Disruption

Jacques ChesterLeave a comment

Hello all, your friendly Ozblogistan Tyrant here.

This weekend I will be performing one of the biggest changes made to Ozblogistan in several years.

I am moving the site from its current home to a new one.

The new service is a company specialising in WordPress hosting. They will be taking responsibility for all the scut-work of making the site go.

Once the move is finalised, I expect that Ozblogistan will be snappier than it is now. I also won’t have to worry about fixing security problems, doing backups, finding out why plugin X has stopped working, working out why the site has suddenly died and so on. These will now be responsibilities I can delegate to the providers.

This has been in the works for some time. While I was a student I could afford the time it takes to keep Ozblogistan working relatively smoothly. As a professional I no longer have that time. So it makes sense to hire other professionals to do it for me.

The security problem we had a few weeks ago (and which is still causing false positives) was the straw that broke the camel’s back.

Moving providers is never pretty. Things are going to break this weekend. And various things will probably appear broken into the new week. It’s all for the good. Ozblogistan will shine out ever brighter.

Update Saturday 2:17PM WST: Failure. I will probably have to try again on Monday night. I’ve re-enabled comments.

Are low SES people more worried about fees than other people?

Andrew Norton7 Comments

My new Grattan report, Graduate Winners: Assessing the public and private benefits of higher education was released tonight (Canberra Times covering it already).

The basic argument is that given high private benefits, higher education will generally be produced with or without a tuition subsidy. Therefore we can start phasing down tuition subsidies. I suggest 50% over 4 years for most disciplines.

The usual reaction to such suggestions is that the low SES people in particular will be put off higher education. I report the contrary Australian evidence. There is interesting English evidence in this report. What the English have done is far more radical than anything I am suggesting. Except for the clinical and lab subjects, they haven’t cut 50% over 4 years. They have cut 100% over 1 year. Combined with some scope for overall funding increases for universities, some student charges will nearly triple.

For the school leaver group, overall demand dropped by one percentage point of the age cohort compared to 2011, or about 15,000 people (like Australia before 2012, the UK has a capped system with demand exceeding supply, so this will have no effect on the total number of students). Read More »

Which Labor education minister made the most difference for working class people?

Andrew Norton3 Comments

In education, nostalgia for the era of Gough goes on and on. This piece of it in The Age yesterday prompted several supportive letters today.

Access to higher education did expand under Gough, but his reforms was not as significant as many people imagine they were. Through a patchwork of scholarships and subsidies from both levels of government and from universities themselves, only a minority of students paid fees in the early 1970s. The average fee for those who did pay was $480, or $3,000-$4,000 in current dollars. Many also received financial assistance; Gough replaced this with a means-tested income support scheme TEAS, the predecessor of today’s Youth Allowance.

The clarity of what Whitlam did probably accounts in part for what people believe today. Though most bright school leavers who wanted to go to university would already have done so pre-Whitlam, the financial pathways were made much clearer by Whitlam’s reforms.

Overall, higher education enrolments expanded from 206,500 in 1972 to 287,700 in 1976 (first year of the Fraser government, but it came to power too late in 1975 to affect enrolments). Less than a third of the increase was in universities, with most new students going to the colleges of advanced education. Numbers had been growing steadily since the 1950s, so some of this growth would probably have occurred anyway.

A lack of consistent data makes it hard to tell exactly what opportunities Whitlam created for working class people. My reading of various sources is that the absolute number of working class students probably went up in the following years. But their proportion of total enrolments went down. The reason for this was simple. University entry usually requires school completion, and very few working class people did that. Therefore it was middle class people who were best placed to take advantage of expanded places in higher education.

The late 1980s and early 1990s were the turning point for improving working class higher education participation. School completion rates had increased dramatically during the 1980s, and the big HECS-financed John Dawkins led expansion in university places gave them somewhere to go. Dawkins and the most Labor state education ministers of the 1980s were more important than Whitlam in opening up education for people of all classes. Gillard is responsible for another wave of expansion since 2009, which also seems to be bringing in low SES students in large numbers.

Yet there is almost no nostalgia for Dawkins, and the state ministers are largely forgotten. Gillard’s time as PM will obscure her successful period as education minister. They all lack Gough’s charisma, and his simple message eloquently put.

Is the student amenities fee loan scheme constitutional?

Andrew Norton2 Comments

On the 7.30 current affairs program the other night, constitutional lawyer George Williams suggested that the Williams case High Court ruling might have implications for universities.

The case revolved around the constitutionality of the school chaplains program. Though reported in the past as about religion, the court in the end found for Williams on a ground concerning the executive power of the Commonwealth to act without legislation.

University funding does have a legislative basis. Its main constitutional backing is in section 51

(xxiiiA) the provision of maternity allowances, widows’ pensions, child endowment, unemployment, pharmaceutical, sickness and hospital benefits, medical and dental services (but not so as to authorize any form of civil conscription), benefits to students and family allowances; (emphasis added)

Three of the seven judges had something to say about what ‘benefits to students’ meant. Justice Kiefel said:

Social services provided to students might take the form of financial assistance, for example payment of fees and living and other allowances, or material assistance, such as the provision of books, computers and other necessary educational equipment, or the provision of services, such as additional tutoring. The term “benefits” in the context of s 51(xxiiiA) does not extend to every service which may be supportive of students at a personal level in the course of their education.

