Opinion
A generation back, universities saw off an attempt to join up skills training and higher education.
This time it won’t be as easy.
ATEC wants a “joined-up” tertiary system bridging the content and qualification divide between VET and HE. University lobbies make positive noises about cooperating across sectors but they declare their members' independence.
Universities 2050 warns, “nationally consistent credit and recognition frameworks are not the same as standardisation. Standardisation improves predictability and eases mobility for students, but it involves trade-offs. Standardisation reduces institutional autonomy and discretion.”
As Universities Australia reminds us, “while some programmes, disciplines and jurisdictions are well suited to standardised credit recognition and transfer, others require a greater degree of institutional assessment.”
These are descendants of arguments in the ‘90s about competency-based training, which is based on demonstrable skills that meet industry requirements mattering more than academic qualifications.
The universities kept competencies off their patch then, defending the traditional distinction between education and training. The result over 20 years was the devaluing of VET and the expansion of undergraduate education in numbers and esteem.
Which is how universities want things to stay.
But they won’t.
In our mass HE system, degrees are about occupational competencies – even HASS advocates argue their courses teach critical thinking skills employers want.
And the temper of the political times has changed – culture-war complaints have spilled over into community scepticism about the value of degrees, outside those certifying trade skills, medicine and teaching, accounting and engineering and the like.
Whether or not Free TAFE is value for public money, it is politically popular with people who are sceptical about what is in HE for them; including Ministers.