Opinion
When I was young I went on a geology field trip. I wasn’t studying geology, but I had friends who were, and because I was interested I was invited to join. I learnt a lot. At one stage one of my friends found a shiny pebble. He took it to his professor and asked what it was.
The academic looked at it carefully and said “I’m not sure. Crack it in half and I’ll have another look”. With his rock pick my friend deftly cut it in two. The professor looked again and murmured. “Interesting, cut it in half again”. My friend set to work and then gave a fragment back to his mentor. “Mmm”, he said, “break it in half again”. Eagerly, my friend cut it in half for the last time.
Now the scholar looked very carefully, then when asked again what it was, he replied solemnly, “I don’t know, I’m sorry, but it’s just too small to tell”.
I thought about this when the Minister and others were discussing Recognition of Prior Learning (RPL), skills, and short courses at the Australian Financial Review Summit last week. There is a constant refrain that the world is changing, it’s no longer just knowledge, it’s skills that count, we have to pivot to short courses, and “we need to crack the code of credit transfer and Recognition of Prior Learning (RPL)”.
My heart sank. Who is advising the Minister? Which yes-men are suggesting that this is a code that can be cracked, and suddenly a door will swing open, and we’ll enter a new nirvana?
And there was more. We have to crack the code of ‘good governance’ too, and we have to harmonise, and we just have to be better. No plans, no fix for Job Ready Graduates, no research funding schemes like we’ve had in the past – NCRIS, HEEF, EIF, NISA, MRFF, Trail Blazers. Nothing.
Well, there were some things. I think that Needs Based Funding could be good, and Managed Growth could be good, if they actually supported growth, rather than just over-managing.
But we seem to have descended into a world where the complex problems that the sector responds to every day – like governance and recognising the importance of skills – are being framed as quick fixes, when actually quick fixes are distractions because they cannot be applied by sprints of policy setting. The fixes are complex and require regular adjustments over time.
Returning to the idea of fixing RPL and recognizing skills, the first thing to say is that it has been a work in progress for decades. When I used to oversee RPL at my institution we considered about 14,000 applications each year and granted the majority of requests. It is complicated but it gets done. It will always be complicated because learning is complicated.
But instead of thinking about the complexity, I guess politicians are under pressure to make facile announcements. At least we, as academics, can think about skills.
Consider the skill of changing a tyre on a car. One could classify that in a National Skills Passport and assign a number that a computer could read – one or zero. Those types of skills can be recognised.
But now think about another skill, say dancing. Everyone can dance. Very few people can dance well enough to make a living out of it. If someone has done a short course in dancing at the local club, it may have been a good course or a bad course. We have no idea. It is like that shiny pebble – too small to tell. It cannot go into the passport. Other things like cloning a gene involve skills and knowledge, and I have taught short-courses on just this, but again it’s impossible to tell the quality, so you can’t put it into a passport and it’s hard to work out how much to charge for it and students don’t know what to pay.
Now what about making skills stackable?
Many lament the fact that the last time the Australian Qualifications Framework (AQF) was reviewed the panel chose not to put micro-credentials into the framework. But, of course, they didn’t. They realised that you cannot stack things on top of a foundation of pebbles of variable and uncertain size and shape and quality. This variation is the same reason that micro-credential marketplaces don’t work.
Universities do give credit when they can, sometimes specific and sometimes generic credit for skills or knowledge. But the code will never be cracked and trying to crack it is not the answer to boosting productivity in Australia. The answer is much more likely to come via the tax summit. If we find a way to fund teaching and research. And if we want to better harmonise the vocational and university sector the answer is more likely to lie in funding models than in credit transfer.
We seem to be caught in a long period of reform where the difficult questions are being avoided because they cost money, and distractions keep popping up because they are readily framed in rhetoric.
Universities are about deep learning and their activities not only support productivity, they establish a culture of growth and of social cohesion. One needs to support the sector, not over-regulate it, and we must not waste time on the wrong problems.
Universities are about teaching and research and we need to focus on supporting those things and stop being distracted by what my friend’s pebble actually was – you’ve probably guessed – it was Fool’s Gold.
Professor Merlin Crossley is Deputy Vice-Chancellor Academic Quality at UNSW.
