Category: Higher education

The rise but not triumph of the private higher ed providers

~ Andrew Norton ~ 3 Comments

According to The Australian, we are seeing a ‘private uni bonanza’. 260 of the 2,300 new university places announced by Julie Bishop yesterday went to private institutions – Avondale College, the University of Notre Dame, Christian Heritage College, and the Tabor Colleges in South Australia and Victoria.

Perhaps more significantly, the extension of FEE-HELP loans to any institution offering accredited higher education courses seems to have produce a surge in their student numbers. All up in the first half of 2006 there were about 21,000 students with government support, either in tuition subsidies or loans, outside the traditional public sector universities (not all of them are at private providers though; there are publicly-owned institutions including TAFEs on the list). That’s nearly twice as many as the year before, compared to enrolment growth of just 1% in the public institutions. Take out the newly-listed institutions, and the non-public university higher ed sector still shows a very respectable 31% growth rate.

Bishop’s allocations and her Department’s statistics highlight how blurred the distinctions between public and private higher education have become. Public universities take fee-paying students and private universities take government subsidised students. Many more students at private institutions take government loans, but are denied tuition subsidies received by people taking similar courses at public universities. The higher education system is just a series of anomalies held together by inertia.
Continue reading “The rise but not triumph of the private higher ed providers” →

The curse of the 1970s strikes again

~ Andrew Norton ~ 22 Comments

The curse of the 1970s struck twice yesterday. In talking to The Australian, Kevin Rudd again indulged his nostalgia for Whitlamesque free education, while stopping short of promising to bring it back:

the Opposition Leader says he also feels uneasy that young Australians do not have access to free tertiary education, which he received in the 1970s under Gough Whitlam’s reforms.

But ….Mr Rudd said the need for economic responsibility precluded a return to free education.

Instead, he promised to ease the burden of the Labor-introduced Higher Education Contribution Scheme, which he said was out of control and prevented children from working-class families from going to university.

But as readers of this blog know, that idea has been persistently discredited. Last year there was the Cardak and Ryan paper that showed for their sample (of young people) that nothing mattered except Year 12 results. The cruder postcode indicator used by DEST also shows that the proportion of low SES enrolments has been flat since statistics started being collected in the early 1990s, despite two significant price increases since (and the absolute number is well up).
Continue reading “The curse of the 1970s strikes again” →

Does the federal government spend more on private schools than universities?

~ Andrew Norton ~ 26 Comments

Lesson of the day: don’t say things to journalists relying on memory alone. Yesterday I spoke to a reporter from The Australian, and during the conversation agreed with a claim from University of Melbourne higher education expert Simon Marginson that the federal government spends more on private schools than on universities. That was printed in this morning’s paper.

I had some time ago looked into this oft-repeated claim by the public education lobby and decided that it was defensible but a factoid (meaning 2). It was defensible because if you count only direct subsidies related to tuition then more is spent on private schools than on universities (approximately $5 billion compared to approximately $3.5 billion in 2005). But I deemed it a factoid because private school funding supports more than twice as many students. It is less than surprising that about 1.1 million school students cost more than about 450,000 university students (full-time equivalent).

But I’d forgotten that the university income number did not include research and other grants to universities, which take the spend up closer to $6 billion, or the significant contribution to university cash flow made by student loans, which add in another $2 billion.

So if we looked at total support for universities it is significantly higher than total support for private schools.

In my defence I did dismiss the value of the comparison (which wasn’t reported), and note that there had been a significant recent increase in university funding (which was reported), and the original purpose of the conversation had been to discuss something else entirely, for which I had the relevant spreadsheets open when I returned the call. But I should have said nothing or at least fact-checked myself afterwards. Someone did question my evidence today, and they were right to do so.

