Category: Higher education

Is the ANU better than Stanford?

~ Andrew Norton ~ 14 Comments

On the front page of The Australian‘s print edition today a headline reads:

ANU pips Stanford

The internet headline was a little less counter-intuitive, but the story the same. It’s a reference to the 2008 Times Higher Education rankings which puts the ANU at 16th in the world, and Stanford at 17th.

Now the ANU is a perfectly respectable university. But the THE rankings have been widely criticised, and results like this will not help the case for the defence.

The biggest criticism of the THE is their heavy reliance on subjective measures. 40% of the ranking is based on academic peer review, which is done by emailing tens of thousands of academics with an internet survey. The response rate is typically poor, and the response quality doubtful. One potential benefit of rankings is that use of objective information can correct impressionistic views of universities, but this method tends to reinforce the latter. The Shanghai Jiao Tong rankings use purely objective measures (though the weightings are subjective; I don’t think there is any way to make these objective). But while the THE rankings are dubious on this measure, this isn’t what’s dividing the ANU and Stanford. They both get the maximum score of 100.
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The puzzle of high Victorian unmet demand for university places

~ Andrew Norton ~ 9 Comments

In an article for yesterday’s Education Age, I had a go at explaining why the prospects of Victorian applicants for university are worse than those of applicants in other states.

The unmet demand statistics consistently show that it is higher in Victoria than elsewhere; using other data sources I found that this has been true since 1993 at least.

It will surprise none of my regular readers that the unmet demand culprit is the centralised system of distributing university places, which until fairly recently aimed at equalising higher education participation between the states, rather than meeting actual demand as revealed in applications to attend university. Though Victoria has not relative to its population been under-supplied with places compared to other states, because demand there is higher than the national average more of it is ‘unmet’.

But identifying the culprit still leaves a puzzle: why is demand higher in Victoria than elsewhere? The main reason seems to be that school retention is higher in Victoria than in other states. With a higher percentage of young people finishing Year 12 in Victoria than elsewhere, more people have the basic qualification needed for university entry.

A couple of people have asked me whether Victoria’s private schools might have something to do with the story. The ABS schools data suggest that indeed this could be the case.
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Lower HECS for law?

~ Andrew Norton ~ 14 Comments

The idea of the government forgoing HECS payments for graduates who do things it wants seems to be growing in popularity. Maths and science graduates who become teachers will have half their HECS repayments refunded. Then there was the 2020 Summit proposal for a community corps funded by discounting HECS repayments. And in The Australian this morning a Law Council suggestion that the federal government pay all or part of law graduates’ HECS debts in return for agreeing to work in regional centres.

What this means, in effect, is that the Law Council wants the federal government to subsidise legal services in regional areas. But it is hard to see why legal services should be subsidised on a regional/city basis, rather than as at present through legal aid on an assessment of the client’s financial situation.

I’d have thought that there is a fairly simple market solution to this problem: if there are too few lawyers in country towns, then the price of legal services in those places will rise and attract more lawyers to them.
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Sub-prime courses and students?

~ Andrew Norton ~ 8 Comments

As Rafe and others have pointed out, the US financial meltdown is giving market critics a long-awaited opportunity. Indeed, over the last few years things had grown so desperate for them that they had given up arguing that capitalism didn’t work, and instead resorted Clive Hamilton-style to claiming that it worked too well, causing unhappiness and trashing the planet.

But now the argument is swinging back to markets don’t work. The National Tertiary Education Union is jumping on this bandwagon as the Bradley committee considers the future of Australian higher education, with several submissions (including of course mine) calling for relaxing quantity and price controls.

In this week’s Higher Education Supplement of The Australian, NTEU Policy and Research coordinator Paul Kneist says:

Opening up the higher education sector to competition to give potential students greater choice no doubt echoes the calls for financial deregulation in the ’80s.

Specialised private providers with lower costs will enter the market. Student choice will increase and the cost of a higher education qualification may fall. Universities will be forced to respond if they are to remain competitive.

However, will increased competition and lower prices result in lower entry standards and a lowering of the quality of education being delivered? Will there be a proliferation of sub-prime qualifications?

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Higher education narratives

~ Andrew Norton ~ 40 Comments

According to the SMH report of the latest ANU Poll:

UNIVERSITIES are no longer seen primarily as centres of learning but as corporations most concerned about the bottom line.

And indeed 48% of respondents agreed with universities ‘mainly care about the bottom line’ compared to 39% who agreed that ‘universities mainly care about education’.

Yet 71% say universities are doing an excellent or good job (compared to 46% saying the same of public schools). Perhaps the bottom line/education question was a dumb one, since the two are interdependent – no education, no money; no money, no education. Yet it appeals to the narrative of the public education lobby, a narrative faithfully reinforced by the SMH over many years.

The public education narrative was also reflected in other answers. 70% of respondents thought that it had become more difficult for students from poorer families to get into university over the last ten years.
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More promising signs on vouchers

~ Andrew Norton ~ 27 Comments

A few weeks ago my hopes were raised that we might be headed for a voucher system in higher education.

Yesterday my hopes were raised again. The Victorian government confirmed that it was introducing a voucher scheme into vocational education, and Julia Gillard confirmed that income-contingent loans would be available to finance the partially deregulated fees accompanying the voucher scheme.

This makes it more difficult for her to reject a voucher scheme for higher education.

There have been the predictable voices against the Victorian innovation, though focused on the cost angle:

Australian Education Union TAFE president Mary Bluett accused the Government of cost-shifting and warned that higher fees, together with the new HECS-style loan scheme, would deter people from taking on training courses.

Sadly, the Victorian Opposition is also taking the populist line on costs (what’s the point of a Liberal Party that does not believe in markets?).
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The return of compulsory, unbundled, student amenities charges?

~ Andrew Norton ~ 4 Comments

A report in this morning’s SMH says that the Rudd government will next month announce the return of student amenities charges. It’s a bad sign for the broader Bradley review of higher education policy, because it suggests that the government is making the same mistake as its predecessor: creating messy and bureaucratic ad hoc schemes to deal with ostensibly isolated issues, rather than tackling the price control and quota issues that are at the main causes of dysfunction in the higher education sector.

According to today’s report, the new model will be:

“opt-out” system in which students will be able to choose which services their fees are spent on and whether they belong to the student union.

So it sounds like students will have to pay some money, but get some choice in what that money is spent on.

This is an unsatisfactory solution for all parties. It prevents universities offering just the degree and nothing but the degree, a sensible option for those without the time or inclination to participate in campus life. It prevents universities from charging everyone for the same bundle of services, so that as part of their marketing they can promise free access to X, Y or Z facility or service.

The solution, as I have argued for years, is to just let a market operate. Some universities will offer a high level of services, some low, and students can choose between them. Most are likely to offer optional extras. None needs bureaucrats in Canberra second-guessing how they should run their universities.

Update: Government Ministers cast doubt on the compulsory element of this story.

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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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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