DEEWR’s latest higher education newsletter, published today, mostly summarises prior announcements. But there was one statement worth noting:

The Government will announce the details of the review of base funding levels in 2010. While it is for the review to consider the appropriate level of base funding, … early estimates of over enrolments for Commonwealth supported places in 2010 suggests that universities will increase their number of Government funded places while being funded at current rates.

What this effectively says is that the government does not need to increase per student funding rates because universities will be stupid enough to keep enrolling more students even while the government keeps slashing their real funding.

I despair at the lack of political strategy and skill in the higher education sector.

Buried in the Mid-Year Economic and Fiscal Outlook was a change to the FEE-HELP loan system. From July 2010, the ‘administration charge’ (more accurately, debt surcharge) for fee-paying undergraduate students will increase from 20% to 25%. So for example a student borrowing to finance a $10,000 fee would incur a debt of $12,500 rather $12,000.

While I don’t object to the HELP scheme being put on a sounder financial basis – lending money at zero real interest is an expensive business – targeting just this group is highly anomalous.

Since full-fee undergraduate places are being phased out of public universities, this change hits students at TAFEs and private providers. The TAFEs and private ‘feeder colleges’, institutions offering diploma programmes that articulate into bachelor courses, are exactly the kinds of higher education providers a government wanting to improve access to higher education should be encouraging. They give second chances to people who didn’t get the Year 12 scores they needed, or mature age students returning to study after a long absence.

On this year’s estimated FEE-HELP lending to students at TAFEs and feeder colleges, this change will cost them about $1.5 million a year. Continue reading “Warped HELP priorities” →

In responding to a claim by former Monash Vice-Chancellor Richard Larkins that fees should be deregulated, one of Julia Gillard’s spokespeople asserted that

The government has invested a substantial amount of additional funding in the tertiary and research sector that will not just arrest the decline in real funding that occurred under the Coalition but actually begin to turn it around.

Note how the tense changes mid-sentence. Somehow the money they have invested already will at at some point in the future stop real funding declining.

In their first budget, virtually all the new higher education spending was just squeezing out private spending, by cutting student contributions for science and maths and abolishing full-fee places.

In their second budget, all but $82 million of the $533 million in new spending for 2009-10 came from abolishing Coaliton programmes or raiding the Coalition-established Education Investment Fund. Continue reading “Spin on university funding” →

The Sunday Age‘s letter page had a mixed reaction to last week’s story about widening entry criteria to university courses, especially by using aptitude tests (based on this report released later in the week by the U of M Centre for the Study of Higher Education).

But none criticised the proposal for more aptitude testing. America is the home of aptitude testing for tertiary admission, and there it has long been controversial, accused of socio-economic and cultural/racial biases. The CSHE report is hopeful that aptitude testing might dilute the SES biases of using school results for admission, but they couldn’t offer strong evidence that this was the case, and note that whatever the admission system middle class people are likely to do better. Though aptitude tests are increasingly being used here, I think we are short of the evidence base needed to recommend their spread, rather than continuing to watch as individual universities experiment with their use.

The perspective I thought was missing in the CSHE report – perhaps because it is largely a literature review, and reflects the work of past researchers – is that of the applicant. It’s largely about how universities select students, rather than how students choose which institution to apply to. So it focuses on universities finding out more about students, rather than students finding out more about universities, their academic prospects, and what jobs they might get on completion. Continue reading “Better applications needed as well as better uni selection” →