Thursday morning in the Reps Education Minister Jason Clare introduced the Bill for Government to decide how many international students institutions can enrol. The Minister spoke at length about bodgy education agents in the VET sector – which rather creates the impression that universities are collateral damage.
It appears as if the Government is trying to fix two political problems with the cap on enrolments. One is the assumption in the electorate that record numbers of international students in the country earlier this year make the rental housing shortage worse. The other is the idea that education visas are a front for migration scams. The first isn’t true across the country (international students take 4 per cent or so of the rental market), the second is pretty much a VET issue.
There’s another problem in the Bill for universities – it empowers the Minister to cancel courses if (among other reasons) they are of “limited value to Australia’s critical skill needs” or it is in the “public interest.” The example used is where students are being exploited, but “public interest” can come to mean whatever officials want it to mean. And the thing about international students, is that they have this idea that they should get to study what they are prepared to pay for.
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The Fred and Ginger Award for Timing does not go to Swinburne U which issued a press release about a good rankings result, at 7.45 Tuesday night – when education media were engrossed in the Budget.
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Adrienne Nieuwenhuis is confirmed as Chief Commissioner of the Tertiary Education Standards Agency – she has acted for a couple of weeks, since the departure of Peter Coaldrake. In addition to HE governance, Ms Nieuwenhuis is versed in VET and cross-sector governance (she served on the AQF Expert Advisory Group). This could be useful if TEQSA is subordinated to the authority of the new tertiary education commission, as recommended in the Accord plan for absolutely everything. TEQSA now has a new leadership team, Mary Russell was confirmed as CEO this month, after acting since last June.
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The day after Jason Clare’s pre-announced budget announcements, the Minister came out with some new news for the future of post school education – announcing the advisory committee to “inform the legislative design” of the Australian Tertiary Education Commission. Tony Cook (DoE) chairs and members are, * Tom Calma (former Uni Canberra chancellor) * Jenny Dodd (TAFE Directors Australia) * Stephen Duckett (Uni Melbourne) * Verity Firth (UNSW) * Barney Glover (former Western Sydney U VC now (Jobs and Skills Australia commissioner) * Julia Horne (Uni Sydney) * Natalie James (Department of Employment) * David Lloyd (Uni SA VC) * Ben Rimmer (Department of Education)
To which Swinburne U VC Pascale Quester responds that given dual sector universities (like hers) are “are uniquely placed to support the Commonwealth in its ambitious higher education reform agenda,” it is a shame they aren’t represented. Professor Quester should be relieved, there are only three officials on it.
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Adelaide Uni has a win, before it even exists. The outcome of the Uni of Adelaide and Uni SA merger will be home to the Australian Defence Forces Technology Academy – based at UoA’s Lot Fourteen innovation site. Beyond teaching and research, information as to what the Academy will actually do for the armed forces is sparse, but the Department of Defence may not be bothered, it’s not up for the initial $60m, some of which comes from Prime Minister Turnbull’s 2015 City Deal programme – the Department of Finance must have found the money down the back of the couch.
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Headline stats from the Department of Education show the great COVID job shedding is over, at least for those statistical beings called EFTS. The Feds ’23 all public universities (plus Avondale U, Bond U and Uni Divinity) staff report shows total FTE staff last year was 137,000 – well up on 129,000 in 2021, when COVID was doing its worst. Casual FTEs are up, but they have not recovered from the pandemic hit – there were 24,800 in the last full pre-pandemic year, 2019 and there were 21,000 last. But FTEs aren’t people, which does not appear to bother officialdom, DoE simply states “headcount data are not collected for casual staff.”
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Uni Tasmania VC Rufus Black appears to be walking in the general direction of away from relocating just about everything from Sandy Bay to the CBD, asking staff and students what they think about creating a new STEM facility on the existing campus. Not there is State Government funding for such, but there could be, if legislation for the city-move is never introduced in to State Parliament, or does not have the numbers. Relocation was not a big issue in the recent State Election but Hobart Liberals campaigned on changing the university Act to make selling Sandy Bay conditional on support in both houses of State Parliament, if they won a majority in the lower house. They didn’t, but this does not appear to be an issue now.
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The Susan McKinnon Foundation renews funding for the McKinnon Institute for Political Leadership at Monash U, with $25m over five years to fund coaching and policy briefing for members of Australian parliaments.
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Open AI regularly makes the extraordinary average but there was an announcement this week that impressed even people who generally want to know there has been no breakthrough since breakfast. Programs that show how to solve maths problems step by step, correcting student mistakes along the way, have been around for aeons (12 months in AI time). But this week Open AI presented GPT-4Omni, with an AI that interacts with people in a close to convincing conversational voices, recognises its surroundings and can respond to images – such as written math problem. A promo demonstrates the AI patiently teaching a young man how to solve a maths problem – he does the work, it does the explaining. It won’t replace teachers – but it will help, help really help where they are in short-supply. The Khan Academy (“every child deserves the chance to learn”) is already on to this. This is very bad news for the after school tutoring industry. But potentially very good news for HE student support.
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The joint Parliamentary Committee Inquiry into International Education and Tourism heard evidence at Parliament House on Wednesday. According to NSW senator, Deborah O’Neil, they were “excited” to learn how things are going in Canberra. She really needs to get out more.
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There is a big budget win for student recruiters at universities where students are unhappy with the way they are taught – the Government cut $8m over four years from funding for the Quality Indicators for Learning and Teaching survey project in this week’s Budget. Certainly QILT results could be better known – but that is a fixable comms problem and no reason to reduce hard data, based on survey samples so large they may as well be a census, on how students rate where they study. And yet that is what the Government has done.
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A single post-school education and training system leads the Universities Accord vision but is largely being ignored by HE people with patches to protect. But the Government is onto it, with Skills Minister Brendan O’Connor announcing a “scope and pilot” of the Australian Skills Quality Authority delegating course accreditation to TAFEs. Plus he says TEQSA “will consider and facilitate” TAFE applications to self-accredit HE courses.
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Jason Clare announces action on yet another Accord recommendation, a study of “antisemitism, Islamophobia, racism and the experience of First Nations people in the university sector. It will be led by Race Discrimination Commissioner Giridharan Sivaraman and is scheduled to deliver an interim report at year end and a final one by June 30 ’25.
