An interesting radio discussion triggered a number of thoughts that I wanted to get down for later reflection.
A World Economic Forum report has apparently ranked Australia just number 29 in the world when it comes to science and maths education. This is apparently a bad performance but one needs to know the basis of the ranking to really comment.
A science teacher at a Queensland high school - public, non-selective with a feeder area including areas with significant disadvantage, around 40 in the final year science class - has apparently had no less that 13 students who have apparently subsequently achieved an award under the Australian Government's Eureka Science awards. This is an astonishing result by any standard.
Helen's reaction (Helen's old school has about the same number of final year science students but without this scale of later success) was that after the first few awards this might become self reinforcing through attraction of new students.
This seemed plausible but does not appear to be the case. The method of teaching itself as well as the enthusiasm of the individual teacher is obviously important. However, a key reason also appears to be the fact that the Queensland education system itself is more flexible - there were things here that I had not known - giving teachers greater freedom in the way they taught as compared to NSW with its HSC exam obsession.
All this comes back to what has become one of the most important things that I have been trying to explore - and not just in education - the way in which in standards based approaches what we measure affects, can distort, the thing we are trying to measure.
Tuesday, January 16, 2007
Monday, January 15, 2007
Tamworth and Refugees - follow up note
Photo: Tony Windsor (Independent, New England)
A brief follow up to my previous stories on the Tamworth Refugee imbroglio.
I have listed previous posts at the end of this post.Tamworth Regional Council is to reconsider this matter tomorrow. I will report on the outcome, although the news media will probably beat me in this case given the interest.
In the meantime, I see from the Northern Daily Leader (14 January) that Federal Member Tony Windsor has provided the Council with the sensible advice that if, as has been suggested several times, Council is concerned about weaknesses in the Refugee Resettlement Program then they should discuss this with the Immigration Department. I must say that this took me by surprise in that I had assumed that this would have been done as a matter of course.
Tony Windsor also made the interesting point that there was nothing to stop a community group taking up the program, that Council could not stop this and indeed had only become involved in the matter in the first place as a facilitator.
If this is true, it makes the whole thing even stranger.
A little later
I see the planned Council meeting has, as expected, become a major national news item although transcripts of the Australian Broadcasting Commission's 7.30 report stories are not yet available.It looks as though, as I had feared, the political dynamics involved have entrenched positions.
One interesting side issue in all this that I had forgotten is that Tamworth Regional Council is just that, a regional council formed out of the amalgamation of a number of local government areas. I do not know the break-up of Council numbers, on population terms Tamworth City will dominate, but at least one of the Councilors involved from the no side is not from Tamworth at all.
Previous Posts
- 17 December 06, Tamworth, the Council and James Treloar (New England Australia blog)
- 18 December 06, Tamworth & Refugees - Broader Issues
- 21 December 06, Tamworth and Refugees - update as at 21 December
Sunday, January 14, 2007
End Week Reflections
Photo: Gordon Smith, Cattle on the Long Paddock. I really do bless the day that Gordon gave me approval to use his fantastic photos from his photo blog. I can nearly always find a story link to allow me to use the photo I want.
The week began with my email inbox peaking at 750. It's now down to a mere 450, so that's progress. I am planning to halve this tomorrow morning!
I have spent a fair bit of time this week looking at education and training issues.
Last Sunday I put up a short post on the Regional Living Australia blog on Charles Darwin University, one of what I hope will be a series of short posts on various universities located in Regional Australia.
In preparation I have been trawling through various university sites looking at press releases on university activities. I find this interesting because of what it tells me about differences between universities driven in part by their differing regions.
On that same Sunday I put up a post on this blog looking in part at the the treatment of HSC students by New England's universities. This followed my earlier analysis of the impact of HSC and UAI processes. One unexpected outcome of my latest analysis was my conclusion that students located in New England were to some degree advantaged as compared to Sydney based HSC students.
I continued the education theme on Monday with a post on the Managing the Professional Services Firm blog reflecting on professional practice within professional services. My starting focus here was on the various knowledge domains relating to professional practice, moving then to look at a case study on optometry vs ophthalmology as an example. This is an interesting example because it shows the way in which competency based approaches can affect relationships between separate but related professions.
Mid week the education theme continued with a meeting of a small joint venture that I chair, although I did not in fact finally attend this meeting because of another unexpected development. The JV is interesting because it combines a law firm and a not for profit that specialises in assisting charities in the development of new approaches to estate planning incorporating community accountability. A first training course jointly promoted by the JV and the University of Technology (Sydney) targeting financial planners is due to run later this year.
Thursday continued the education theme with two posts. The first post looked at competition among Sydney universities for top HSC students. The second begun Thursday but not completed until today was a very long op ed piece looking at problems in Australian higher education as I see them. My thanks here to Lexcen and Ninglun (Neil) for their very fast responses. I actually sweated blood on this second post trying to define my messages properly, so their responses made me feel the effort was worthwhile.
With this week's posts I have now completed a large number of posts on education and training in general, higher education in particular. It's been niggling at me. There is more that I could say, but I am conscious that I have started but but not completed other themes.
On a related issue, Dave Lee has asked me if I would like to join the blog squad editing the US Learning Circuits blog. This approach followed an earlier education and training discussion theme looking at differences in approaches between countries. I would like to do so, but am thinking through time issues.
The week hasn't all been education and training, with my wandering eye taking me in several other directions as well.
Earlier I wrote several posts looking at different aspects of Aboriginal history, life and experience. On Wednesday on the New England Australia blog I put up a brief post on the work of Dick Estens, a Moree cotton farmer, in creating employment opportunities for Aboriginal kids. I liked this story because it is a success story in the midst of so much negative reporting.
In another story on New England, Australia I reported on the death of David Armstrong, a Bingara boy who went to the University of New England and then onto a long and sometimes colourful career during which he was variously active in adult education and as head of various charities including Community Aid Abroad. He was also one of the founders of the Australian Democrats. While David was older than me, he was already a staff member at UNE when I started as a student, his story really resonated with me because I shared some of the same experiences and could understand some of the things that drove him.
In the midst of all this I continued my tours of the blogosphere, focused especially on my traditional favourites. There were many things worthy of comment, but I will pick these up in a later blog review.
It may be hard to believe, but the week wasn't all blogging!
Thursday, January 11, 2007
Australia's Universities - a personal Mea Culpa
In my last post I talked about universities and competition for students. In this post I want to look at the question of university funding. I also pose the question to what degree do I share the guilt - the mea culpa in the post title - with others for current problems.
In Monday 8 January Sydney Morning Herald Fred Hilmer had an opinion piece in which suggested that funding constraints were threatening the future of Australian higher education. This was followed by a letter to the editor on 10 January by Stephen Buckle suggesting that the funding crisis was greatest in the humanities and pure sciences.
I will leave it to you to read the full pieces. Here I want to look at the background to current problems, including the role that I played in earlier debate.
Economics of Education
To start with some economic theory. I have a frustration here because I wanted to check some of my facts, but the on-line economic literature is locked up behind economic walls that I cannot access because I am not connected with a university nor can I afford to pay access charges myself just to check a few facts. So I have to rely on my memory.
Classical economics talked about land, labour and capital as the three factors of production. Land was fixed, so if income increased the increase had to come from additional labour or capital. The problem then was that income had increased more than could be explained by additional labour or capital. This led Edward F Denison to postulate that the unexplained increase came from improvements in labour brought about extra education. In turn, this led to considerable interest among economists in the contribution made by education to economic growth.
In 1965 Dad took sabbatical leave and went to work for the Economic Commission for Asia and the Far East as an economist. His core task for the year was the preparation of a major report on education across Asia. As part of this, he looked at the economics of education including Denison's work.
I picked this work up a little later.
While I had had no intention of becoming an economist, I found myself working in the Australian Treasury as an economist. In turn, this led me to decide that I should do a Masters in Economics. Because my honours degree had been in history with a simple major in economics, I needed to do a Master's qualifying first. This required me to do two full year subjects at honours level plus a sub-thesis, achieving distinction level in all three. I selected the economics of education as my thesis topic.
In my thesis - really a literature review - I looked at different ways of measuring the economic return from education. One way of doing this was to calculate the extra income earned by individuals as a consequence of extra education. While this was significant, there was still an added national income component that could only be explained by the presence of what economists called externalities.
In simple terms, investment in individual generated a return to the nation. However, each individual only captured part of that return in terms of increased personal income. This meant that the nation as a whole would under invest in education if that investment came solely from the amount that individuals were prepared to spend on their own education in anticipation of increased personal income.
Current education policy rests on this simple analysis. With HECS, each Government funded student bears part of the cost of university education linked to expected increases in future income, paying the amount back out of that increased income. Then there is the direct Government subsidy linked to the broader externality benefit.
Fred Hilmer's core argument, one that I agree with, is that the Government now has this equation out of balance, that the Government contribution is now too low, meaning that overall investment in higher education is too low. Fred in fact goes further than this, arguing (my words) that Australia is now milking past investments, mining the capital created from past investment. Again, I would agree with him. However, I would go further and argue that there are now a range of interlinked systemic problems within higher education.
Now why do I think this and that I share part of the guilt for current problems? To understand this, we need to look at the history of higher education in Australia after the second world war.
Post War Higher Education - Initial Period
Australian higher education expanded significantly over the 1950s and 1960s. However, prior to the Whitlam Government, numbers at university while growing fast were still limited. During this period universities relied largely on fees to fund recurrent expenditure, with Government increasingly funding capital spending. Governments in fact payed most fees - the majority of students were on Government scholarships (mainly means tested Commonwealth scholarships plus non-means tested but bonded Teachers College scholarships) - but universities had great autonomy.
Impact of the Whitlam Government
The Whitlam Government abolished university fees and greatly expanded university places.
