Giardiasis said:
sorry, i should have clarified. I mean the quality of the students, those applying for uni.
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University Fee Deregulation
- Thread starter martyshire
- Start date
sorry, i should have clarified. I mean the quality of the students, those applying for uni.
I think it more likely that the quality of students will improve under a market rate. Sure there might be a few talented people that could have done well that don't go through the system, but there is currently a far greater number of people that would have been far better off working IMO. For a lot of people paying off hecs debt isn't really a strong consideration when deciding whether to go to uni. Under a market rate, the cost would be much more important consideration in the decision to go to uni. For those students without rich parents that decide to go to uni would really want to do well to justify the expense.Brodders17 said:
I agree that many people (especially those in their 20s and 30s) would have been far better off working or starting a trade as opposed to going to uni but IMO the proposed fee deregulation and changes to interest on loans are not required to fix that. Actually I think this is fixing itself already. It only takes a decade or two for the pendulum to swing the other way when you see that all the kids that left school early to do a trade are the ones that have paid off their house and take their families OS every year. IMO the changes used as a disincentive for non-rich kids to go to uni is unnecessary. It is certainly unnecessarily strong as they are currently proposed and the problem will be the reverse to a much, much greater magnitude. If anything, kids just need to be reminded of the economics pertaining to each of their options, whether that be uni, trade, maccas or whatever. Admittedly, the tough part might be getting their schools to help on this front...given they look better if they have more people striving for uni places.Giardiasis said:
Some interesting views here. Many arguments pivot around employment prospects. Sure many people want a uni degree because it is the only way to peruse a certain vocation, for others it's about increasing overall education levels to get some yet to be determined job on graduation. But for them and everyone else a uni degree is about increasing the overall levels of education in society.
Show me a nation with say on average primary school, as the norm that is a forward stable or enlightened society. Does anyone think that having 50 Percent of our teenagers finish school at year 10 like
I don't think unis should be forced to offer primarily vocationally oriented degrees. We need people to carry forward the great bodies of human achievement in mathematics, literature, history, philosophy, as much as we need marketing, hospitality, engineers, doctors and lawyers which are today's money spinners in post secondary education.
Show me a nation with say on average primary school, as the norm that is a forward stable or enlightened society. Does anyone think that having 50 Percent of our teenagers finish school at year 10 like
I don't think unis should be forced to offer primarily vocationally oriented degrees. We need people to carry forward the great bodies of human achievement in mathematics, literature, history, philosophy, as much as we need marketing, hospitality, engineers, doctors and lawyers which are today's money spinners in post secondary education.
22nd Man said:
It's a great point, how many non-lawyers/accountants/managers do we have leading the country at the moment?
And it shows, the arts & sciences are being savaged, the environment is being plundered, people are feeling disenfranchised with their employers, corporate loyalty has become a thing of the past, we are working longer hours & becoming more isolated from social networks (outside of the internet). Life is more than a balance sheet, at some point this has to sink in.
A mate of mine in his early 40's is a sparky with his own business.
House paid off.
Several classic cars in the garage.
And no University Education.
It's harder to find a good sparky or chippy than an Accountant these days.
House paid off.
Several classic cars in the garage.
And no University Education.
It's harder to find a good sparky or chippy than an Accountant these days.
bullus_hit said:
Its pretty much wall-to-wall ex-student politician lawyers on both sides. Real representative
Good to see someone is speaking out on this issue
Higher education changes a 'fraud on the electorate'
Date December 2, 2014 - 4:27PM
Stephen Parker
"Wake up Australia if you want to preserve your children's life chances," says UC Vice Chancellor Stephen Parker.
Stephen Parker slams Universities Australia
Had someone told me last summer that I would be defending public universities on the first day of next summer I would have ridiculed the idea.
Somehow I believed what the Coalition wrote in early 2013: that there would be no change to university funding arrangements. Somehow I believed what Tony Abbott said to the Universities Australia conference in March 2013: that we could expect a period of benign neglect from an Abbott government. And somehow I believed what Abbott said two days before the election in September 2013: that there would be no cuts to education.
It is the last of these canards that is so shocking. Abbott knew he was going to win, so he didn't even need to promise it to gain votes.
But here we are and here I am.
A further surprise has been to find myself the only Vice-Chancellor to say publicly what at least a few actually believe. I have tried to understand other Vice-Chancellors' perspectives. I've worked at Group of Eight and more modern universities. I was the Senior DVC at Monash. I know the pressures, but nothing justifies the position that they and Universities Australia have taken.
These reforms are unfair to students and poorly designed policy. If they go through, Australia is sleepwalking towards the privatisation of its universities. And ironically they will be the death knell of our peak group, Universities Australia, which could not survive them for long.
Unfair to students
These reforms are unfair to students – the constituency to which I have devoted 35 years of my working life. They have to lead to significant increases in student debt because this is part of the government's case for them.
Education Minister Christopher Pyne says the reforms are a way to bring fresh funding into universities, so he must assume that we will go further than just replace government cuts with higher tuition fees.
