ANU headlined its birthday party announcement for 100,000 or so grads and supporters: “You're invited: The visionaires among us.” Presumably that’s the name of the house band.
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Cathy Foley argues regulation is the reason Australia is not-great at commercialising research. “Over time, Australia has added hundreds of grants, rules, reporting requirements and coordinating bodies … (but) complexity accumulates. … Eventually, the energy that should drive innovation is spent navigating the system, “ the Academy of Technological Sciences and Engineering said Wednesday.
In other news from the valley of death, the process to create the new National Collaborative Research Infrastructure plods on. The Department of Education advises the Expert Working Group is using the initial survey, the issues paper, “relevant international analyses” and “key national documents” including the one formally known as the Strategic Examination of Research and Development to “refine” an exposure draft, expected mid-September. “Topic Groups” are also meeting, on AI and Research Infrastructure, National Digital Research Infrastructure and HASS.
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The HE private providers lobby speaks up for private enterprise. “Equating profit with poor quality delivery or with greed is lazy and deeply misguided. But it has become a recurring theme in tertiary education commentary,” says Felix Pirie from the Independent Tertiary Education Council Australia. He has only just noticed?
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The NSW and federal Labor Governments unite to announce Free TAFE Is tackling building trades shortages. According to national skills minister Andrew Giles, the national 20,000 enrolment target for 2025 and 2026 was passed in March, 7,600 of them in NSW according to state minister Steve Whan. Of course, more boots on site will depend on completions and there should be numbers on this in a year or so – when Ministers will huzza! or argue people dropping out does not mean the program did not work.
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And the Tip (“all politics is local”) Award goes to Jason Clare for a speech this week honouring western Sydney Labor legend John Brown. It is superb rhetoric, announcing Labor is the party of the region and drives education as the engine of productivity. It explains why the HASS lobby is getting nowhere condemning Job Ready Graduates. Mr Clare will just talk about Paid Prac helping students and the community.
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There is a new allocation of 50 Commonwealth funded med school places, allocated according to a formula shared among the med-ed establishment, to “help address GP shortages in rural and underserved metropolitan areas.” The schools with more students are at ANU, Macquarie U, QUT, Uni Newcastle, Uni NSW, Uni Notre Dame Australia, Uni Queensland and Uni WA.
Med school places are ATEC immune and will continue to be allocated by ministers, as standard CSP, bonded places (doctors must work in RRR areas after graduating) competitive GP/primary care places and places for med schools in the bush plus demand-driven Indigenous allocations. That makes it sound way less complicated than it is.
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Among the poultice of special pleadings on the Bill setting out how ATEC will work, the Deans of Science include a novel idea, “the success of the reforms should be judged by the outcomes they achieve for the students they are intended to benefit.”
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The Senate Education and Employment committee has released submissions to its inquiry into the government’s final ATEC establishing Bill. For deeply informed, independent analysis Mark Warburton and Andrew Norton are hard to beat. For a submission that sees the Bill as part of an existential struggle read the Australian Academy of the Humanities.
The Academy focuses on two faults.
One is that it does not end Job Ready Graduates, “Without action, the JRG will continue to undermine the Government’s and the Universities Accord’s long-term goals for increased student participation and equity in higher education.”
The other is that its members are not protected and they should be. “ATEC is uniquely placed to draw on disciplinary and sector expertise to undertake ‘capability mapping’ to inform compacts, to ensure Australia maintains and grows its sovereign capabilities” the Academy states. Examples of what the commission should work on include: “maintaining nationally significant disciplines that are institutionally fragile,” “rebuilding priority languages and area studies” and “preventing uncoordinated closures that cumulatively damage national capability.”
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The National Tertiary Education Union has long campaigned for fewer outsiders and more staff on university councils. It is winning. There are critical reports of university governance by parliamentary committees in NSW and Victoria. TEQSA intervened at ANU to help its Council choose a new chancellor after a union-inspired staff revolt against former VC Genevieve Bell and chancellor Julie Bishop. And now an architect of the ANU triumph is looking at the University of Canberra. Local NTEU leader Lachlan Clohesy is campaigning for the ACT Government to change the UoC Act, including requiring its council to include HE and public administration expert members, for Academic Board “to have independence” from management and for its chair to be elected by academic staff, not appointed by Council; and for 40% of council members to be elected staff or students. The ten recommendations could apply to any university in the country. Maybe Dr Clohesy will take the list with him in October, when he starts his new job as the union’s assistant national secretary.
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Jason Clare was in Cairns the other day, celebrating the start of work on CQU’s new city campus. It is another achievement under two VCs to create a sustainable base for what 15 years ago was a struggling college with a domestic market not big enough to fund it. “This is going to be the place in Cairns where we are going to train more teachers, more nurses, more engineers, more allied health professionals. And, boy, do we need them,” Mr Clare said.
Long established James Cook, which used to be FNQ’s only HE provider, was in the news this week, being denounced in regional media for a restructure in technical services. Plus engineering students are upset by a plan to cut in-person lectures. JCU enrolments dropped for eight years straight till it stopped the rot in 2022, but up to last year it was not making its annual target of a 400 EFT increase.
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Kelly Linden (Charles Sturt U) argues reaching the government’s 80% tertiary target means universities must meet the study needs of part-time students, now 35% of local load.
“Traditionally, university students have studied full-time and, therefore, university processes, support, and government funding are skewed towards supporting full-time students. It is therefore not surprising that studying part-time is one of the leading predictors of failure and attrition,” she argues
Her report for the Australian Centre for Student Equity and Success (Curtin U) sets how universities should help, including: “adequate time” for academics, “work and caring commitments” are acceptable for special-consideration, all students automatically qualify for no-questions-asked extensions and equitable maximum time to complete policies.