The news that the number of university students is declining is far from surprising. The number of Australian students commencing degrees has been roughly static since the Howard government was elected and, contrary to election commitments, imposed broad-ranging cuts on the sector. Writing in the Oz, and also at Catallaxy, Andrew Norton argues that this isn’t a problem.
Norton makes a reasonable case that the decline is due more to a reduction in HECS-funded places than to increases in fees, but since both are policies of the same government, this is a distinction without a difference.
Norton continues with the general line that a contraction in the supply of university graduates isn’t a problem for Australia. His only evidence, though, is that some graduates are in jobs that don’t use their skills. As he concedes, this has always been the case, and the proportion hasn’t changed significantly. The BA driving a taxi was a stock figure in the 1970 (I knew several, so it wasn’t entirely an urban myth). It may well be that some relative expansion of TAFE would be a good thing, but we need expansion in postsecondary education across the board. In any case, TAFE has plenty of problems
Underinvestment in human capital is a big problem for Australia, and we will all pay the price in future.
John Quiggin 
We may need to invest more in education, though some would argue that it is people rather than governments who need to decide how much. We also need to pay attention to the quality of the system as well and it is appears that the quality has suffered from the too rapid expansion of the system in the 60s and 70s (plus the Dawkins expansion to include the colleges), and the politicisation of the humanities during that time. It will be hard to lift the standard of debate on the universities until those problems are acknowledged and the folk who were responsible promise to do better in future.
Rafe, don’t forget that governments are made up of people! We even get to choose the people making the decisions. 😉
When both the major parties in this country are more interested in offering tax cuts to people who don’t need them than funnelling the same money into public health and education, you kind of get a feeling for which way the wind is blowing.
However, the fundamental problem with parents alone deciding how much to invest in their children’s education is that it will likely precipitate the creation of two very distinct classes of education in our society. It might be very well that those who can afford private education are given the opportunity to choose exactly where and how to spend their money, and benefit as a result. But surely we don’t want to see a scenario arising whereby the children of the monied can buy themselves a quality education at a quality school, but the children of the poor and struggling are forced to send their kids to poor schools with less-skilled teachers. I’d like to think we are all a little more egalitarian than that.
With regards to tertiary education funding, I would like to see a greater emphasis put back onto the TAFE funding. I do think that both the ALP and the Libs (dodgy free toolbox pork-barrelling aside) tend to forget at times that not everybody needs or wants to go to university. While uni is obviously essential for many intellectually-oriented disciplines, let face it – not everyone (or arguably even a majority of people) are oriented that way.
The taxi driving example runs against the case for higher education; in 1970 driving a taxi was a relatively well paid profession; but in 2000 it is a relatively poorly paid profession. If 20% of grads in both cohorts became taxi drivers, that means that the returns to education have fallen between 1970 and 2000 (ceteris paribus).
There is some evidence that the returns to education have fallen around the world recently – the lines being
1) Women’s entry into the workforce has increased the returns to experience; this occurs because the women work shorter hours and have shorter careers. Increasing the proportion of women in the workforce therefore reduces the amount of aggregate experience. Lost experience is one of the main opportunity costs to education so the returns to education fall.
2) Technical change may now be biased against the skills taught in university; for example you once needed to learn how to perform a regression, now any school leaver can call one up in excel.
3) Vintage capital; perhaps the speed of progress has made some skill obsolete. By the time you’ve learnt a skill to the level necessary to teach at university it obsolete.
4) Increased overseas student numbers have reduced the perceived return; this arose because overseas students at the same level of qualification often have a harder time getting a job – i.e. they’re a large part of the 20%
An alternative (and potentially additional factor) why the returns from education may look like they are falling is that that the standard of education has declined in many places. Hence people might be getting a similar return on the amount that they have learnt, but what they are learning in the same amount of time is less than would have been the case some years ago.
The tertiary education sector is now beginning to face the same crisis that industry and commerce are facing, namely a youth shortage. The tertiary education sector is now facing stiff competition for young school leavers who will be trained on the job and through private training groups in pressure cooker courses, which industry will increasingly be prepared to fund for its brightest workers. With company profitability at an all time high, many employers are now in a position to afford the luxury of learner workers again, particularly with experienced workers in short supply.
Most middle class kids reaching YR12 now have enough computing experience to be fast-tracked into an office/admin area at a junior level and be worth their keep within a month. What you have to bear in mind here is that employers have to pay 1 months salary anyway to private employment agencies for a new employee placement.(This is refundable if the employee is rejected during the mandatory probationary period) Notice that an employer who can access a school leaver via the ‘grapevine’, has a months salary grace here to get their new chum up to speed, assuming they don’t have to wear the costs of advertising and selection. It aint what you know it’s who you know, which of course is unfortunate for the usual suspects, albeit the latter are not usually university fodder in any case. The HR lady’s comments on perusing my daughter’s resume in front of my acquaintance was- ‘Hmmm Brighton High, that’s a good school.’ So much for uni degrees.
