Among the many failures in the education ‘reform’ movement, the attempt to promote for-profit education has been the most complete. The Swedish experiment, for quite a few years seen as the exemplar of success, has turned out very badly.
In the US, the for-profit schools company Edison failed completely. Far worse for-profit universities like Phoenix, which have prospered by recruiting poor students, eligible for Federal Pell Grants, and enrolling them in degree programs they never finish. Phoenix collects the US government cash, while the students are lumbered with debts they can never repay and can’t even discharge in bankruptcy.
Several years ago, there was a major scandal in Victoria (which led the way in privatising vocational education) about similar practices.
This did not, of course, lead to any change for the better. Instead, governments across Australia followed the Victorian model. For-profit providers responded by emulating the University of Phoenix, with recruiters offering free laptops to anyone will to sign up for a course and the associated debts: the targeted groups were low-income earners who would not have to repay the income contingent loan except in the unlikely event that the course propelled them into the middle class.
This isn’t just a matter of fringe players: a report on A Current Affair[1] identified some of the biggest for-profit firms, such as Evocca, Careers Australia and Aspire. The Australian Skills Quality Authority is supposedly investigating. However, as with the authorities that are supposed to regulate greyhound racing, the obvious question is why, when these rorts have been common knowledge for years, a current affairs show can find the evidence ASQA has apparently missed.
It’s clear enough that privatisating VET-TAFE has been a failure, as would be expected based on international experience. But the answer isn’t to go back to the past. Rather, we need a national framework for post-school education, with funding both for TAFE and universities on an integrated basis.
There’s still the problem of how to wind down the for-profit system. I’d suggest that we could start by converting the better ones into contract providers of TAFE courses, and then gradually absorbing them into a unified system.
Those who don’t like that deal could compete like good capitalists in the open market, charging upfront fees and serving whatever market they could find, subject to ordinary consumer protection laws.
fn1. Presumably reflecting a change in the audience, A Current Affair has started targeting large-scale corporate wrongdoing rather than going solely after the easy target of dodgy tradespeople and low-grade con artists. Unfortunately, the story was spoiled by an apparently irrelevant attempt to drag in the Mormon affiliations of some of those involved in the basis, but you can’t have everything.
John Quiggin 