This expansion had major pluses. Don Aitkin, for example, argues that the great expansion in Australian mass education at all levels was one of, if not the, greatest achievements of the post war period. But it also had significant minuses.
The first difficulty at university level is that the Whitlam approach proved too expensive and could not be sustained. This could well have been true even at the best of times. But the period of the Whitlam Government coincided with the end of the long post war boom and the arrival of the economic troubles of the seventies.
I have briefly explored elsewhere the way in which these events in combination with other trends brought about a revolution in public administration including the end of the welfare state. In the case of higher education, it led Australian Governments to look to ways of reducing higher education costs while finding new ways of funding education.
One outcome was a dramatic reduction in university autonomy combined with forced restructuring of the sector. Our public universities ceased to be truly autonomous institutions and instead became higher education service providers. A second outcome was pressure on universities to increase productivity, in part achieved through mandated cost reduction.
These mandated reductions may have improved productivity in statistical terms. However, and as I discussed in a earlier post in the context of network industries such as electricity and telecoms, such apparent improvements can be grossly misleading.
Impact of Forced Restructuring - Armidale Case Study
I saw at first hand the way these various processes brought my old University close to the point of collapse, in so doing destroying years of work by thousands of people.
In 1981 Armidale had two tertiary institutions, the Armidale College of Advanced Education and the University of New England. Canberra mandated that they must merge, arguing that there was no justification for having two in one place, that productivity gains could be achieved through increased size.
I was back in Armidale at the time as a post graduate student and was opposed to the merger on both educational and historical grounds. I just thought that the arguments were wrong. So working through the VC on one side and Peter Monley, a friend who was on the Armidale Council, on the other I organised a protest meeting that drew 5,000 people to Armidale's mall.
The merger was blocked this time, but ultimately proceeded because the pressure from Canberra was just too great. The statistical productivity gains were achieved by the simple expedient of reducing the combined funding available to the merged institution by the amount Canberra estimated that the merger should save! This was actually a double hit, because mergers always involve some form of implementation cost.
A few years later in another round of Canberra mandated mergers, the University was merged with the Northern Rivers CAE and the Orange Agriculture College to form a networked university still under the name University of New England. As part of this merger, the old University's reserve funds built up through careful management by Professor Gates, the previous VC, were used to fund development elsewhere in the network.
When the network finally collapsed in great acrimony, the University of New England lost the coastal campuses built up by the pre-networked institution and was left not just without reserves but with added debt. The institution's basic survival itself was now in question. It would take years to rebuild.
The University of New England is a stark case of the way changing Canberra policy affected a single institution. But the story does not end here.
Less Elitist but also less Egalitarian
Prior to the Whitlam changes, Australia's higher education system had been both elitist and egalitarian. Elitist in the sense that the proportion of the population attending university was limited. Egalitarian in that the combination of means tested Commonwealth scholarships with bonded Teachers College scholarships allowed students access to university regardless of parental income. Importantly, the proportion of students that had to work to support themselves was much smaller than today, allowing for a more intense university experience.
The Whitlam changes in combination with other events over time have made our higher education system less elitist, but also much less egalitarian.
University scholarships of all types were cut back, effectively reducing access for lower income groups. The introduction of HECS itself was arguably neutral in social terms. However, the discount on payment in advance was not because it provided a direct benefit to higher income families who could afford to pay up front. Then the introduction of full fee places provided a further benefit to higher income families by giving them another option in a competitive environment.
Further Changes - the start of mea culpa
Other changes to the higher education system proceeded in parallel. Here we get into areas covered by my mea culpa plea. In saying this I am not saying that I was directly responsible for the changes, although I did have some limited influence in a few areas. Rather, that the ideas and arguments that I espoused were part of a corpus of ideas that collectively influenced the process.
I was and remain a supporter of administrative reform, including many of the key ideas associated with things such as the New Zealand model in public administration. However, I feel that the way that reform proceeded in practice has had many perverse results, introducing real distortions into the system.
From early 1983 to mid 1987 I was an SES (Senior Executive Service) official in the Department of Industry and Commerce/Industry, Technology and Commerce with particular responsibility for the development of policy towards Australia's high technology industries. Then from mid 87 to the early nineties I ran a national consulting and research operation out of Armidale focused on the electronics, aerospace and information industries. This had a major lobbying and public policy stream.
In DIAC/DITAC my core concern was to find a way to build an Australian presence in the high technology industries. Here I formed a view that our higher education system was an impediment to improved performance along two key dimensions.
The first dimension was the failure of the system to provide the people we needed to support industrial development. Here I argued that we needed more IT professionals, that the universities were and could not provide this because they were unresponsive to market forces. My suggested solution to this was Commonwealth funding of specific IT places at university.
This approach was initially opposed by the Commonwealth Department of Education. They argued that the Commonwealth provided general funding and that it was then up to the universities to decide where to focus in terms of places. We won this one in that the 1987 Information Industries Statement provided for the allocation of funding to create specific IT places, the first time that the Commonwealth had intervened in this way.
I still think that we were right here. However, it did have the longer term effect of further limiting university autonomy.
Universities and the Commercialisation Push
The second dimension was commercialisation of the results of university research.
We argued that Australia had a strong track record in the development of new knowledge, a very poor track record in the translation of that knowledge into product and services that could provide a base for effective industrial development.
Part of the problem here lay in our fragmented and under-developed industrial structure. This was a problem that we were trying to address through other policy initiatives. But part of the failure lay with the universities and their inability to facilitate the commercialisation of knowledge, especially scientific knowledge.
We were not alone in feeling this. The outcome was a series of measures designed to force universities to focus on commercialisation and to build links with industry and other research bodies.
Again, I do not back away from this. If Australia is to grow, we need to get get economic benefits from university research. However, the continued emphasis on commercialisation has, to my mind, introduced growing distortions into the university system.
We (I and my Ndarala colleagues) explored some of these issues in our post on the Ndarala Group blog on the institutional and process issues associated with science commercialisation.
Today almost the whole funding system focuses on applied research. The problem in this is that there is now very little scope for "pure" research. By "pure research" I mean simply study driven by intellectual curiosity without any focus on immediate practical outcomes.
Universities are not just machines for achieving economic, industrial or community objectives. They are intellectual communities that challenge, or should challenge, the way we think and act. When we look back, most great advances (and some disasters, too) have come from independent thought carried out in isolation of practical objectives.
The problem, today, is that this type of thought and research has become very difficult. Without losing sight of commercialisation, we really need to refocus on universities' traditional role, leaving shorter term paybacks aside. But this requires a fundamental paradigm shift.
Higher Education as an Industry
One of my interests in Government was industrial and structural reform with a special focus on the service sector. As part of this, I looked at sectors such as telecommunications and higher education that had previously been considered as Government service areas, not industries as such.
This approach reflected my Department's focus as the industry Department. I argued that education - primary, secondary and tertiary - should be thought of as an industry sector and analysed in the same way as any other industry sector. I also suggested that this would generate new policy approaches.
I was also interested in the broader contribution - not just commercialisation - that education and especially the training sector could make to industrial development. The education sector was thus both a major industry in its own right and an important enabling industry for other sectors.
I continued these interests after I moved into consulting.
From this background, I now want to look at three things in a little more detail as case examples: the application of industry policy to higher education; overseas students; and the interface between the education and training systems in Australia.
Application of Industry Policy to Education
As mentioned already, from an industry policy perspective the education sector is both a major industry in its own right and a major enabling industry contributing to development in other areas.
As a major sector in its own right, industry policy focuses - or should focus - on the industrial, economic and policy settings that will facilitate the growth of, reduce impediments to the growth of, the education industry as an industry.
As a major enabling sector, industry policy focuses - or should focus - on the industrial, economic and policy settings that will help maximise the contribution of the education industry to other sectors.
These are different perspectives from those associated with either education or broader social policy. This may be difficult to see, so let me try to illustrate.
Government policy towards the education sector is riven with conflicts of interest because of the way policy is administered.
To begin with, Governments at all levels own the majority of education assets, so we have the role of Government as owner. Then Governments are the major funders of education at all levels, so they want to control spend while setting priorities for that spend. Governments are also regulators of what is one of the most highly regulated sectors in the country.
If this is not complicated enough, ownership, spend and regulation are split across levels of Government in an increasingly complicated way. Public universities are funded under state legislation but are now Commonwealth funded. The states own and largely fund public schools, regulate schooling in general, but then have to deal with increasing Commonwealth funding especially targeting private schools.
All of these different elements affect structure and performance within the education and training sector in complicated and sometimes contradictory ways. Yet in all this, there is now no one really responsible for looking at education and training in general, higher education in particular, from an industry policy perspective.
Is this important? I think that it is, very.
To take one example, education is now Australia's fifth largest export industry with the value of exports estimated at $A9.8 billion in 2005-2006. Since we only imported around $A720 million of education services, the net contribution to our balance of payments was very substantial. Further, because of the way our universities have been funded, overseas full fee paying students are now critical to the financial viability of many institutions.
In her paper Higher Education in Australia - 2016 looking back, Sandra Welsman painted a dramatic picture of the potential impact of the changes now underway in higher education, suggesting (among other things) that our export of educational services might vanish as quickly as it had arisen.
Sandra was writing in January 2006 and would be the first to admit that she might be wrong on individual points. But there is no doubt that the broad picture she paints of a higher education sector facing dramatic change is correct. Yet debate on the direction and implications of that change process for such a major sector is strangely muted simply because there is no industry policy focus.
This reflects the failure of those such as myself who were interested back in the eighties and early nineties to get the new thought approaches to stick in any institutional way. Already in decline under the last Hawke and then the Keating Governments, they finally vanished along with so many other industry policy approaches on the election of the Howard Government.
Overseas Students
I now want to extend the argument by looking in a little more detail at the case of overseas students.