The incoherent policies of the National Union of Students

~ Andrew Norton ~ 30 Comments

The National Union of Students rallied today for its usual assortment of not entirely coherent causes:

Remove Full Fee entry places,
Reduce exorbitant HECS increases,
Relieve student poverty and
Repeal VSU

That’s right, students should not be allowed to pay for their tuition (remove full-fee places) or should pay less (reduce HECS), but they should be required to pay for services they do not want, such as political rallies attracting a few hundred people (repeal VSU).

I’m not sure that NUS fully understands the implications of their no full-fee places policy. When they used an AFR story earlier in the week about increasing numbers of full-fee students to call for the phasing out full-fee places, they probably did not realise that many of those places were at private higher education providers, dozens of which since 2005 have acquired access to the FEE-HELP income-contingent loan scheme. So does NUS now agree that private higher education should be funded the same way as public higher education? Their comrades at the Australian Education Union might have something to say about the precedent that would set.

NUS may find that rather more students are showing an interest in full-fee place than show an interest in NUS (the media has been slack on this one – NUS claims to represent students, but how many students have voluntarily joined a student union?). Continue reading “The incoherent policies of the National Union of Students” →

Strained logic on full-fee university places

~ Andrew Norton ~ 9 Comments

The Mercedes-Benz CLK 63 AMG is an impressive car, but at $200,000 it is rather out of my price range. But am I excluded from car ownership as a result? If you apply the logic of the National Union of Students, the answer to that question is yes. In response to the annual media kerfuffle over $100,000 and $200,000 university courses reported in each year’s Good Universities Guide, NUS issued a media release:

The National Union of Students called on the government to review its position on full fee paying places in order to provide opportunities to all students, regardless of whether they have wealthy families or are prepared to take up a $200,000 loan. National President, Mr Michael Nguyen said, “The prospect of going to university and graduating with a huge debt really makes it difficult for young people to be able to go to university unless they come from wealthy families.”

Of course, very few of the 663,000 Australians enrolled in Commonwealth-connnected higher education institutions last year were paying $200,000 or anything like it. Many of the most expensive courses are in fact double degrees which in practice cost less than the figure reported in the Good Universities Guide. When I have looked into this in the past the GUG assumes that people pay full-fees for both courses. However, as the full-fee ENTER for the more prestigious course is usually above the HECS ENTER for the less prestigious course, any students would pay full fees for one and HECS for the other. I haven’t had time to do more than quick check of this year’s GUG, but for Monash at least the same problem is there. Monash’s website states for Arts/Law:
Continue reading “Strained logic on full-fee university places” →

What is ‘unmet demand’ for university?

~ Andrew Norton ~ 7 Comments

As well as taking issue with my analysis of the graduate labour market, Bob Birrell and his colleagues take issue, in their People and Place article, with the Universities Australia (formerly known as the AVCC) statistics on unmet demand.

The universities themselves, and the government, argue that unmet demand for university places is now minor – 13,200 was the estimate for 2007, a little more than a third of what it was three years ago. Birrell and his colleagues say that this seriously understates the true figure, because Universities Australia (UA) discounts aggregate unmet demand – the number of people who applied for a place but did not get one.

I don’t fully agree with the Birrell et al critique, but it raises important issues about how ‘unmet demand’ should be calculated. The UA methodology takes out those applicants who applied for only one or two courses, presumably on the argument that many of them could have secured a place had they been more flexible in what courses they were prepared to take. Of the remaining unsuccessful applicants, the UA then discounts the number again by the ‘state rejection factor’, ie given that a certain percentage of people who are offered a place turn it down, it is reasonable to assume that a similar percentage of unsucessful applicants would also have declined their offer had they received one. As Birrell et al point out, one likely reason for rejections is that applicants were not offered the place they wanted.

From the government/Universities Australia perspective, this discounting make sense – their object is to fill the places allocated by the government, not to meet student demand. Continue reading “What is ‘unmet demand’ for university?” →

Are there too few university students? (Again)

~ Andrew Norton ~ 10 Comments

In the latest issue of People and Place, as reported in this morning’s papers, Monash University academic Bob Birrell and his colleagues Daniel Edwards and Ian Dobson argue that there is a widening gap between the demand for and supply of university graduates.

