Andrew Giles makes plain the party line. “I want to see more people going into VET. And – as someone who holds a law degree and a BA, I can say this – how many lawyers or history majors does it take to build a house?” the Skills Minister said at an apprentice event last week. So much for the case to abolish Job Ready Graduates top fees for law, humanities (and business) students.
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Independent ACT senator David Pocock held a “town hall” at ANU on Tuesday night and the campus branch of the National Tertiary Education Union was very pleased indeed, saying he “put university governance front and centre.” The Senator reported receiving “a huge amount of correspondence” with the main theme being ANU management’s savings plan and related complaints. “Lack of consultation, transparency and poor governance” is the general idea. Demonstrating he is on the case for constituents, he mentioned matters including the Senate inquiry into university governance and “potential to reform” the university’s council. Presumably that was in the letter to the Minister he referred to. If so, it is one issue Jason Clare can’t flick to ATEC. ANU is incorporated by a Commonwealth Act.
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Unaccountably forgotten something important that happened in Australian higher education and research 2013-24? Chances are Campus Morning Mail reported it, The complete CMM archive is live for another year. You can also find it under the ‘News’ tab on the Future Campus website.
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La Trobe U kindly invites FC to start a career in digital health with a dedicated grad cert and masters. Not the most precise pitch, FC’s grasp of healthcare is sadly analogue but it does demonstrate LT U plans to build share in an emerging market. It leads the new Care Economy CRC, which announces three programs: technology solutions, data solutions and workforce innovation. They are all going to be needed to fill the imminent shortage of medical clogs on the ground. According to the Productivity Commission last week, there was a 10% increase in nurses and midwives under 40 in the last decade, but nearly 10% of the profession is 60. The attrition rate for medical practitioners was stable 2014-2024, in the low 20%s.
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Back in 2023 Uni Melbourne management told Campus Morning Mail “we have a shared interest with the union to address the reliance on casual and short duration fixed-term employment and note that developing a genuine and enduring solution is a complex matter.”
It still was the other week, when the university and National Tertiary Education Union were in the Fair Work Commission, disagreeing about what they had agreed to include in the enterprise agreement regarding giving existing casual staff first crack at continuing jobs. The union argued management had to complete an internal process before advertising externally. The university responded it did not. The dispute ended up in the Fair Work Commission where both sides presented their cases in such complexity that Commissioner Redford referenced; the “ somewhat invidious position the Commission is being placed in, if it is being asked to provide an exhaustive explanation as to the circumstances in which the University’s obligation to apply ‘reasonable endeavours to select’ will require it to give an applicant the job, and when it is not obliged to do so. The question simply cannot be answered definitively.”
The Commissioner also mentioned the enterprise agreement clause on which the dispute depended is ambiguous and that evidence he heard “did not assist”.
In the end, he concluded the agreement does mean staff who have been employed “for two or more semesters, over two consecutive calendar years, on a 0.5 FTE or more time fraction” should be considered for a job before external applications are called and that a “positive obligation” exists on the university to prefer such a candidate, “to the extent of what is reasonable in the circumstances.”
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The National Student Ombudsman is seriously in business with a plain, guff-free website that explains what it can and cannot do and how it works. The NSO has one function in particular that university leaders will hate, a “restorative engagement process” that “brings a student together with a senior leader,” from the higher education provider.
“This process enables a student to share their personal account of the harm caused to them.”
And there is one that should terrify them, starting its own investigations of issues on a “systemic level.” The NSO can require providers to supply information and can make reports public. Plus it can talk to TEQSA.
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Does it not occur to TEQSA how messages for the trade might look to HE sceptics in the community?
The Guidance Note on Learning Resources and Education Support released Tuesday, includes, “the Threshold Standards do not explicitly state a provider needs to have a physical library and physical learning materials.”
Certainly the next sentence reads, “there is an expectation on providers to ensure students can readily access materials and resources referred to in their course of study” but not requiring a library, as in a physical place with your actual bound books might be hard for old conservatives to get their heads around.
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Barzan Uni College in Qatar will teach Swinburne U degrees in computer science, engineering, cybersecurity, business. And no, it’s not a pathway program, Swin U states that while all its offshore students can do some study in Australia, “the principal teaching model is full offshore delivery.”
Curtin U, Murdoch U and Uni of Wollongong are all in Dubai and UoW plans to be teaching undergraduate degrees in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia mid 2027. The Federal Government’s strategy to drive bright young international students out of Australia and into other jurisdictions with a greater appreciation of future workforce need appears to be working.
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Students are not spooked by AI. Study support provider Studiosity reports 55%of surveyed students expect their university to offer AI assistance, in line with previous years – internationals in particular (75%) and men (60%) more than women (51%). The discipline split on AI expectations puzzles FC: 60% or plus of STEM, medicine, and bized students all expect AI support tools. But only 43% of HASS and 31% of psych students do. The results are in the 2025 edition of Studiosity’s Student Wellbeing survey.