When I first set up a consulting operation, we did a fair bit of work for Austrade on the development of export strategies in areas like computer hardware, communications equipment and broadcasting and television. My people including Andrew Davis and and Liz Noble also did a lot of work in the education and training area looking at structural change in the sector as well as the interfaces between the sector and other policy areas. As part of all this, over the period 1988-1990 we did a series of research papers on the export of education services.
We correctly forecasted the growth in exports of education services, although we underestimated the scale of growth. We did not, however, properly identify all the implications of that growth on industry structure, performance and culture. Part of the reason for this is that we failed to predict the extent to which Government policy would perpetuate and in some ways accentuate rigidities in higher education.
I have already discussed the financial pressures placed on Australia's public universities. Faced with these pressures, faced with constant change and limitations in the domestic marketplace, our universities seized the opportunity to attract overseas full fee paying students with vigour and enthusiasm. This has had profound effects on university structure, culture and performance.
I will list just here:
1. The varying success of our universities in attracting full fee paying students has had a significant impact on industry structure, creating a pattern of relative winners and loosers that has then flowed through into changes in position in the domestic marketplace.
2. As already noted, our success in attracting overseas students has made some universities as well as some courses within universities very dependent upon the fees so generated. Any downturn in demand could have dramatic effects not just on those institutions, but on our higher education sector has a whole. Without being too dramatic, the viability of Australian higher education depends upon continued export success.
3. The importance of overseas students has created pressures on standards within universities, leading in at least a few cases to things such as marking scandals that have the potential to threaten the reputation of the higher education system as a whole.
4. The now high proportion of overseas students at certain institutions and in certain courses is affecting the culture of the institutions and the nature of the university experience for all students in ways not always welcomed by Australian students.
None of this should be read as opposition to overseas students. My point simply is that the framework we presently use in thinking about the higher education sector means that we do not properly address issues associated with industry structure and performance.
The Changing Interface between Education and Training
The changing interface between education and training is the last issue I want to discuss, focusing on the change process in the training sector and the way that process has affected higher education. Again, part of my message is the way current analytical frameworks limit the questions we ask, the way we think.
Back in 1980 when I was Assistant Secretary heading the Economic Analysis Branch in the Department of Industry and Commerce, a key concern was (and this will sound familiar) the way skills shortages were affecting resource development.
The economic troubles of the 1970s had been followed by a mining boom. Because training of all types had been cut back during the downturn, we were suddenly experiencing substantial shortages of skilled labour. Here we faced real problems in quickly increasing skilled labour supply because of long training pipelines. The problem was accentuated by industrial rigidities associated with a rigid award system that made it difficult for industry to move people between activities.
These problems were not really addressed until after the election of the Hawke Labor Government in 1983. Then the close relations between the Labor Government and the trade union movement, the flow on effects of the Hawke concensus approach, the growing recognition of the global international challenges facing Australia, together with growing recognition of the problems in Australia's system of technical education all combined to allow the launch of what became known as the Dawkins Training Reform Agenda.
The Dawkins Agenda drew from Australia's particular circumstances but was set against a backdrop of international change in training and especially in the UK, Europe and New Zealand, change that drew in turn from the international standards movement. The concept of competence or competencies was central to this.
While early elements of the Dawkins reforms had begun while I was in Government, the launch of the Agenda itself came after I had left Government.
Both I and my key colleagues were very excited by the new developments because we saw competencies in combination with recogntion of prior learning as a way of freeing up the education and training system, leading to the creation of a fully articulated national framework that would allow a multiplicity of education and training providers while also offering individuals greater flexibility and choice.
In a recent post on the managing the professional services firm blog I gave an example of the potential continuing power of competency based approaches looking especially at the ophthalmology vs optometry case.
In simple terms, if you can define the core competencies associated with qualifications or activities and then combine this with a simple standards based approach to the acquisition and recognition of those competencies, then you open up the possibility of an almost infinite combination of paths to the achievement of the skills in question. In turn, this cut to the heart of the protection afforded existing suppliers including universities, allowing for easy entry of new providers. So we promoted and supported the new approaches as best we could.
From my perspective, two linked things then went wrong.
The first one was the effective capture of the Training Reform Agenda by existing vested interests, especially in the Government vocational education sector.
While the competency approach itself survived, its rigid and cumbersome implementation effectively acted to protect existing suppliers. In so doing, we lost the opportunity to create a new globably competitive training industry. Part of the reason for this is that the whole thing was seen as a training issue without sufficient recognition of the industry development opportunities.
The second and arguably more pernicious outcome was the way in which concepts and approaches intended to improve training performance spread to the univesrity and school sectors.
There is a difference between the two. Training focuses on the capacity to do, education focuses on the to think. Both are important. But the capacity to do is enhanced by the capacity to think.
I am the first to argue that our universities have not paid sufficient attention to teaching. I would also accept that universities who have moved into the training arena are, too, subject to the same type of assessment and performance criteria. However, I do not accept that the story ends here.
If I or my children enroll at a university I expect more. I expect that university to teach us to think, to provide intellectual stimulation. I expect my daughters in particular to gain more than I could teach them through simple skills acquisition. Too many of our universities no longer provide this.
This is the crux of my argument in this post and the reason why I say mea culpa because I, too, have helped to bring this situation about.
In Monday 8 January Sydney Morning Herald Fred Hilmer had an opinion piece in which suggested that funding constraints were threatening the future of Australian higher education. This was followed by a letter to the editor on 10 January by Stephen Buckle suggesting that the funding crisis was greatest in the humanities and pure sciences.
I will leave it to you to read the full pieces. Here I want to look at the background to current problems, including the role that I played in earlier debate.
Economics of Education
To start with some economic theory. I have a frustration here because I wanted to check some of my facts, but the on-line economic literature is locked up behind economic walls that I cannot access because I am not connected with a university nor can I afford to pay access charges myself just to check a few facts. So I have to rely on my memory.
Classical economics talked about land, labour and capital as the three factors of production. Land was fixed, so if income increased the increase had to come from additional labour or capital. The problem then was that income had increased more than could be explained by additional labour or capital. This led Edward F Denison to postulate that the unexplained increase came from improvements in labour brought about extra education. In turn, this led to considerable interest among economists in the contribution made by education to economic growth.
In 1965 Dad took sabbatical leave and went to work for the Economic Commission for Asia and the Far East as an economist. His core task for the year was the preparation of a major report on education across Asia. As part of this, he looked at the economics of education including Denison's work.
I picked this work up a little later.
While I had had no intention of becoming an economist, I found myself working in the Australian Treasury as an economist. In turn, this led me to decide that I should do a Masters in Economics. Because my honours degree had been in history with a simple major in economics, I needed to do a Master's qualifying first. This required me to do two full year subjects at honours level plus a sub-thesis, achieving distinction level in all three. I selected the economics of education as my thesis topic.
In my thesis - really a literature review - I looked at different ways of measuring the economic return from education. One way of doing this was to calculate the extra income earned by individuals as a consequence of extra education. While this was significant, there was still an added national income component that could only be explained by the presence of what economists called externalities.
In simple terms, investment in individual generated a return to the nation. However, each individual only captured part of that return in terms of increased personal income. This meant that the nation as a whole would under invest in education if that investment came solely from the amount that individuals were prepared to spend on their own education in anticipation of increased personal income.
Current education policy rests on this simple analysis. With HECS, each Government funded student bears part of the cost of university education linked to expected increases in future income, paying the amount back out of that increased income. Then there is the direct Government subsidy linked to the broader externality benefit.
Fred Hilmer's core argument, one that I agree with, is that the Government now has this equation out of balance, that the Government contribution is now too low, meaning that overall investment in higher education is too low. Fred in fact goes further than this, arguing (my words) that Australia is now milking past investments, mining the capital created from past investment. Again, I would agree with him. However, I would go further and argue that there are now a range of interlinked systemic problems within higher education.
Now why do I think this and that I share part of the guilt for current problems? To understand this, we need to look at the history of higher education in Australia after the second world war.
Post War Higher Education - Initial Period
Australian higher education expanded significantly over the 1950s and 1960s. However, prior to the Whitlam Government, numbers at university while growing fast were still limited. During this period universities relied largely on fees to fund recurrent expenditure, with Government increasingly funding capital spending. Governments in fact payed most fees - the majority of students were on Government scholarships (mainly means tested Commonwealth scholarships plus non-means tested but bonded Teachers College scholarships) - but universities had great autonomy.
Impact of the Whitlam Government
The Whitlam Government abolished university fees and greatly expanded university places.
This expansion had major pluses. Don Aitkin, for example, argues that the great expansion in Australian mass education at all levels was one of, if not the, greatest achievements of the post war period. But it also had significant minuses.
The first difficulty at university level is that the Whitlam approach proved too expensive and could not be sustained. This could well have been true even at the best of times. But the period of the Whitlam Government coincided with the end of the long post war boom and the arrival of the economic troubles of the seventies.
I have briefly explored elsewhere the way in which these events in combination with other trends brought about a revolution in public administration including the end of the welfare state. In the case of higher education, it led Australian Governments to look to ways of reducing higher education costs while finding new ways of funding education.
One outcome was a dramatic reduction in university autonomy combined with forced restructuring of the sector. Our public universities ceased to be truly autonomous institutions and instead became higher education service providers. A second outcome was pressure on universities to increase productivity, in part achieved through mandated cost reduction.
These mandated reductions may have improved productivity in statistical terms. However, and as I discussed in a earlier post in the context of network industries such as electricity and telecoms, such apparent improvements can be grossly misleading.
Impact of Forced Restructuring - Armidale Case Study
I saw at first hand the way these various processes brought my old University close to the point of collapse, in so doing destroying years of work by thousands of people.
In 1981 Armidale had two tertiary institutions, the Armidale College of Advanced Education and the University of New England. Canberra mandated that they must merge, arguing that there was no justification for having two in one place, that productivity gains could be achieved through increased size.