Australian students already pay a higher proportion of their tuition than those in most OECD countries. This will blight the lives of a generation, unless Australia comes to its senses. Mission Australia released its Youth Survey showing that most teenagers rank career success as their top aspiration, but only around half feel the goal is attainable. It will become a whole lot harder under these changes.
And the impact on women and certain professions will be worse, as Ben Phillips and I have demonstrated in articles in The Conversation when we modelled the likely HECS debts of female scientists, nurses and teachers based on typical career trajectories.
Poor policy design
These reforms are poorly designed policy. Where do I start?
They emerged as a budget measure, but they won't save the taxpayer money in any real sense. A fundamental feature of HECS is that the government forwards all the money upfront to the university. So if fees go up by more than the cuts, the Commonwealth shells out more from day one.
Default will rise. More students will work overseas – legitimately, this is not evasion – and so only through some arcane aspect of accounting standards can this even look as if it is a savings measure.
This isn't a savings measure: it is ideology in search of a problem.
But it gets worse. Bizarrely, there is no guarantee that a single cent of the extra money will go into the student's course: it could go into research, infrastructure, paying for past follies or current *smile*-ups. It's tempting, believe me, I make them too, but it's wrong.
The internal equity aspect of the policy design is laughable. Why should the second poorest quartile of students subsidise the lowest quartile?
So I ask myself: which policy amateur came up with the scheme in the first place?
Sleep-walking towards privatisation
In June, I wrote in The Conversation about the slide towards privatisation. I compared universities with public utilities where the then managements were initially encouraged to be "commercial" and "competitive". Then they were actually pitted against private providers. Then the utilities were privatised themselves, and required a complete focus on private profit.
The privatisation that we are sleep-walking towards may or may not involve shareholders and the stock market – but it will involve the removal of the public voice.
I can hear the argument in my head already. Some Vice-Chancellor, perhaps one who has championed competition reforms in an earlier life or been the CEO of a large public company, will say:
Now that universities compete for places and on price, and they compete with private providers, including multi-nationals, we need a level playing field.
We have one hand tied behind our backs. We need to be set free, so let's get auditor-generals out of the place, let's stop state governments appointing our Senates and Councils, and let's get staff and students off them while we are at it.
And so on. It will all have a compelling logic because of the corner we have boxed ourselves into.
Death knell of Universities Australia
These reforms also ring the death knell of our peak body – Universities Australia. The support that Universities Australia is giving them is a strange form of suicide ritual.
Older universities, which have benefited from decades of public money, built a brand at taxpayer expense and who now want to run away with it, will raise their fees more. The stratification of institutions will intensify. Competition and dog-eat-dog will be the order of the day. And when they have milked the peak group for what they can get out of it the elites will dance away in a figure eight formation.
We have just seen a week of bizarre national adverts from Universities Australia – presumably aimed at six crossbench senators – full of Orwellian doublespeak that the reforms are fair to students.
Whether it breaks up soon because the tensions are too great, or it survives until the interest group factions have no more use for it and spit it out, Universities Australia is doomed because it has lost its moral compass.
I personally will not attend a further meeting of an organisation with necrotizing fasciitis: the condition where the body eats its own flesh.
A wake-up call
So wake up Australia if you want to preserve your children's life chances.
Wake up academia – especially those of you who write about public policy but have been strangely silent on this issue.
Wake up senators – you know not what you are playing with – you are aiding and abetting a fraud on the electorate.
Maintain the fight everyone. If the government won't take the honourable course of acknowledging these reforms are a gross violation of pre-election promises and put them before the electorate, then we must make sure that they lose that election because of them. And I believe they will, as the Victorian state election on Saturday indicated.
Stand up everyone for public universities, reject the reforms, join us at the table for a sensible conversation, without a gun at our heads, about how to make Australian public higher education great.
Stephen Parker is Vice-Chancellor at the University of Canberra. This article was originally published on The Conversation.
This is an edited version of a speech delivered to the National Alliance for Public Universities on December 1.
http://www.theage.com.au/comment/higher-education-changes-a-fraud-on-the-electorate-20141202-11yliz.html
Higher education changes a 'fraud on the electorate'
Date December 2, 2014 - 4:27PM
Stephen Parker
"Wake up Australia if you want to preserve your children's life chances," says UC Vice Chancellor Stephen Parker.
Stephen Parker slams Universities Australia
Had someone told me last summer that I would be defending public universities on the first day of next summer I would have ridiculed the idea.
Somehow I believed what the Coalition wrote in early 2013: that there would be no change to university funding arrangements. Somehow I believed what Tony Abbott said to the Universities Australia conference in March 2013: that we could expect a period of benign neglect from an Abbott government. And somehow I believed what Abbott said two days before the election in September 2013: that there would be no cuts to education.
It is the last of these canards that is so shocking. Abbott knew he was going to win, so he didn't even need to promise it to gain votes.