A typical example is my 17 yr old daughter who has just finished YR12. With a TER score of 88.3 she has applied for a uni place and will defer to work a year. I passed her resume to an acquaintance who works in head office for a large store chain. He apparently gave it to their HR people on Friday at 4pm and by 4.30 there was a message on our home phone wanting to interview MissO for general office duties. I have a feeling the university sector is about to lose another prospective bum on their seats. Interestingly enough this employer has a number of graduates in its offices and apart from age related pay, does not start them on any higher reward than a school leaver. Thereafter, remuneration is strictly geared to ability and worth to the organisation. That makes a HECS debt and 3yrs without pay, an unattractive proposition for many school leavers in a sellers maket nowadays.
Taking up some of Guy’s comments, starting with the last point where we have the most agreement. I am pleased to report that in a 1971 article in Honi Soit on liberal education (actually one of a series of three double page spreads) I suggested that nobody should miss out on a uni education if they could get some benefit from it, and I also suggested that technical education probably needed attention as well (without having any idea what might need to be done). Anyway, with the uni population increased by a very large factor since that time it is apparent that there are too many junk courses and also too many students at uni who are not getting any benefit. What happened to the technical high schools and TAFE during that time? It looks as though somebody cares, at last, but the impulse to pork barelling and empire building will need to be kept under control to deliver real benefits.
On the two tier education system, I take the point but find the danger over-stated for a number of reasons that would be tedious to enumerate here. Just a few points (1) the selective high schools provide a ladder of educational opportunity for talented poor kids, (2) having parents who really care about education is more important than having parents who are just prepared to spend more money, (3) if the teachers unions get serious about education the public system could be transformed without need for big dollars, (4) perhaps the people who really care about educational disadvantage need to donate their own time and resources to do something about by targetted intervention instead of just demanding more money for the public system at large.
There are also taxi-driving former Deans of Arts. Can’t remember his name but the Dean at UQ before Don Barrett quit and got a job as a cabbie. Made a change anyway from being picked up by a cabbie and when in response to explaining that you’re an Arts student you get asked “oh, yr good at drawing, mate?”. “Oh, good, I used to be the Dean of Arts” was a much better response.
What about the Dean of Arts who was sacked for plagiarism?
Generally speaking, it’s not a problem if people who are quite satisfied with the money and the buzz that they get from office work, taxi driving or u-nameit decide that they don’t need a tertiary education.
But from a national perspective, it is a problem if there are too few people coming into the workforce with the requisite base-level training in socially worthwhile or economically important professions and trades. It’s also a problem if the standard of teaching in those areas is lousy.
Poisonally, I couldn’t give a rat’s if the gender studies course at the Murrayvale campus of O’Malley University rewards sophist arguments.
But if it can be shown that the present system is:
*deterring significant numbers of capable and interested people from entering socially worthwhile or economically important professions and trades; or
*sending out people who won’t be able to do those jobs because they’ve been badly taught
then I’m concerned.
Observa wrote; “That makes a HECS debt and 3yrs without pay, an unattractive proposition for many school leavers in a sellers maket nowadays.”
Those are good points, University takes people out of the economy for too long and disadvantages them by putting them through border line poverty as well parental dependence for too long. The manner of University courses are also at odds with the way industry practices. The current style of a three or four year slab of full time study is from an industrial era past.
Modern companies work project to project, and team members in a project only specialise in a subject for the length of the project. Consequently a person in a project goes through a quick period of coming up to speed in a technology or knowledge base, then rapidly specialising in it for the duration of the project. After the project is finished, the process starts again and they specialise in some other areaa for another short period.
In the industries I have worked in, it is exceedingly rare for a project to be four years long. In my experience a long project where a specialist’s skills are used is rarely more than twelve months.
With that in mind, I reckon the NSW School Certificate should be taught to the HSC level, and the two years that are spent doing the HSC should be changed to a basic University education. So that a student about age 16/17 does two years of University level education in their final two years of school and leaves public school with a degree or diploma.
I reckon Universities should change, to offer one year courses that are increasingly specialised. That way if a student leaving high school does want to specialise they are only removed from being a full economic actor for one year. More demanding professions such as specialised medicene etc will probably need a series of such degrees before you can practise as a brain surgeon, but that can be the students choice to do four “one years” extra degrees.
I reckon that would make University more relevant, closer to current private industry practices in the use of specialists, make univeristy cheaper (only one year), allow for ongoing specialisation plus have the added benefit of more individuals being more highly educated from high school.