I was back in Armidale at the time as a post graduate student and was opposed to the merger on both educational and historical grounds. I just thought that the arguments were wrong. So working through the VC on one side and Peter Monley, a friend who was on the Armidale Council, on the other I organised a protest meeting that drew 5,000 people to Armidale's mall.
The merger was blocked this time, but ultimately proceeded because the pressure from Canberra was just too great. The statistical productivity gains were achieved by the simple expedient of reducing the combined funding available to the merged institution by the amount Canberra estimated that the merger should save! This was actually a double hit, because mergers always involve some form of implementation cost.
A few years later in another round of Canberra mandated mergers, the University was merged with the Northern Rivers CAE and the Orange Agriculture College to form a networked university still under the name University of New England. As part of this merger, the old University's reserve funds built up through careful management by Professor Gates, the previous VC, were used to fund development elsewhere in the network.
When the network finally collapsed in great acrimony, the University of New England lost the coastal campuses built up by the pre-networked institution and was left not just without reserves but with added debt. The institution's basic survival itself was now in question. It would take years to rebuild.
The University of New England is a stark case of the way changing Canberra policy affected a single institution. But the story does not end here.
Less Elitist but also less Egalitarian
Prior to the Whitlam changes, Australia's higher education system had been both elitist and egalitarian. Elitist in the sense that the proportion of the population attending university was limited. Egalitarian in that the combination of means tested Commonwealth scholarships with bonded Teachers College scholarships allowed students access to university regardless of parental income. Importantly, the proportion of students that had to work to support themselves was much smaller than today, allowing for a more intense university experience.
The Whitlam changes in combination with other events over time have made our higher education system less elitist, but also much less egalitarian.
University scholarships of all types were cut back, effectively reducing access for lower income groups. The introduction of HECS itself was arguably neutral in social terms. However, the discount on payment in advance was not because it provided a direct benefit to higher income families who could afford to pay up front. Then the introduction of full fee places provided a further benefit to higher income families by giving them another option in a competitive environment.
Further Changes - the start of mea culpa
Other changes to the higher education system proceeded in parallel. Here we get into areas covered by my mea culpa plea. In saying this I am not saying that I was directly responsible for the changes, although I did have some limited influence in a few areas. Rather, that the ideas and arguments that I espoused were part of a corpus of ideas that collectively influenced the process.
I was and remain a supporter of administrative reform, including many of the key ideas associated with things such as the New Zealand model in public administration. However, I feel that the way that reform proceeded in practice has had many perverse results, introducing real distortions into the system.
From early 1983 to mid 1987 I was an SES (Senior Executive Service) official in the Department of Industry and Commerce/Industry, Technology and Commerce with particular responsibility for the development of policy towards Australia's high technology industries. Then from mid 87 to the early nineties I ran a national consulting and research operation out of Armidale focused on the electronics, aerospace and information industries. This had a major lobbying and public policy stream.
In DIAC/DITAC my core concern was to find a way to build an Australian presence in the high technology industries. Here I formed a view that our higher education system was an impediment to improved performance along two key dimensions.
The first dimension was the failure of the system to provide the people we needed to support industrial development. Here I argued that we needed more IT professionals, that the universities were and could not provide this because they were unresponsive to market forces. My suggested solution to this was Commonwealth funding of specific IT places at university.
This approach was initially opposed by the Commonwealth Department of Education. They argued that the Commonwealth provided general funding and that it was then up to the universities to decide where to focus in terms of places. We won this one in that the 1987 Information Industries Statement provided for the allocation of funding to create specific IT places, the first time that the Commonwealth had intervened in this way.
I still think that we were right here. However, it did have the longer term effect of further limiting university autonomy.
Universities and the Commercialisation Push
The second dimension was commercialisation of the results of university research.
We argued that Australia had a strong track record in the development of new knowledge, a very poor track record in the translation of that knowledge into product and services that could provide a base for effective industrial development.
Part of the problem here lay in our fragmented and under-developed industrial structure. This was a problem that we were trying to address through other policy initiatives. But part of the failure lay with the universities and their inability to facilitate the commercialisation of knowledge, especially scientific knowledge.
We were not alone in feeling this. The outcome was a series of measures designed to force universities to focus on commercialisation and to build links with industry and other research bodies.
Again, I do not back away from this. If Australia is to grow, we need to get get economic benefits from university research. However, the continued emphasis on commercialisation has, to my mind, introduced growing distortions into the university system.
We (I and my Ndarala colleagues) explored some of these issues in our post on the Ndarala Group blog on the institutional and process issues associated with science commercialisation.
Today almost the whole funding system focuses on applied research. The problem in this is that there is now very little scope for "pure" research. By "pure research" I mean simply study driven by intellectual curiosity without any focus on immediate practical outcomes.
Universities are not just machines for achieving economic, industrial or community objectives. They are intellectual communities that challenge, or should challenge, the way we think and act. When we look back, most great advances (and some disasters, too) have come from independent thought carried out in isolation of practical objectives.
The problem, today, is that this type of thought and research has become very difficult. Without losing sight of commercialisation, we really need to refocus on universities' traditional role, leaving shorter term paybacks aside. But this requires a fundamental paradigm shift.
Higher Education as an Industry
One of my interests in Government was industrial and structural reform with a special focus on the service sector. As part of this, I looked at sectors such as telecommunications and higher education that had previously been considered as Government service areas, not industries as such.
This approach reflected my Department's focus as the industry Department. I argued that education - primary, secondary and tertiary - should be thought of as an industry sector and analysed in the same way as any other industry sector. I also suggested that this would generate new policy approaches.
I was also interested in the broader contribution - not just commercialisation - that education and especially the training sector could make to industrial development. The education sector was thus both a major industry in its own right and an important enabling industry for other sectors.
I continued these interests after I moved into consulting.
From this background, I now want to look at three things in a little more detail as case examples: the application of industry policy to higher education; overseas students; and the interface between the education and training systems in Australia.
Application of Industry Policy to Education
As mentioned already, from an industry policy perspective the education sector is both a major industry in its own right and a major enabling industry contributing to development in other areas.
As a major sector in its own right, industry policy focuses - or should focus - on the industrial, economic and policy settings that will facilitate the growth of, reduce impediments to the growth of, the education industry as an industry.
As a major enabling sector, industry policy focuses - or should focus - on the industrial, economic and policy settings that will help maximise the contribution of the education industry to other sectors.
These are different perspectives from those associated with either education or broader social policy. This may be difficult to see, so let me try to illustrate.
Government policy towards the education sector is riven with conflicts of interest because of the way policy is administered.
To begin with, Governments at all levels own the majority of education assets, so we have the role of Government as owner. Then Governments are the major funders of education at all levels, so they want to control spend while setting priorities for that spend. Governments are also regulators of what is one of the most highly regulated sectors in the country.
If this is not complicated enough, ownership, spend and regulation are split across levels of Government in an increasingly complicated way. Public universities are funded under state legislation but are now Commonwealth funded. The states own and largely fund public schools, regulate schooling in general, but then have to deal with increasing Commonwealth funding especially targeting private schools.
All of these different elements affect structure and performance within the education and training sector in complicated and sometimes contradictory ways. Yet in all this, there is now no one really responsible for looking at education and training in general, higher education in particular, from an industry policy perspective.
Is this important? I think that it is, very.
To take one example, education is now Australia's fifth largest export industry with the value of exports estimated at $A9.8 billion in 2005-2006. Since we only imported around $A720 million of education services, the net contribution to our balance of payments was very substantial. Further, because of the way our universities have been funded, overseas full fee paying students are now critical to the financial viability of many institutions.
In her paper Higher Education in Australia - 2016 looking back, Sandra Welsman painted a dramatic picture of the potential impact of the changes now underway in higher education, suggesting (among other things) that our export of educational services might vanish as quickly as it had arisen.
Sandra was writing in January 2006 and would be the first to admit that she might be wrong on individual points. But there is no doubt that the broad picture she paints of a higher education sector facing dramatic change is correct. Yet debate on the direction and implications of that change process for such a major sector is strangely muted simply because there is no industry policy focus.
This reflects the failure of those such as myself who were interested back in the eighties and early nineties to get the new thought approaches to stick in any institutional way. Already in decline under the last Hawke and then the Keating Governments, they finally vanished along with so many other industry policy approaches on the election of the Howard Government.
Overseas Students
I now want to extend the argument by looking in a little more detail at the case of overseas students.
When I first set up a consulting operation, we did a fair bit of work for Austrade on the development of export strategies in areas like computer hardware, communications equipment and broadcasting and television. My people including Andrew Davis and and Liz Noble also did a lot of work in the education and training area looking at structural change in the sector as well as the interfaces between the sector and other policy areas. As part of all this, over the period 1988-1990 we did a series of research papers on the export of education services.
We correctly forecasted the growth in exports of education services, although we underestimated the scale of growth. We did not, however, properly identify all the implications of that growth on industry structure, performance and culture. Part of the reason for this is that we failed to predict the extent to which Government policy would perpetuate and in some ways accentuate rigidities in higher education.
I have already discussed the financial pressures placed on Australia's public universities. Faced with these pressures, faced with constant change and limitations in the domestic marketplace, our universities seized the opportunity to attract overseas full fee paying students with vigour and enthusiasm. This has had profound effects on university structure, culture and performance.
I will list just here:
1. The varying success of our universities in attracting full fee paying students has had a significant impact on industry structure, creating a pattern of relative winners and loosers that has then flowed through into changes in position in the domestic marketplace.
2. As already noted, our success in attracting overseas students has made some universities as well as some courses within universities very dependent upon the fees so generated. Any downturn in demand could have dramatic effects not just on those institutions, but on our higher education sector has a whole. Without being too dramatic, the viability of Australian higher education depends upon continued export success.