In doing so, they disagree in part with the analysis in my paper (pdf) on graduate mismatch. One explanation they offer for the number of graduates in non-graduate jobs I explored and decided was probably not major – the possibility that it is driven by women framing work around family. Female overqualification (20%) is only slightly higher than male (18%), and there are other possible explanations such as the over-representation of women in Arts courses.

They do however raise one point that I should have explored more, which is what role migration of graduates has played in boosting numbers of university-qualified people in jobs that don’t require degrees. There is, as they say, a history of migrants having trouble finding jobs matching their formal education.

Nevertheless, I don’t think they deal with central argument: that there is no evidence anywhere in the labour market data of an aggregate shortage of graduates. In 2006, there were more than 500,000 graduates in jobs that don’t require degrees or unemployed. Continue reading “Are there too few university students? (Again)” →

Could improved Youth Allowance undermine rural campuses?

~ Andrew Norton ~ 41 Comments

An editorial in today’s Age follows on from yesterday’s story about would-be students from regional areas being more likely to defer their university studies to improve their Youth Allowance eligibility.

The editorial draws attention to both the claimed under-funding of regional campuses and the added costs faced by regional students when they have to move to study, calling for an inquiry but effectively suggesting both receive additional Commonwealth resources. Yet there are tensions between improving income support for rural students and helping rural campuses.

I don’t believe that there is any inherent reason why educational delivery costs should be higher in regional areas. The problem seems to be achieving economies of scale by spreading fixed costs over a large number of students. That’s been hard to do for several reasons: low initial population density in regional areas, weak school results limiting the pool of potential applicants, and the preference of many students for study in capital cities.

In Victoria, there is only one truly regional university, the University of Ballarat (though Deakin University has a substantial regional presence, and other universities have rural campuses). The Victorian Tertiary Admissions Centre provides statistics for each university by the home region of applicants. 35% of applicants to Victorian universities from the Central Highland region where the University of Ballarat is located gave it as their first preference in 2005 for academic year 2006. So about two-thirds of potential local students actually want to go somewhere else – except for Swinburne, applications are spread fairly evenly across the other Victorian universities.
Continue reading “Could improved Youth Allowance undermine rural campuses?” →

Are fewer uni students getting Youth Allowance?

~ Andrew Norton ~ 16 Comments

An article in this morning’s Age reports on research from the On Track survey of recent Victorian school leavers finding that:

Thirty-seven per cent of regional students told the survey for State Government initiative On Track they were waiting to qualify for an independent Youth Allowance before studying, compared with 15 per cent of city students. The easiest way to qualify is by earning about $18,000 over 18 months before starting.

For eighteen months now I have been curious about why university students seem to be starting at a later age, with this kind of playing the Youth Allowance system being high on the list of theories.

Unfortunately, there was no data released for 2005 on the ages of students ‘new to higher education’, so I had to use the commencing student data (which isn’t as good, because it includes people transferring from other courses). While the trend of an absolute enrolment decline in ‘young’ commencing students, which I define as those aged 16 to 18, stopped and their numbers started to climb again, they continued to decline as a proportion of all commencing students aged 16 to 21. If the 16 to 18 year olds had maintained their year 2000 market share of all commencing students 21 and under in 2005, there would have been about 6,600 more of them at university than in fact was the case. Continue reading “Are fewer uni students getting Youth Allowance?” →

University and Beyond survey

~ Andrew Norton ~ Leave a comment

I don’t normally do announcement posts, but as someone who relies heavily on the survey research of others I thought I would give a plug to the University and Beyond survey. Open to all currently enrolled students, this is a description:

This survey will develop a greater understanding of students’ plans for “life after university”, of their perceptions about various aspects of university life, and of their expectations if they plan to enter the workforce. The results will provide valuable information to businesses and universities and will assist students to develop a realistic understanding of their post–university options and prospects.

It finishes on Friday 6 July.