Category: Higher education

Do Australian applicants take note of skills shortages?

~ Andrew Norton ~ 5 Comments

While international candidates are aware of specific skill shortages areas via DIAC and courses to suit outcomes, when will Australian students follow suit?

– commenter Andrew Smith, 21 October

The answer to Andrew’s question is: already. Because we have university applications data by field of study we can track whether would-be students respond to labour market trends.

In looking at this issue, I classified courses as in-demand if they satisfied two conditions. First, they had to lead to occupations on the skills shortages list. Second, there had to be a tight graduate labour market, which I classified as 5% or less of recent graduates looking for work in the Graduate Destination Survey.

All the disciplines that satisfied these tests showed an increase in applications, while all other disciplines put together showed a decline: Continue reading “Do Australian applicants take note of skills shortages?” →

Are we headed for a big jump in uni unmet demand?

~ Andrew Norton ~ 6 Comments

On Monday, the AFR reported that several state university admissions centres were reporting big increases in applications for next year: 12% up in WA, 11% up in Queensland, 7% in Tasmania. There were smaller increases of 2% in NSW/ACT and 4% in SA. Victoria is yet to report numbers. Possibly a weak labour market for young adults is making education more attractive.

Due to new rules for Youth Allowance eligibility from next January, more people offered a university place are likely to seek university admission in 2010 rather than defer. More students will be able to get YA via the parental income test and not need to take a gap year to get ‘independence’ from their parents, and it will be harder (though not impossible) for students from upper-income families to take an ‘independence’ gap year and then go on welfare.

So demand for places in 2010 is, on the evidence of the early applications data, and on the theory of lower deferments, likely to be well up on 2009.

Will there be places for these additional university hopefuls, or will many of them end up in the ‘unmet demand’ statistics? Continue reading “Are we headed for a big jump in uni unmet demand?” →

The real causes of academic staff problems

~ Andrew Norton ~ 20 Comments

According to a report in this morning’s Australian,

AUSTRALIA’S academics are disillusioned by corporate management cultures at universities, threatening to drive many away from the profession and worsen a looming staff shortage as thousands of them approach retirement.

According to the survey on which the story is based (which I presume will appear here) 28% of Australian academics have taken concrete action to change jobs to an industry other than higher education.

What we don’t know is how many succeed. My calculations based on the ABS labour mobility survey suggest that education (which includes schools and vocational education) in 2007-08 had the lowest annual rate of labour loss of any Australian industry, coming fractionally below health on 3.5%.

While I doubt that corporate (sic) management culture has much to do with exit – since for all their complaints academics have less management direction than any industry I can think of – higher education is poorly placed to deal with its personnel issues. Continue reading “The real causes of academic staff problems” →

A leaking student pool

~ Andrew Norton ~ 10 Comments

Skills Australia chair Phil Bullock wasn’t happy, in a friendly sort of way, when I suggested that his organisation was a central planning agency (this was at a seminar to discuss the papers that ended up in this publication).

In their recent paper on ‘market design’, they deny that they favour central planning:

It is important to emphasise that Skills Australia does not advocate a ‘central planning agency’ approach based on detailed forecasting of skills.

It’s true that they don’t advocate the kind of micro-level central student place allocations we’ve sometimes seen in higher education. But Skills Australia does want what they call a ‘managed market’, in which governments purchase student places to align them with ‘community and industry needs’.

But I’m not sure that they have really thought enough about how this works in practice. With the central planner’s mindset, they want to shape student behaviour largely by restricting options: Continue reading “A leaking student pool” →

A better higher ed prediction

~ Andrew Norton ~ 9 Comments

Though my prediction on science applications wasn’t on target, my prediction on low SES enrolments is doing better.

The basic theory is that low SES applicants are disproportionately affected by movements in the number of places in the higher education system, so that when the number goes down they get a declining share of the total, and when it goes up they get an increasing share.

This is because low SES school students tend to get lower average Year 12 results, the currency for ‘buying’ admission to university. Other things being equal, a contraction in places causes admission requirements to rise and prices low SES applicants out, while an expansion causes admission requirements to fall and allows low SES students to buy more places.

The 2008 enrolment statistics released yesterday show that commencing domestic undergraduate numbers were up 1.5% on the previous year, allowing a modest increase in low SES* share from 16.95% to 17.01% (overall this series is very stable; most years rounding makes it flat).

Breaking the statistics down further, in the public universities 17.3% of commencing undergraduates are from low SES backgrounds, compared to 15.2% in non-public university providers- even though most of these students are paying full fees.

* This is using the postcode measure of low SES; permanent residence in a postcode in the lowest 25% according to the ABS Index of Education and Occupation.

Australia’s not so large education export industry

~ Andrew Norton ~ 9 Comments

Reporting of Julia Gillard’s India trip has regularly mentioned Australia’s ‘$15 billion’ international education industry.

Eighteen months ago I claimed that these figures were inflated, and while I was away last month Bob Birrell offered the most detailed substantiation yet of this argument.