3. The importance of overseas students has created pressures on standards within universities, leading in at least a few cases to things such as marking scandals that have the potential to threaten the reputation of the higher education system as a whole.
4. The now high proportion of overseas students at certain institutions and in certain courses is affecting the culture of the institutions and the nature of the university experience for all students in ways not always welcomed by Australian students.
None of this should be read as opposition to overseas students. My point simply is that the framework we presently use in thinking about the higher education sector means that we do not properly address issues associated with industry structure and performance.
The Changing Interface between Education and Training
The changing interface between education and training is the last issue I want to discuss, focusing on the change process in the training sector and the way that process has affected higher education. Again, part of my message is the way current analytical frameworks limit the questions we ask, the way we think.
Back in 1980 when I was Assistant Secretary heading the Economic Analysis Branch in the Department of Industry and Commerce, a key concern was (and this will sound familiar) the way skills shortages were affecting resource development.
The economic troubles of the 1970s had been followed by a mining boom. Because training of all types had been cut back during the downturn, we were suddenly experiencing substantial shortages of skilled labour. Here we faced real problems in quickly increasing skilled labour supply because of long training pipelines. The problem was accentuated by industrial rigidities associated with a rigid award system that made it difficult for industry to move people between activities.
These problems were not really addressed until after the election of the Hawke Labor Government in 1983. Then the close relations between the Labor Government and the trade union movement, the flow on effects of the Hawke concensus approach, the growing recognition of the global international challenges facing Australia, together with growing recognition of the problems in Australia's system of technical education all combined to allow the launch of what became known as the Dawkins Training Reform Agenda.
The Dawkins Agenda drew from Australia's particular circumstances but was set against a backdrop of international change in training and especially in the UK, Europe and New Zealand, change that drew in turn from the international standards movement. The concept of competence or competencies was central to this.
While early elements of the Dawkins reforms had begun while I was in Government, the launch of the Agenda itself came after I had left Government.
Both I and my key colleagues were very excited by the new developments because we saw competencies in combination with recogntion of prior learning as a way of freeing up the education and training system, leading to the creation of a fully articulated national framework that would allow a multiplicity of education and training providers while also offering individuals greater flexibility and choice.
In a recent post on the managing the professional services firm blog I gave an example of the potential continuing power of competency based approaches looking especially at the ophthalmology vs optometry case.
In simple terms, if you can define the core competencies associated with qualifications or activities and then combine this with a simple standards based approach to the acquisition and recognition of those competencies, then you open up the possibility of an almost infinite combination of paths to the achievement of the skills in question. In turn, this cut to the heart of the protection afforded existing suppliers including universities, allowing for easy entry of new providers. So we promoted and supported the new approaches as best we could.
From my perspective, two linked things then went wrong.
The first one was the effective capture of the Training Reform Agenda by existing vested interests, especially in the Government vocational education sector.
While the competency approach itself survived, its rigid and cumbersome implementation effectively acted to protect existing suppliers. In so doing, we lost the opportunity to create a new globably competitive training industry. Part of the reason for this is that the whole thing was seen as a training issue without sufficient recognition of the industry development opportunities.
The second and arguably more pernicious outcome was the way in which concepts and approaches intended to improve training performance spread to the univesrity and school sectors.
There is a difference between the two. Training focuses on the capacity to do, education focuses on the to think. Both are important. But the capacity to do is enhanced by the capacity to think.
I am the first to argue that our universities have not paid sufficient attention to teaching. I would also accept that universities who have moved into the training arena are, too, subject to the same type of assessment and performance criteria. However, I do not accept that the story ends here.
If I or my children enroll at a university I expect more. I expect that university to teach us to think, to provide intellectual stimulation. I expect my daughters in particular to gain more than I could teach them through simple skills acquisition. Too many of our universities no longer provide this.
This is the crux of my argument in this post and the reason why I say mea culpa because I, too, have helped to bring this situation about.
Universities and the Competition for Students
Photo: Booloominbah, University of New England
Recently I have written a fair bit on higher education in Australia. It seem that I cannot let the topic alone.
This week there have been several further stories, pieces of information, that again show a sector in change.
Monday's(8 January) Sydney Morning Herald carried a story by Anne Patty and Harriet Alexander about the way that Sydney universities are offering scholarships to those with 99 plus UAIs to try to attract them, a competition now extending down to attempts to target potential future stars at year 8 level.
In another story in the same edition, Harriet Alexander reported that Ji Gao received scholarship offers from four Sydney universities the day after she learned that her UAI score was 99.95 - Sydney University and NSW each $10,000 per annum, Macquarie $4,000 and UTS $13,000. She also reported on the breakfasts and receptions that that both UNSW and Sydney held for students who scored 99.9 and above.
Students are wily beasts. To quote Ji Gao, she said that if there was only $1,000 or $2,000 in it, she would choose her (unspecified) university and course of choice. Now here, and based only on the small sample available to me, I have noticed a fascinating shift in student choice.
Several years ago, in one of my first forays into trying to influence planning at the University of New England, I argued in a series of emails to Ingrid Moses, then VC, that UNE should try to maintain arts. My argument was that I could see signs of a swing back to arts and to the university experience itself, both areas in which UNE had been so strong. Ingrid was very polite, but I think that I was seen as being a tad old fashioned.
Well, it seems the swing I was talking about may be here. I was fascinated to discover just how many among my daughter's friends are doing or planning to do arts, liberal arts or combination arts with another such as economics. This includes kids with UAIs as high as 99 plus. Further, the idea of a university as a university had considerable appeal.
Accepting that this is a small and largely female sample, I am not sure that the result should come as a surprise. While I have previously expressed doubts about the Generation Y or NextGen classification as meaningful subdivisions, these outcomes would seem to fit with some of the features as defined.
Wednesday, January 10, 2007
Rosebery Reflections - Tiredness
I sometimes don't get enough sleep. I really mean, I don't get enough sleep!
We presently live on a reasonably busy road in a small mixed industrial residential inner city Sydney suburb. Normally this does not worry me, but every so often
I suppose police chases are the worst.
Our bedroom is at the front of the house. I suppose the street would be 20 m. or so away. A police car at high speed with siren and lights passing at this distance is, how would I describe it?, noticeable!
Fortunately there are not many of these, and they pass rather quickly, with the noise dieing away in a diminishing wail.
While the noise is usually less pronounced, trucks are worse.
A big semi delivering a container to the poker machine factory across the road - Rosebery is one of the global HQs for the manufacture of gaming machines - is also noticeable in the middle of the night. Again this is rare, although at one stage when the factory was working three shifts a day to meet a big order it was common for a period.
Beyond this, there are a whole variety of annoying motor vehicles. Street sweeping machines are the worst, since for some reason they often come early in the morning and then go up and down the road outside the house.
Today was a new one.
For reasons that escape me, one of those vehicles with a large flashing arrow mounted on the back that you see at road construction sites came and sat at the head of our drive way - motor running, lights flashing - for an extended period.
By the time it drove away I was wide awake and could not get back to sleep. So I finally got up.
We presently live on a reasonably busy road in a small mixed industrial residential inner city Sydney suburb. Normally this does not worry me, but every so often
I suppose police chases are the worst.
Our bedroom is at the front of the house. I suppose the street would be 20 m. or so away. A police car at high speed with siren and lights passing at this distance is, how would I describe it?, noticeable!
Fortunately there are not many of these, and they pass rather quickly, with the noise dieing away in a diminishing wail.
While the noise is usually less pronounced, trucks are worse.
A big semi delivering a container to the poker machine factory across the road - Rosebery is one of the global HQs for the manufacture of gaming machines - is also noticeable in the middle of the night. Again this is rare, although at one stage when the factory was working three shifts a day to meet a big order it was common for a period.
Beyond this, there are a whole variety of annoying motor vehicles. Street sweeping machines are the worst, since for some reason they often come early in the morning and then go up and down the road outside the house.
Today was a new one.
For reasons that escape me, one of those vehicles with a large flashing arrow mounted on the back that you see at road construction sites came and sat at the head of our drive way - motor running, lights flashing - for an extended period.
By the time it drove away I was wide awake and could not get back to sleep. So I finally got up.
Monday, January 08, 2007
Australian Individuals Fighting (and Dying) on Foreign Soil
Photo: "Melbourne Boys Safe from Franco’s Killers.” – Melbourne Age 2 February 1939
Although the circumstances of the death appear unclear, the sad news that an Australian had been killed in the fighting in Somalia made me curious about the broader question of Australians joining overseas conflicts as individual volunteers. How common has it been? How did we respond?
I have not done much checking - that has to wait until I have time for fuller story - but my impression is that it has in fact been quite common dating back at least to the New Zealand Waikoto wars of the early 1860s.
Much of this participation such as the Waikato wars or individual Australian volunteers serving with various non-Australian Imperial forces during the first or second world wars has taken place within recognised official frameworks. However, there has also been a steady stream of volunteer participation for individual national or religious reasons, in support of causes, for adventure or as professional mercenaries.
As one example, during the Spanish Civil War at least 66 Australians served on the Republican side, 10 of them women. A significant number were killed. At least one Australian served with the Franco forces. Amirah Inglis wrote of the Republican volunteers:
"We know little enough about the (Australian) volunteers we can identify but one characteristic is striking: 10 of the 66 were women - proportionally more than one would find in a conventional army. Otherwise they were not unusual. More than a third were born outside Australia, a little higher than the adult population where 70 per cent were native born, and most of that third had started life in the United Kingdom...Of 52 volunteers whose occupations we know, 36 were attached to fighting groups and 16 nursed, organised, investigated or propagandised. Before they left, 27 of the 36 fighters were manual workers - seamen, shearers, a shearer's cook, a boiler maker, sugar workers and general labourers; three were Communist Party functionaries; two were unemployed; one was a writer; four were farmers; one a school teacher; and one was a poster artist. The 16 non-fighters (including 10 women) had been nurses and white collar workers: six nurses, one advertising copywriter, two students, one office worker; two had been pedlars...Of the 27 whose politics are known, 22 were communists; two described themselves as anarchists, several were liberal democrats and three were Labor supporters"The Spanish Civil War was a major conflict, making it easier to trace individual Australian involvement.
