Month: February 2024

How would student places be allocated by the proposed Australian Tertiary Education Commission?

Andrew Norton2 Comments

Based on the Universities Accord interim report I was concerned that its proposed tertiary education commission would be highly interventionist, controlling university enrolments to meet the government’s equity, attainment and skills targets. I called it Job-ready Graduates 2.0.

The Australian Tertiary Education Commission proposed in the Universities Accord final report is – I think, a lot of detail remains to be seen – considerably better than the version of my policy nightmares last year.

The overall funding system would have more central steering than now, but on my reading ATEC probably will not routinely micromanage – that university A must offer B places in C course and fill them with students meeting criteria D, E or F. That was the approach of recent ad hoc student place allocations, such as the 20,000 new places for skills shortages and equity groups. The Accord final report admits that these places won’t be used. Even without recent soft demand, every condition added to a student place reduced the chance that a student could be found to fill it.

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Creating a better integrated education system – some notes on Rethinking Tertiary Education, a book building on the work of Peter Noonan

Andrew Norton1 Comment

Peter Noonan was a rare person with expertise across vocational and higher education, and an even rarer person who made significant policy contributions to both. Sadly he passed away in 2022 at the age of 67.

Rethinking Tertiary Education, co-edited by Peter Dawkins, Megan Lilly and Robert Pascoe, with sixteen others as co-authors, is billed as ‘building on the work of Peter Noonan’, and does so by exploring ways of making the component parts of Australia’s formal education sector – especially higher education and vocational education, but also schools – work together more smoothly than now. Pascoe also contributes an interesting biographical chapter on Noonan.

For historical and political reasons the vocational and higher education systems in Australia have quite sharp dividing lines in the nature of the qualifications they deliver, how they are funded, how they are taught, and with some exceptions the occupations they support. The book also looks at school credentials, especially the idea that they don’t measure all they should.

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