In addition to the point I made about the need to deduct earnings by overseas students while in Australia, he adds that estimates of their spending while here are too high. I think he’s right, though a new survey of international students is needed to arrive at a more defensible number.

Universities Australia boss Glenn Withers wrote an article for the Higher Education Supplement defending the $15 billion figure, but though making a couple of good points it is unconvincing overall.
Continue reading “Australia’s not so large education export industry” →

What’s going on with science applications #2?

~ Andrew Norton ~ 5 Comments

Earlier in the year, I reported evidence that contrary to my earlier expectations demand for science courses, for which the student contribution rate has been cut by by more than $3,000 a year, was going up significantly.

The national final applications data shows that science did indeed observe a surge in applications, up 17% in a market that was up 5% overall. The market share gain was 0.72%, within the historical pattern of annual movements of more than +/- 1% market share being rare, but still a big change (some previous U of M professional courses now requiring a science course first explains some, but not all, the increase).

So did the price decrease cause this market share shift? There is some other evidence in the applications data consistent with this interpretation. Past research suggests that people have clusters of aptitudes, skills and interests. On this theory we would expect declining market share in disciplines that draw on similar clusters to science. This is apparent in agriculture (-.49%) and health (-.34%). It is not apparent in engineering (+.32%) or IT (+.11%).

There is however one particularly curious aspect to the applications data. Continue reading “What’s going on with science applications #2?” →

A chance to get student amenities financing right

~ Andrew Norton ~ 12 Comments

The government’s student amenities fee legislation has been rejected by the Senate.

While I did not support the original VSU bill, and am unpersuaded by the reasons given for rejecting the government’s legislation, I am pleased that it has been defeated.

Even by the low standards of Australian higher education policymaking, Kate Ellis’s student amenities financing plan was a shocker.

As I noted when it was introduced, it sought to impose new unfunded service obligations on universities – and this despite Labor cutting recurrent university funding in real terms in every year of its first term. While they have thrown money at capital projects, their policies on recurrent funding have been worse than the Coalition’s.

The bill would have required universities to make complex distinctions between similar services funded from their Commonwealth subsidies and from the new amenities fee.

The bill would have required universities to create an entirely new and completely unnecessary new student loan scheme, SA-HELP. Anyone who needs to borrow $250 for amenities will also need to borrow for tuition under HECS-HELP or FEE-HELP, and so these should be used for all loans. The SA-HELP alternative would have imposed bureaucratic costs on universities and created confusion for students.

In short, it is a relief that this bureaucratic monster has been strangled at birth.

While the government will probaby reintroduce the bill and hope that an Opposition terrified of an early election will pass it, the more sensible thing from them to do would be to refer it to the review they have promised on base funding levels for universities. Amenities fees are just one component of a much larger funding and pricing issue, and it would be sensible to deal with it all in a coherent fashion.
Continue reading “A chance to get student amenities financing right” →

Where does Kaplan rank?

~ Andrew Norton ~ 32 Comments

During a couple of days as Singapore’s lone classical liberal last week, I took a particular interest in education advertising. A major theme is rankings, with results of student surveys used where the conventional prestige measures are unavailable.

On advertisement in the Straits Times particularly caught my eye. It advertised Monash University degrees, noting that Monash is ranked 47th in the Times Higher Education Supplement and is a member of the ‘prestigious Group of Eight universities’.

But the courses advertised aren’t taught by Monash. People wanting to find out more had to go to the website of Kaplan Singapore, part of the big US for-profit Kaplan University.

And where does Kaplan rank? It’s not 47th in the THES. It’s not in the Group of Eight. It isn’t in the major rankings at all.

Though this raises yet more questions about the consumer information value of rankings in teaching markets, this teaching outsourcing could be a positive development overall.

There is a potential conflict of interest in the same institution both teaching and assessing, since there is an incentive to soft mark to ensure that students continue. I’m not sure how Monash’s deal with Kaplan works, but it is possible that this conflict is minimised by outsourcing teaching (or Kaplan outscourcing assessment, depending on how you look at it).

Disaggregation of the industry may also bring the benefits of specialisation, with different institutions building skills and reputation in course development, teaching and assessment.

Another way of collecting graduate earnings data

~ Andrew Norton ~ 6 Comments

One of the gaps in the Australian higher education information market is institution-specific earnings information. Is it worth spending more to go to a particular university?

It’s always going to be a difficult question to answer, as field-occupation specific and individual charateristics are likely to be the more important factors. But it would be useful to have some more salary data.

One method of getting the data is shown by this US initiative, PayScale, written up in the New York Times earlier this week.

Payscale gets it data by providing another labour market service, helping employeers and job seekers test the market worth of various occupations. It has used the information on degree source, field of study, occupations and salaries to create lists of the top earning jobs and colleges.

They claim to be drawing on 1.2 million users of their site. As the NYT points out is not a random sample, but I would have thought that the main likely bias – it would undersample those content in their jobs – is unlikely to lead to misleading results for those wanting to test their earnings potential.

It will be interesting to see if anyone sees potential for a similar site here. PayScale works for Australia, so when they have enough Australian entries it would be good if they published a similar report on earnings by university here.