When we drop below this level, it becomes much harder to identify involvement unless the individual is killed or comes to notice, as with David Hicks, through intelligence activities. But we do know that individual Australians have become involved in a significant number of conflicts both as combatants and in supply roles.
Official and community attitudes towards these involvements appears to have varied enormously depending upon public opinion at the time and the nature and prominence of the involvement. Further, those attitudes can and do shift with time. We only have to take the Spanish Civil War as an example, where some Australians fearing communism initially supported Franco, while others were on the Republican side.
In all, an interesting if obscure issue.
In all, an interesting if obscure issue.
Sunday, January 07, 2007
Annual Australian Climate Statement 2006
The Bureau of Meteorology has released its annual climate statement for 2006. This shows the broad picture discussed earlier.
Those who are interested in the position by state or territory can find it here. The NSW annual report also shows the position I referred to (links to earlier posts here too), with north-eastern NSW spared the worst, with a small segment recording well above average rain.
Interestingly, while some parts of NSW recorded the lowest rainfall on record, December rains mean that the current drought is now only the third worst drought on record.
Those who are interested in the position by state or territory can find it here. The NSW annual report also shows the position I referred to (links to earlier posts here too), with north-eastern NSW spared the worst, with a small segment recording well above average rain.
Interestingly, while some parts of NSW recorded the lowest rainfall on record, December rains mean that the current drought is now only the third worst drought on record.
Drought, Higher Education and Mental Traps
I have always been aware of the way in which location, up-bringing, contact networks, our experiences and access to information conditions out thinking. So I try to guard against this. Yet every so often I find examples where my own thinking has been unconsciously caught in this conditioning trap. In fact, two this week.
I have so far written three stories linked to drought and water (here, here and here). In doing so, I have tried to come at things from a different perspective, pointing among other things to to the way in which sudden water problems in major metro centres were leading to conclusions about drought and water that did not accurately reflect the variety in conditions across the country. It turns out I got caught in the same trap.
I knew that New England, the north-eastern corner of NSW from the Hunter Valley up, was the wettest part of NSW. I knew that not all parts of New England were in drought. I knew that control over and access to New England's water was becoming an important if still unseen issue. Yet I still got caught.
When the NSW Government announced the building of the Tillegra dam to meet the needs of Newcastle and the Lower Hunter the announcement was couched in terms of the current drought. I simply accepted this. Then yesterday a story in the Sydney Morning Herald throwing doubt on the need for the dam caused me to do some investigation for a story on the New England, Australia blog.
Without repeating the full story again, I found that Hunter Water's storage was over 82 per cent, the two main dams were over 90 per cent full, and that there were no water restrictions. I also found when I looked at the official Government material on the proposal it was all twisted in a strange fashion to make it fit into the drought theme. All very strange, but clearly my previous automatic assumption re need was simply wrong.
Higher education provides the second example.
A lot of my earlier writing on this topic (I won't repeat the posts here) focused on the University of New England's strategic planning exercise. This meant that I was looking at the world from the viewpoint of a particular institution, although I did try to put in a broader context set by overall changes in education and training.
Other writing focused on Australia's regional universities in general and on the linkage between the structure of university education in Australia, population distribution and problems associated with the attraction to and retention of professionals within Regional Australia. One of my aims here has been to sell the value of the regional experience for education and work.
My most recent writing on the NSW HSC, the UAI and the linkages between this and university education has taken me in a new direction because I wrote this in part from the perspective of a parent now living in Sydney looking at education for his own daughters.
This writing caused an interesting paradigm shift because it caused me to look at university education in Sydney as compared to regional NSW from a different perspective, leading me to the unexpected conclusion that in some ways regional kids are significantly advantaged as compared to Sydney kids. This is the opposite of the conventional wisdom, a wisdom that I had accepted to some degree.
To explain this a little, consider the broader New England.
At June 2005, New England's population was a bit over 1.3 million. That population is serviced by three main universities, New England, Southern Cross and Newcastle. In addition, the Seventh Day Adventists' Avondale College provides a range of degrees, Charles Sturt has a theology school at Morpeth, while there is a private technical institution at Byron Bay.
Those universities compete against each other for New England students and also for students from other places. So New England and Southern Cross, for example, draw some students from Queensland including the relatively big population conurbation of South East Queensland.
Most of the bigger New England urban centres now have some form of local tertiary study from one or other of the New England universities whether campus or study centre. The bulk of the New England population now live within an hour and a half's travelling time one way of some form of tertiary study.
All this said, it remains true that Sydney students have a greater theoretical range of tertiary opportunities open to them in reasonable geographical proximity. So a higher proportion of New England students need to move to pursue study of choice. Conversely, Sydney students are much less prepared to move away from Sydney. But this is not the end of the story.
The unwillingness of Sydney students to move combined with competition for places from non-Sydney students makes for high UAIs at the older Sydney Universities. Conversely, UAIs at New England's universities tend to be lower simply because competition for places is less, so it's easier to get in. But again, this is not the end of the story.
Because of the competition, all the New England universities have policies in place that effectively advantage New England students as compared to students from outside New England and especially Sydney.
Take Newcastle. This University has a Regional and Rural Preference Scheme, which will award a bonus four points to the admission ranks of 2006 current NSW HSC students who attend schools within a defined postcode boundary.
The scheme includes schools and TAFE colleges with postcodes in the Hunter, Central Coast, Central West, Northern Rivers, mid-North Coast, New England, Western Plains and Broken Hill mail centres. The scheme applies to all undergraduate programs except B Medicine or any combined degree.
Both Southern Cross and New England also have special schemes.
Within the Southern Cross University's defined Feeder Region - the area bordered in the south by Bulahdelah, by Dubbo and Goondiwindi in the west, and in the north by Warwick and the Greater Gold Coast Region - school leavers from within our Feeder region are elibile for bonus UAI/OP points and special entry schemes such as the STAR Entry Scheme. The STAR scheme is a school's based early entry program that grants admission in advance of HSC results.
The University of New England also has a school's based early admission program. I am not sure that this is in fact limited to New England schools, although that may be the practical effect.
Recognising some variations between areas, the practical effects of all this for students prepared to move are:
1. New England students can compete with Sydney students on an equal basis for places in Sydney universities.
2. New England students receive a degree of advantage over Sydney students in competing for places at New England Universities in terms of flexibility offered by alternative school based entry pathways (SCU, UNE) or bonus additions to UAIs (Newcastle, SCU).
Students with very high UAIs can essentially pick and choose. Beyond that point, New England year 12 students would appear to be advantaged.
I have so far written three stories linked to drought and water (here, here and here). In doing so, I have tried to come at things from a different perspective, pointing among other things to to the way in which sudden water problems in major metro centres were leading to conclusions about drought and water that did not accurately reflect the variety in conditions across the country. It turns out I got caught in the same trap.
I knew that New England, the north-eastern corner of NSW from the Hunter Valley up, was the wettest part of NSW. I knew that not all parts of New England were in drought. I knew that control over and access to New England's water was becoming an important if still unseen issue. Yet I still got caught.
When the NSW Government announced the building of the Tillegra dam to meet the needs of Newcastle and the Lower Hunter the announcement was couched in terms of the current drought. I simply accepted this. Then yesterday a story in the Sydney Morning Herald throwing doubt on the need for the dam caused me to do some investigation for a story on the New England, Australia blog.
Without repeating the full story again, I found that Hunter Water's storage was over 82 per cent, the two main dams were over 90 per cent full, and that there were no water restrictions. I also found when I looked at the official Government material on the proposal it was all twisted in a strange fashion to make it fit into the drought theme. All very strange, but clearly my previous automatic assumption re need was simply wrong.
Higher education provides the second example.
A lot of my earlier writing on this topic (I won't repeat the posts here) focused on the University of New England's strategic planning exercise. This meant that I was looking at the world from the viewpoint of a particular institution, although I did try to put in a broader context set by overall changes in education and training.
Other writing focused on Australia's regional universities in general and on the linkage between the structure of university education in Australia, population distribution and problems associated with the attraction to and retention of professionals within Regional Australia. One of my aims here has been to sell the value of the regional experience for education and work.
My most recent writing on the NSW HSC, the UAI and the linkages between this and university education has taken me in a new direction because I wrote this in part from the perspective of a parent now living in Sydney looking at education for his own daughters.
This writing caused an interesting paradigm shift because it caused me to look at university education in Sydney as compared to regional NSW from a different perspective, leading me to the unexpected conclusion that in some ways regional kids are significantly advantaged as compared to Sydney kids. This is the opposite of the conventional wisdom, a wisdom that I had accepted to some degree.
To explain this a little, consider the broader New England.
At June 2005, New England's population was a bit over 1.3 million. That population is serviced by three main universities, New England, Southern Cross and Newcastle. In addition, the Seventh Day Adventists' Avondale College provides a range of degrees, Charles Sturt has a theology school at Morpeth, while there is a private technical institution at Byron Bay.
Those universities compete against each other for New England students and also for students from other places. So New England and Southern Cross, for example, draw some students from Queensland including the relatively big population conurbation of South East Queensland.
Most of the bigger New England urban centres now have some form of local tertiary study from one or other of the New England universities whether campus or study centre. The bulk of the New England population now live within an hour and a half's travelling time one way of some form of tertiary study.
All this said, it remains true that Sydney students have a greater theoretical range of tertiary opportunities open to them in reasonable geographical proximity. So a higher proportion of New England students need to move to pursue study of choice. Conversely, Sydney students are much less prepared to move away from Sydney. But this is not the end of the story.