But here we are and here I am.
A further surprise has been to find myself the only Vice-Chancellor to say publicly what at least a few actually believe. I have tried to understand other Vice-Chancellors' perspectives. I've worked at Group of Eight and more modern universities. I was the Senior DVC at Monash. I know the pressures, but nothing justifies the position that they and Universities Australia have taken.
These reforms are unfair to students and poorly designed policy. If they go through, Australia is sleepwalking towards the privatisation of its universities. And ironically they will be the death knell of our peak group, Universities Australia, which could not survive them for long.
Unfair to students
These reforms are unfair to students – the constituency to which I have devoted 35 years of my working life. They have to lead to significant increases in student debt because this is part of the government's case for them.
Education Minister Christopher Pyne says the reforms are a way to bring fresh funding into universities, so he must assume that we will go further than just replace government cuts with higher tuition fees.
Australian students already pay a higher proportion of their tuition than those in most OECD countries. This will blight the lives of a generation, unless Australia comes to its senses. Mission Australia released its Youth Survey showing that most teenagers rank career success as their top aspiration, but only around half feel the goal is attainable. It will become a whole lot harder under these changes.
And the impact on women and certain professions will be worse, as Ben Phillips and I have demonstrated in articles in The Conversation when we modelled the likely HECS debts of female scientists, nurses and teachers based on typical career trajectories.
Poor policy design
These reforms are poorly designed policy. Where do I start?
They emerged as a budget measure, but they won't save the taxpayer money in any real sense. A fundamental feature of HECS is that the government forwards all the money upfront to the university. So if fees go up by more than the cuts, the Commonwealth shells out more from day one.
Default will rise. More students will work overseas – legitimately, this is not evasion – and so only through some arcane aspect of accounting standards can this even look as if it is a savings measure.
This isn't a savings measure: it is ideology in search of a problem.
But it gets worse. Bizarrely, there is no guarantee that a single cent of the extra money will go into the student's course: it could go into research, infrastructure, paying for past follies or current *smile*-ups. It's tempting, believe me, I make them too, but it's wrong.
The internal equity aspect of the policy design is laughable. Why should the second poorest quartile of students subsidise the lowest quartile?
So I ask myself: which policy amateur came up with the scheme in the first place?
Sleep-walking towards privatisation
In June, I wrote in The Conversation about the slide towards privatisation. I compared universities with public utilities where the then managements were initially encouraged to be "commercial" and "competitive". Then they were actually pitted against private providers. Then the utilities were privatised themselves, and required a complete focus on private profit.
The privatisation that we are sleep-walking towards may or may not involve shareholders and the stock market – but it will involve the removal of the public voice.
I can hear the argument in my head already. Some Vice-Chancellor, perhaps one who has championed competition reforms in an earlier life or been the CEO of a large public company, will say:
Now that universities compete for places and on price, and they compete with private providers, including multi-nationals, we need a level playing field.
We have one hand tied behind our backs. We need to be set free, so let's get auditor-generals out of the place, let's stop state governments appointing our Senates and Councils, and let's get staff and students off them while we are at it.
And so on. It will all have a compelling logic because of the corner we have boxed ourselves into.
Death knell of Universities Australia
These reforms also ring the death knell of our peak body – Universities Australia. The support that Universities Australia is giving them is a strange form of suicide ritual.
Older universities, which have benefited from decades of public money, built a brand at taxpayer expense and who now want to run away with it, will raise their fees more. The stratification of institutions will intensify. Competition and dog-eat-dog will be the order of the day. And when they have milked the peak group for what they can get out of it the elites will dance away in a figure eight formation.
We have just seen a week of bizarre national adverts from Universities Australia – presumably aimed at six crossbench senators – full of Orwellian doublespeak that the reforms are fair to students.
Whether it breaks up soon because the tensions are too great, or it survives until the interest group factions have no more use for it and spit it out, Universities Australia is doomed because it has lost its moral compass.
I personally will not attend a further meeting of an organisation with necrotizing fasciitis: the condition where the body eats its own flesh.
A wake-up call
So wake up Australia if you want to preserve your children's life chances.
Wake up academia – especially those of you who write about public policy but have been strangely silent on this issue.
Wake up senators – you know not what you are playing with – you are aiding and abetting a fraud on the electorate.
Maintain the fight everyone. If the government won't take the honourable course of acknowledging these reforms are a gross violation of pre-election promises and put them before the electorate, then we must make sure that they lose that election because of them. And I believe they will, as the Victorian state election on Saturday indicated.
Stand up everyone for public universities, reject the reforms, join us at the table for a sensible conversation, without a gun at our heads, about how to make Australian public higher education great.
Stephen Parker is Vice-Chancellor at the University of Canberra. This article was originally published on The Conversation.
This is an edited version of a speech delivered to the National Alliance for Public Universities on December 1.
http://www.theage.com.au/comment/higher-education-changes-a-fraud-on-the-electorate-20141202-11yliz.html