Read More »

Two views on prices

Andrew NortonLeave a comment

[Tertiary education minister] Senator Evans warned that fee deregulation would increase costs to students and threaten access.

“Increasing fees is what deregulation is about,” he said.

“It is about allowing the universities to charge more.

“We would see a reduction in participation as people were priced out of the market’.

– The Australian, 6 June 2012

Ms Gillard says she wants to tackle rising childcare costs, but does not think capping fees will work.

She says that would prevent centres raising their fees if their costs go up for legitimate reasons.

– ABC radio news, 7 June 2012

All government-subsidised undergraduate science students to pay more

Andrew Norton4 Comments

Rather surprisingly, last night’s budget was pain free for universities. But their students were not entirely spared. The previously announced decision to restore previous student contribution amounts for new science students was extended to include continuing science students.

While in my view the discount for science students should never have been offered, the change again highlights the problems caused by the instability of higher education policy, with constant introductions and withdrawals of incentive policies. DEST/DEEWR/DIISR incentive programs rely on the naivety of the punters to work, because anyone who observed this policy area over time would assume that incentive policies lack long-term credibility, and not change their behaviour.

(Of course prospective students are unlikely to follow this detail, so temporary discounts may work. Oddly, a couple of articles (here and here) in today’s budget coverage repeat the Ian Chubb/ government line on science – too little demand for science university places, too little supply of university places, and too few scientists. The evidence does not support any of these propositions. A 2012 report on university applications showed not only that for the third successive year science experienced very large increases in applications and offers, but that science was doing exceptionally well in the 90+ ATAR group. And the argument that we are short of science graduates is not evident in any employment survey.)

Junior economist jobs at the Grattan Institute

Andrew Norton1 Comment

The Grattan Institute is advertising for junior economists to work as associates. The job involves working with a program director (me on higher education and my colleagues who run schools, cities, energy and productivity programs) on various projects. Associates rotate between programs, so there will be opportunities to learn about several areas.

Details here.

Where do journalism graduates work?

Andrew NortonLeave a comment

The Higher Education Supplement this morning has a series of articles on journalism degrees. I did send some 2006 census statistics in, but they don’t seem to have made it to print.

The good news is that back then there were reasonably good rates of employment in professional and managerial jobs, 74% of bachelor graduates and 83% of masters or above graduates. However, only a minority of them were working as journalists, as seen in the figure below. Around 9 percentage points more were in related occupations such as PR or advertising (and there could be more working in the media industry, but in other roles).

I had a quick look at the broad fields of study of people working as journalists. A caveat here is that the census asks about the main field of study in the respondent’s highest qualification. Many people taking a postgraduate journalism qualification are likely to have a bachelor degree in some other field. With that caveat, the broad “creative arts” category that includes journalism courses is the field of study of nearly half of journalists, with “society and culture” (essentially humanities and social sciences, but also law and economics) providing more than a quarter of journalists with their education.

Bachelor degrees the science employment risk

Andrew Norton6 Comments

The Higher Education Supplement this morning ran an op-ed version of my critique of Ian Chubb’s promotion of science courses. About 60 words were cut from the original. Editors often have to shrink articles to the available space, but in this case an important source was omitted. The employment outcomes in the last few paragraphs are from the 2006 census, not the Beyond Graduation survey as the op-ed appears to say. An amended version of the op-ed is under the fold.

Those paragraphs were the only part of the article that I had not reported before. In the past, I have said that science graduates as a whole have about average rates of graduate employment in professional and managerial jobs. However, closer analysis tells a more interesting story. People with postgraduate science qualifications have above rates of professional and managerial employment. But people with bachelor-level qualifications have lower rates of such employment – males 5 percentage points below the male average, and women a massive 13 percentage points below the female average. That’s a pretty bad outcome, and one worth further investigation when the 2011 census is released later this year.

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Read More »

The launch of My University

Andrew Norton2 Comments

The government’s My University website launched this morning.

Overall, I think it is a good start in giving students more information to help with their higher education choices. There is information by university and field of study on student satisfaction with teaching and generic skills development, attrition rates, employment rates, staff qualifications, student:staff ratios, and other things. The meaning of these numbers is often contested – the methodology section suggests caution on some matters – but overall it is better than general impressions or historical reputation.

Here is an example of how the information is presented, for Macquarie University business.

There is also information on general campus facilities. Here is an example for Murdoch University.

Some suggestions for future versions of the site:

* How to get to the course performance information is not intuitive. ‘Course search’ will provide a list of courses in the field of study of interest, but the comparison tool only gives ATARs and cost. The latter will be useful if fees are deregulated, but under the current system the student contributions will be much the same. To find course performance information, users have to go to ‘university search’, and then choose the field of study. Comparison between universities will be difficult without printing out results for each university.

* For non-university higher education providers (NUHEPs), their courses can be located through ‘course search’ but not ‘university search’. No information on admission requirements or cost was in any of the results from random searches. Nor is there any information on course performance, though some NUHEPs are in the relevant surveys (there may be sample size issues). To get a proper market, we need to include the NUHEPs as fully as possible.