The unwillingness of Sydney students to move combined with competition for places from non-Sydney students makes for high UAIs at the older Sydney Universities. Conversely, UAIs at New England's universities tend to be lower simply because competition for places is less, so it's easier to get in. But again, this is not the end of the story.
Because of the competition, all the New England universities have policies in place that effectively advantage New England students as compared to students from outside New England and especially Sydney.
Take Newcastle. This University has a Regional and Rural Preference Scheme, which will award a bonus four points to the admission ranks of 2006 current NSW HSC students who attend schools within a defined postcode boundary.
The scheme includes schools and TAFE colleges with postcodes in the Hunter, Central Coast, Central West, Northern Rivers, mid-North Coast, New England, Western Plains and Broken Hill mail centres. The scheme applies to all undergraduate programs except B Medicine or any combined degree.
Both Southern Cross and New England also have special schemes.
Within the Southern Cross University's defined Feeder Region - the area bordered in the south by Bulahdelah, by Dubbo and Goondiwindi in the west, and in the north by Warwick and the Greater Gold Coast Region - school leavers from within our Feeder region are elibile for bonus UAI/OP points and special entry schemes such as the STAR Entry Scheme. The STAR scheme is a school's based early entry program that grants admission in advance of HSC results.
The University of New England also has a school's based early admission program. I am not sure that this is in fact limited to New England schools, although that may be the practical effect.
Recognising some variations between areas, the practical effects of all this for students prepared to move are:
1. New England students can compete with Sydney students on an equal basis for places in Sydney universities.
2. New England students receive a degree of advantage over Sydney students in competing for places at New England Universities in terms of flexibility offered by alternative school based entry pathways (SCU, UNE) or bonus additions to UAIs (Newcastle, SCU).
Students with very high UAIs can essentially pick and choose. Beyond that point, New England year 12 students would appear to be advantaged.
Saturday, January 06, 2007
David Hicks - a final comment
Lexcen and I have been having a debate about David Hicks. Here Lexcen feels:
There is a lot of sympathy for David Hicks. I don't know why. I'm not sure if the sympathizers are more concerned with the rights of individuals or that justice must seen to be carried out or whether they see Hicks as innocent. Personally, I would just dump him back in Afghanistan and forbid him from returning to Australia.
I know Lexcen's views are shared by others, although the majority view is now clearly shifting. In this post I want to explain, very simply, why the Hicks' case so concerns me.
To cut to the nub of the matter, my core concern in the Hicks case (here, here), and the reasons for my linking Hicks and Dreyfus, have very little to do with questions of Hicks' guilt or innocence of whatever he may ultimately be charged with, everything to do with process.
If you look at English history you will see that one of the core themes has been the fight to establish the rights of the individual relative to the state. The rule of law and equality of people in front of the law are part of this.
This was not an easy fight. Kings who ruled by divine right did not take kindly to limitations on their power or actions that threatened their interests. Later Parliamentary Governments in fact also behaved in the same way when they saw their what they perceived as their or the nation's interest being threatened. Individual rights were established by blood and suffering.
The new Australian colonies had it pretty lucky. We inherited the gains that had been made. We were given responsible government and freedom early. So we took (and take) certain things for granted.
Even so, our Governments at all levels since 1788 have displayed the same tendency to believe in the divine right of Government, today expressed in terms of the national interest. Weapons used have included police enforcement, imprisonment, deportation, manipulation of public opinion, secret surveillance, removal from office, slander through Parliament.
Often, these actions were perceived as correct at the time, driven by overwhelming popular opinion and fears. Sometimes, those opinions and fears were correct. More often, history has shown them to be invalid or unbalanced. In all this, respect for the rule of law and of equality before the law has, however imperfectly, been a key thing protecting us as individuals.
The problem with the Hicks case, at least as I see it, is that the treatment of David Hicks has increasingly breached these principles. It is easy to uphold the principles of the rule of law and equality before the law when a matter is popular, much harder when the matter is unpopular. Yet it is how we handle the second that determines the longer term strength of the principles and of our freedom.
HSC, UAI and Education - a further note
My last post continued my musings on the rigidities, difficulties and pressures created in NSW by the Higher School Certificate/Universities Admission Index combination, by the need for schools, parents and kids to try to manage the process to get the best numeric outcome.
I have done a little more thinking and investigation since then talking to people and also working my way yet again through the UAC web site.
As all parents know, the UAI index is a device for competitive matching of demand by students for courses to available places in courses within NSW and ACT universities. At the end of each entry round there are always some vacancies in some subjects in some institutions. In this sense, the UAI is most important as a rationing device for the more popular courses and institutions.
Given all this, the final UAI required for entry to a particular course in a particular institution becomes a price proxy for demand and supply for that course. The result is a quite dramatic 40 spread between the lowest entry UAI that I could find (60 in 2006) and the 99 plus required for some courses in some institutions.
The UAI is not a perfect market clearing mechanism simply because students are not themselves perfectly mobile, while universities will drop UAIs only so far to attract students. This means that at the end of the process there are always some vacancies in some institutions one one side, some unplaced eligible students on the other.
Prior to the UAI system, students had to apply individually to their institution(s) of choice. In this sense, there is no doubt that the UAI system has made things easier for students. However, it has also introduced the distortions and pressures I discussed in my previous posts.
One specific issue that I mentioned in my last post was our surprise at the continued importance of the UAI for people who had already completed part of their degree and wished to switch courses and especially institutions. The specific trigger case was Sydney University with its 50/50 weighting between UAI and first year results. We have since learned that the University of NSW has a 75/25 weighting.
This came as a surprise to us because in the old pre-UAI world weight was placed upon successful completion of first year because it proved that you could in fact do tertiary studies, something that could not be assumed just from success in final school exams.
We should not have been surprised. Students wishing to switch compete against year 12 students, so there is an argument for ensuring at least some equivalence. However, the difficulty for students and parents is that it introduces yet a further degree of complexity into an already complicated process.
The process appears to work this way.
Students wishing to switch institutions apply to UAC as post year 12 students. Each university sets their own rules, hence the variation in weighting between UNSW and Sydney. UAC then somehow takes the student's university results and turns them into a UAI equivalent index, allowing the old UAI and the university results to be combined into a new UAI equivalent so that the transferring student can be compared with the year 12 cohort.
All this sounds fair and equitable. However, there are some very real problems.
To begin with, no one seems able to tell us - perhaps a reader can - just how the university study component is turned into an index number for ranking purposes across grades, courses and institutions. So we have another black box uncertainty.
The second problem is the nature of the equivalence between the HSC/UAI ranking and the University results.
Leave aside issues about comparisons of UAIs between years, a student already at university may miss out if the university result pulls the UAI down. Take the case of a student who already has the required entry level UAI for the course but has been on a gap year. That student gets in. The same student who has been at university for a year, passed everything but gets an index number lower than the UAI may miss out.
Advice from the University of NSW is that students wishing to switch courses should obtain average distinction to ensure that they can switch. That's fine, but marks are affected by all sorts of things.
For example, it appears that in at least some universities in some courses the bell curve approach is applied. The effect of this, to one quote university lecturer involved, is to limit the number of higher results independent of the absolute quality of students and their results. Further, those wishing to switch often do so because they realise that they have made the wrong choice, something that may affect their results to some degree.
In all this, I can see only one class of student who might clearly benefit from the system. This is a student who know exactly what they want to do but who falls a little short in the UAI stakes. That student may accept another course then work like absolute blazes ignoring all else to get high enough marks at university to increase his/her average index.
Previous Posts in this Series
Friday, January 05, 2007
Gripes About Australian Education - 2
In my last post I looked at some of the rigidities, difficulties and pressures created in NSW by the HSC/UAI combination, by the need for schools, parents and kids to try to manage the process to get the best numeric outcome.
One of the difficulties here lies in the uncertainties associated with the process. In the words, of my eldest, how was I to know that English would be my best subject?
This was a subject that Helen struggled in to some degree, a subject where we arranged some external tutoring, a subject where her place in class was lower than in most other subjects. Then come the HSC her exam mark was far better than expected, miles in front of the raw school assessment, with the assessment itself being scaled up by a substantial margin.
Conversely, drama was one of Helen's favourite subjects and one she was good at. Unexpectedly, in drama the exam mark was lower than expected, with the no scaling up of school assessment.
I had attended all of the class and individual performances and did not understand this result. I still do not, even after hours spent analysing the official data.
The best I can work out is that the examiners must have marked the school very hard in the performance segment of the examination, bringing the overall exam mark down. Since, as seems to be the custom in many schools, the school itself had marked the assessment tasks hard, the combined effect was negative.
Whatever the reasons, the outcome affected Helen's UAI since she had chosen to do just ten subjects to allow her to also concentrate on other things including her role as prefect. Should we have discouraged her from pursuing the prefect position and then investing so much time in it? I don't think so, because she did blossom in the role. But I can understand why some parents do discourage their children's extra-curricular activities.
Under the NSW/ACT system students have to nominate their university/subject choices. In doing so, they are advised to make a number of prioritised choices. Universities then make offers based on student UAIs.
For most students, the process of selecting universities/subjects can be complex. In some cases, students know exactly what they want to do. However, in most cases they are not certain and go through something of a search process.
I watched all this with interest in the case of Helen and her friends, am now watching the same process with Clare and her friends, some of whom did the HSC this year.
The starting point is just which university you might get into and in which subjects, given your expected UAI.
Unlike the US where students consider universities across the country, Sydney students are almost entirely stay at home. This is partly a matter of culture, increasingly a matter of economics. As the costs of university education increase, the added costs of living away from home become a greater burden. So most Sydney students look first at local institutions. Here the combination of subject choice with expected UAI narrows the field.
