism, popularity (as in democracy) or other historical determinants of social position and political power.

But Wikipedia’s list is too short. Both liberals and social democrats support principles of distribution that are at least in tension with meritocracy.

Don Arthur likes pointing this out in the case of liberalism. Liberalism favours distribution by free exchange, and there is no guarantee that this will match distribution according to personal merit. The market is usually too impersonal to judge directly whether people are intelligent, hard-working, or have any other positive personal attribute. Consumers and producers often know little or nothing about each other. People can be stupid or lazy but lucky, and so reap market rewards. And people can be intelligent and hard-working but unlucky, and so go unrewarded in the market (as recent graduates are about to find out, at least temporarily).
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Trying hard to find a redeeming feature in Labor’s full-fee place phase out

~ Andrew Norton ~ 15 Comments

It is tempting to put the $249 million phasing out of full-fee domestic undergraduate places at public universities, some details of which were announced yesterday and reported this morning, in the same category as the $562 million wasted in a futile attempt to boost maths and science. Putting the two policies together, $811 million will be spent to add not one extra student place and to actually reduce the total funding universities receive. Even by the very low standards of Australian higher education policymaking, that is pretty spectacular.

The full-fee domestic undergraduate places were always a case of 2nd-best policymaking. The quotas and price controls (the 3rd best policy) crippling the Commonwealth-supported higher education system created artificial shortages of university places in high-demand courses. Allowing universities to offer additional places – or more accurately, allowing univerisites to offer those places to Australians rather than overseas students – alleviated these shortages.
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Is HECS a tax?

~ Andrew Norton ~ 20 Comments

Commenter Charles objects to HECS as

an exotic tax aimed at passing education costs to the next generation

Though until 2004 I thought that HECS could reasonably be classified as a tax, that analysis would have been disputed by the courts. Under the Constitution, there is a distinction between taxes and fees for services, and arguably HECS was a fee for service, in that the person who paid it became entitled to a specific service in return.

However, HECS had other attributes of a tax: it was set by the government, it went to the government, and was mostly collected by the Australian Taxation Office (up-front payments went direct to universities, but as money owed to the Commonwealth, with an adjustment to the government income of universities as a result). It made the Australian tax-welfare system mildly more progressive than it would otherwise have been.

But since the student contribution amount system came into force in 2005, I do not think ‘tax’ is the best description of this payment.
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Labor’s faulty uni intuitions cost taxpayers $562 million

~ Andrew Norton ~ 20 Comments

Fulfilling an election promise, this year’s budget contained:

$562.2 million over four years to encourage students to study maths and science and compensate universities. From 1 January 2009, the maximum annual student contribution amount for maths and science will be reduced to the lowest ‘national priority’ rate for new students.

As I pointed out when Labor first announced this plan in early 2007, it rests on two false assumptions.

The first assumption is that choices between broad academic disciplines are driven by relative prices. There is no evidence in the history of changing HECS levels that this is the case. A moment’s reflection explains why: for most people, a choice of course is a career decision, and who in their right mind would choose a field that did not interest them to save a few thousand dollars in eight or nine years time (when their HECS repayments would finish earlier than would otherwise be the case)? And for students motivated by money, a few thousand dollars in tuition costs is not going to change substantially the lifetime earning relativities between occupations.
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Will Australian universities be hit by an employment domino effect?

~ Andrew Norton ~ 13 Comments

For the last decade or so, Australian universities have been funded by what has been called a reverse Colombo plan – a reference to the post-war scheme that brought thousands of Asian students to Australia on scholarships. Back then, Australians funded Asian education. Now, Asian students fund Australian education through the fees they pay. Without them, the Australian higher education system would collapse.

Obviously, students from much poorer countries than Australia like India and China – our two largest markets – are not doing this because they altruistically want to fund the human capital of middle class Australians. Many of them come here as students because they want to migrate. A 2006 survey of international students by Australian Education International found that about two-thirds of them planned to apply for permanent residence.

The ease with which international students have been able to migrate has owed much to the growth in skilled migration quotas during the Howard years (and continuing in Rudd’s first year), combined with rule changes favouring former international students. Historically, migration levels rise with employment levels, and the Howard government was no exception to this pattern.
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And the losers are…

~ Andrew Norton ~ 11 Comments

With the partial exception of Stephen Kirchner, the government’s spending-the-surplus extravaganza is receiving a positive reaction.

Yet there has been very little about what was going to happen to the surplus, particularly the planned contributins to the Education Investment Fund and the Health and Hospitals Fund. One of the Prime Minister’s media releases yesterday referred to speeding up spending from these funds, but this seems to be a separate issue from how much money will eventually find its way into them.

On that issue, the amount contributed to the special investment funds was to be ‘subject to final budget outcomes’, so presumably they are taking a double hit: lower surpluses or even deficits in the coming years, and the current surplus spent on handouts to families, pensioners, and home buyers.

It reinforces the need for universities to disconnect themselves from the budget cycle as much as possible, and to receive their income through markets.