Observa and Cameron Riley are bringing up some really interesting angles and if we can maintain a dialogue between lateral thinkers and traditionalists we should be able to get some tremendous improvements in the system. Having one of my feet in the camp of the traditionalists, there will surely always be a need for strong basic courses, mine in Ag Science was four years and that may be too much although of course the ideas was to produce people who could go in many different directions. The alternative of shorter basic courses followed by moving in and out of courses over a lifetime (a la Latham) is probably the way to go for most people apart from those who proceed to academic careers.
Perhaps the greatest danger lies in the confused and contradictory policy mix that is contemplated by the Federal Minister. The need to be selective and critical may be frustrated by the tendency for discussion to divide along party lines.
Cameron
What is the connection between the three or four year degree and the ‘industrial era past’? And even supposing there was one, why should university education be required to imitate the cycles you say are typical in industry now? I’m not necessarily hostile to the idea: it’s just that you haven’t made the link explicit.
I’m even more puzzled by the high school idea. You seem to be saying that what is now a total of nine years’ education can and shouuld be crammed into six. How would you manage that?
Rafe, I think you’re thinking of the Monash Vice-Chancellor.
James: What is the connection between the three or four year degree and the ‘industrial era past’?
Sorry, should have explained what I meant better. Fifty years ago, if you invested in a three year accounting degree, there was a pretty good chance you would work your entire life as an accountant with one firm and retire with a pension. If you look at professions today, they are very agile and volatile. In the case of computer science, extremely so. Many CS folks have watched the industry go from scarcity to commoditization within a three year span, less than the period for a degree.
I am trying to make the connection that University degrees are too slow, especially in comparison to the current business and technology cycle. Investment is moving faster than people can be trained. I dont always think that is a bad thing, I moved into software with the boom because Universities could not supply specialists to meet the demand quickly enough. So it gives the oppurtunity for self-motivated individuals to change career.
But where I am at the moment, biotech is getting most of the investment. For me to take part in that current mini-boom, I would have to go through three years UUniversity study at a cost to myself (in the US of about $50,000 to $100,000) and there is no gaurantee the Biotech boom will last indefinately. If like the internet boom (1994-2000) – I consider it dying when the unsustainable levels of telecommunications investment dropped off in 2000 – I would have incurred a $50,000 debt and three years out of the economy, in order to collect a $50,000 – $90,000 salary for three years until the bust. Not a good bet, especially when I have a mortgage to feed.
Will biotech do the same? I am not willing to incurr that kind of debt to find out. If it was a one year course which I could do part time over 18 months, with a debt of about $10,000 then I would bite. Especially if it gets me into an industry where I can bid my salary into six figures. Suddenly it is more affordable for me, and the industry would get specialists within a year, helping to flatten the supply/demand and make salaries more predictable.
James: I’m even more puzzled by the high school idea. You seem to be saying that what is now a total of nine years’ education can and shouuld be crammed into six. How would you manage that?
Yes I reckon we should speed up education. From my personal experience in the NSW public school system and NSW University, it was slow. I think we under-estimate the ability individuals have to learn. It may require new techniques of teaching, or even just new methods of determining what people are knowledgable about, but the slowest ship in the convoy is holding too many people back. If a kid age 15 can complete a university degree, why cant they just go and complete it (while remaining within the publis high school system).
I also recall that first year in University was basically a rehash of Year 12, but in a different environment. You could cut one year off of a University course immediately by getting rid of that. It was only in the final year of the degree that we did the real specialisation in the subject we had chosen, much of it was generalist in nature in the previous years. So cut second year out as well. A four year degree is now two years. Most four year degrees do honours in final year so split that out, and the degree is now one year long.
People work hard for the HSC anyway, harder than they do in University. So I reckon it would be simple to push say University level generalist subjects into the HSC level. So anyone that chooses can leave high school with a generalist degree, say a Bachelor of Arts. Those that choose electives in science can leave with a BSc. I would also make Year 11 and 12 entirely elective. Let the kids choose what they want specialise in. They know their passions and dreams by that age.
I am not concerned about kids ability to learn. Most kids know their hobby or passion inside out, if it is V8 supercars, the latest boy band or some other hobby. Even the so called “dumb-kids” know their passion to the nth degree. So I dont think learning is an issue, how a teacher gets a kid to learn something they are not interested in is the harder problem. But I dont think that is a learning problem, it is a teaching issue.
The brain is pretty amazing, it was only a few centuries ago that Cartesian Algebra was the absolute hardest thing to understand in human knowledge. Now we teach those principles to six year olds. I dont see increasing the speed with which we impart knowledge to children as being an issue. If presented in a manner that the kids will absorb it, and want to absorb it, I think the brain will process that information and experience meaningfully. I dont think that the physical is the rate determining step, I think the process that will need innovation is how we teach children and impart knowledge to children.