Other factors then come into play. These include travel time, where friends are going and the prestige and culture of the institution itself.
Because Sydney University is still seen as a university, that institution attracts students who still see a university education in broader terms as compared to the narrower vocational focus. Conversely, UTS is less attractive to those seeking a broader university experience, while the University of New South Wales suffers because the large number of overseas students is seen as adversely affecting campus life. For Eastern Suburbs' kids, the group I know best, Macquarie and Western Sydney are just too far away, while Western Sydney also suffers from lack of prestige.
At the end of the day, it all depends upon just what offers you get. In Helen's case she wanted to do business studies as a first choice with Sydney and UTS as her preferred institutions. The business studies choice dictated the final outcome.
I actually do not understand quite why current students have such a strong preference for commerce or business studies, although that is a matter for another post. In any event, that preference means that UAI's for commerce/business studies can be quite high. In Helen's case, her UAI would have allowed her to do Arts at Sydney, but in terms of her preferred subject choice the only business studies option was UTS Kuring-gai.
Students make their institution and subject choices based on the best information available to them at the time. A considerable number, perhaps as many as a third based just on the sample I know, find their initial choices unsatisfactory.
The reasons for this vary. In some cases, they simply find that they prefer a different subject mix. In other cases, they find the teaching unsatisfactory. Bright students who have done advanced work at school may find initial subject content boringly elementary. A significant proportion are disappointed with campus life at the institution of choice.
Helen is probably a fairly typical case.
She found that she was interested in a broader range of subjects, the long travel times to Kuring-gai became a burden, while participation in campus life proved difficult at such distance. Given her interests and friends, she found herself working at one geographic point, studying at a second point, playing netball with a University of NSW team as a way of continuing sport with friends, organising a drama performance at Sydney University with a friend there.
In these circumstances students need to consider choosing new subjects or even new institutions. However, a new set of institutional rigidities now come in. Again, we can take Helen as a case study.
At school she was told not to worry too much, that there were fourteen different ways of achieving the same thing. Her parents repeated this message based on our own experience. Start now and you can always switch later. Unfortunately, this advice is at best only partially correct.
In Helen's case, she presently wants to maintain a business studies major, she would like to do honours although this has still to be defined, she would like to consider doing some new subjects in arts, politics and economics, and she would like to play a more active role in campus life in the same way that she did at school. So she needs to look at new course options, possibly a new university, recognising that this may add an extra year to the degree.
To this end, she looked again at Sydney University. This is just down the road, she had played water polo for a Sydney University team, she has friends there, she and a friend are mounting a SUDS sponsored drama performance in February. In all, she already knows the University pretty well. However, Sydney University is still just not on. The reasons are instructive.
1. She still cannot get into either commerce or economics because of the way they do the assessments. To shift at the end of first year, the University rules provide for a 50:50 weighting between the previous UAI and the first year university results. Her credit average UTS first year results cannot bridge the gap between her UAI and the commerce and economics entry UAI requirements. There is no provision to take other things into account.
2. As before, she can get into Arts. However, here she faces two distinct problems.
One of the difficulties here lies in the uncertainties associated with the process. In the words, of my eldest, how was I to know that English would be my best subject?
This was a subject that Helen struggled in to some degree, a subject where we arranged some external tutoring, a subject where her place in class was lower than in most other subjects. Then come the HSC her exam mark was far better than expected, miles in front of the raw school assessment, with the assessment itself being scaled up by a substantial margin.
Conversely, drama was one of Helen's favourite subjects and one she was good at. Unexpectedly, in drama the exam mark was lower than expected, with the no scaling up of school assessment.
I had attended all of the class and individual performances and did not understand this result. I still do not, even after hours spent analysing the official data.
The best I can work out is that the examiners must have marked the school very hard in the performance segment of the examination, bringing the overall exam mark down. Since, as seems to be the custom in many schools, the school itself had marked the assessment tasks hard, the combined effect was negative.
Whatever the reasons, the outcome affected Helen's UAI since she had chosen to do just ten subjects to allow her to also concentrate on other things including her role as prefect. Should we have discouraged her from pursuing the prefect position and then investing so much time in it? I don't think so, because she did blossom in the role. But I can understand why some parents do discourage their children's extra-curricular activities.
Under the NSW/ACT system students have to nominate their university/subject choices. In doing so, they are advised to make a number of prioritised choices. Universities then make offers based on student UAIs.
For most students, the process of selecting universities/subjects can be complex. In some cases, students know exactly what they want to do. However, in most cases they are not certain and go through something of a search process.
I watched all this with interest in the case of Helen and her friends, am now watching the same process with Clare and her friends, some of whom did the HSC this year.
The starting point is just which university you might get into and in which subjects, given your expected UAI.
Unlike the US where students consider universities across the country, Sydney students are almost entirely stay at home. This is partly a matter of culture, increasingly a matter of economics. As the costs of university education increase, the added costs of living away from home become a greater burden. So most Sydney students look first at local institutions. Here the combination of subject choice with expected UAI narrows the field.
Other factors then come into play. These include travel time, where friends are going and the prestige and culture of the institution itself.
Because Sydney University is still seen as a university, that institution attracts students who still see a university education in broader terms as compared to the narrower vocational focus. Conversely, UTS is less attractive to those seeking a broader university experience, while the University of New South Wales suffers because the large number of overseas students is seen as adversely affecting campus life. For Eastern Suburbs' kids, the group I know best, Macquarie and Western Sydney are just too far away, while Western Sydney also suffers from lack of prestige.
At the end of the day, it all depends upon just what offers you get. In Helen's case she wanted to do business studies as a first choice with Sydney and UTS as her preferred institutions. The business studies choice dictated the final outcome.
I actually do not understand quite why current students have such a strong preference for commerce or business studies, although that is a matter for another post. In any event, that preference means that UAI's for commerce/business studies can be quite high. In Helen's case, her UAI would have allowed her to do Arts at Sydney, but in terms of her preferred subject choice the only business studies option was UTS Kuring-gai.
Students make their institution and subject choices based on the best information available to them at the time. A considerable number, perhaps as many as a third based just on the sample I know, find their initial choices unsatisfactory.
The reasons for this vary. In some cases, they simply find that they prefer a different subject mix. In other cases, they find the teaching unsatisfactory. Bright students who have done advanced work at school may find initial subject content boringly elementary. A significant proportion are disappointed with campus life at the institution of choice.
Helen is probably a fairly typical case.
She found that she was interested in a broader range of subjects, the long travel times to Kuring-gai became a burden, while participation in campus life proved difficult at such distance. Given her interests and friends, she found herself working at one geographic point, studying at a second point, playing netball with a University of NSW team as a way of continuing sport with friends, organising a drama performance at Sydney University with a friend there.
In these circumstances students need to consider choosing new subjects or even new institutions. However, a new set of institutional rigidities now come in. Again, we can take Helen as a case study.
At school she was told not to worry too much, that there were fourteen different ways of achieving the same thing. Her parents repeated this message based on our own experience. Start now and you can always switch later. Unfortunately, this advice is at best only partially correct.
In Helen's case, she presently wants to maintain a business studies major, she would like to do honours although this has still to be defined, she would like to consider doing some new subjects in arts, politics and economics, and she would like to play a more active role in campus life in the same way that she did at school. So she needs to look at new course options, possibly a new university, recognising that this may add an extra year to the degree.
To this end, she looked again at Sydney University. This is just down the road, she had played water polo for a Sydney University team, she has friends there, she and a friend are mounting a SUDS sponsored drama performance in February. In all, she already knows the University pretty well. However, Sydney University is still just not on. The reasons are instructive.
1. She still cannot get into either commerce or economics because of the way they do the assessments. To shift at the end of first year, the University rules provide for a 50:50 weighting between the previous UAI and the first year university results. Her credit average UTS first year results cannot bridge the gap between her UAI and the commerce and economics entry UAI requirements. There is no provision to take other things into account.
2. As before, she can get into Arts. However, here she faces two distinct problems.
- The first is that, based on the advice from the University, it is highly unlikely that she will later be able to shift to either commerce or economics should she want to no matter how good her results. So if she goes to Sydney, she is stuck in Arts.
- This brings up the second problem, the rigidity in SU course structures. When my wife did her degree at Sydney, she and a friend did almost identical subjects, with one graduating with honours in Political Economy, the second honours in Arts. This type of flexibility is apparently no longer possible. Many of the subjects that Helen is interested in, economics and government relations are examples, are not in Arts. This creates real longer term problems when it comes to considering possible majors and honour's year.
So now it's all back to the drawing board while we reconsider options. Should she stay at UTS perhaps trying to shift to the city campus, accepting the perceived UTS limitations? Should she move to Sydney, accepting the severe limitations there? Should she consider other alternatives such as combined economics/arts at NSW, assuming that she can get in?
There are a number of lessons in this story from a parent's perspective.
The first is the continued importance of the broader university experience for at least some students. I see this when I look at Pippa doing medicine at Newcastle who has apparently been having a magnificent time or Rachel at Sydney with her involvement in student activities. Conversely, I also see it in Helen with her disappointment at UTS. There is more to life than the narrowly vocational.
The second is the extent to which students are disappointed by their initial institution/subject choices. This appears to be far higher than I had realised, so the need for flexibility has to be factored into planning.
This leads me to my third point, the importance of institutional rigidities, including the continuing dead hand of the UAI, in limiting student choice. Students and parents must factor this into initial choices. What is the full range of course options at any institution? How easy is it to switch courses? How easy is it to switch universities? Should we consider the non-Sydney option?
There is also a lesson in all this for the Sydney universities themselves and especially the University of Sydney.
You cannot assume that just because you are a member of the gang of eight, have a large immediate local marketplace and an apparently strong market position, that your market position is unassailable. If you cannot offer good teaching, a rich student experience and substantial student flexibility, then you become just another commodity supplier.
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