To pick up James’ comment on Cameron’s post, you could stream children at the age of 14 into trade/service industries, higher technical and professional. Then you could get the trade/service stream doing preapprenticeship/commercial courses, the higher technical stream doing applied technology (both with substantial periods of work experience) and the professional stream doing something equivalent in standard to an international baccalaureate. This might provide the last bracket with sufficient mathematical/science learning to tackle applied vocational tertiary courses like construction economics or marine engineering on the basis of one year intensive learning/one year of work until they were qualified. But it would be for the experts in tertiary education to consider whether other professional training could be approached in this way. Some professions might be more reliant on a level of intellectual and social maturity that a 19 year old might not have developed.
The obvious alternative strategy for attracting young people concerned about the opportunity cost into needed professions is for government/industry to offer targeted scholarships and cadetships. Or increase the number of HECS funded places in those courses.
Interesting report in the Fin about a week ago on the beginnings of the guest worker syndrome for Aus. A truck trailer manufacturer in Melb is bringing in guest welders from China. Also the fruit/vine industry in the Riverland saw a pressing need for about 8,000 extra workers to bring in their harvest. They wanted experienced pickers from a region in China that already supplies similar services to Japan. Welcome to the thin end of the wedge on this trend, or perhaps the stiffening of mutual obligation with regard to Social Security payments in the near future.
As paul2 has said, the policy change that would lead to the biggest improvement (and maybe even save public funds) is streaming.
Will it happen? No (mostly because of the teachers’ union ideology, political populism (no politician would dare criticize parents as some do teachers)). This renders the discussion, shall we say, academic?
Thanks for your detailed response, Cameron (and to Paul2). Your main argument is that people need to learn a new set of skills several times in their working lives, so it makes more sense to attend university in several stints at the required times, rather than for one long degree at the begining. This may very well be right as far as specific training is concerned, and in any case this is happening anyway through the proliferation of specilised masters and diploma courses. most of which are just for one year.
But specilaised training isn’t the necessarily the main purpose of an undergradute degree. You gave of accounting degrees fifty years ago: I’m not even sure if there were accounting degrees fifty years ago. Bachelor degrees were supposed to provide general education on literature, culture, the meaniing of life, the duties of a citizen, and a range of general analytical and critical skills. Science degrees might have a bit less poetry, but you would nonethelss learn a lot of basic tools that should give you life-long flexibility. As for accounting, I imagine that someone who had learned to learn (through a study of geometry or Chinese or whatever) could probably pick up the essentials in six months or so of intensive study.
You seem to agree about the worth of the general stuff, but you just want it sooner. I don’t see what the hurry is, and I think that a general degree is more suited to a young adult stage of development rather than an adolescent. By contrast, mathematical and computing knowledge doesn’t require any great life experience and can be conveyed to adolescents.
I don’t buy the argument that because we’re so much knowledgable as a scociety we can get basic education over and done with sooner. What counts as basic has to match the sophistication of knowledge in the society itself. Apparently Leonardo da Vinci struggled with multiplication tables; by the nineteenth century the average ten-year-old understood them perfectly, but I doubt that this prompted demands to shorten years of schooling.
Streaming in schools is a separate issue. I’m not against brilliant children being accelerated, but it doesn’t follow that they should finish and start work sooner.
John
While my hat goes off to you and all the other macho men who recently joined you in disdaining the preview facility, and while fully conceding myself worthy of your scorn, I would really like to have it back. My above comment is eloquent testament to my helplessness without this crutch.
The word ‘preview’ appears below, under the irritating but functional ‘Say it!’ button (what’s wrong with ‘send’, for heaven’s sake), but doesn’t do anything – at least not on my system, which hasn’t previously been defeated by any of the blogging software.
Speaking as a migrant, I observed that Australian employers tend to value local work experience ahead of university qualification. On the supply side, qualifications are seen as a means rather than as a goal. This is in contrast to the Chinese, in particular, who tend to value “being educated” as a goal in itself. Given that the economy is bubbling nicely along, it is not surprising to see that young folks are opting to work first. It is not necessarily a bad strategy in Australia, since these people get a headstart and do not hit a ceiling imposed by the lack of tertiary qualification.
“Underinvestment in human capital is a big problem for Australia, and we will all pay the price in future.”
Not sure what your evidence for this is, JQ. In any case, underinvestment in human capital might be the appropriate strategy for Australia. Our comparative advantage seems to be in digging stuff up and exporting it. Obviously this requires some investment in human capital, but it requires far more in machinery, infrastructure etc. Seems logical to conclude that we should be investing most heavily in these.
This article here touches on some of the points raised in the comments. ‘Skills Passports’ eh? I think that’s what we old timers used to call experience.
Try here
Try here at http://news.ninemsn.com.au/article.aspx?id=28304