SOURCE
"The first of the budget-relieving measures was
the least objectionable: introducing the Higher Education Contribution Scheme,
requiring students – who gain significant private benefits from their degrees –
to bear just some of the cost of those degrees, under a deferred loan-repayment
scheme carefully designed to ensure it did nothing to deter students from poor
families.
Likewise, allowing unis to admit suitably
qualified overseas students provided they paid full freight was unobjectionable
in principle. [Does this ring any bells in Launceston?]
John Howard continued the Hawke-Keating push on universities.
The Howard government's scheme allowing less
qualified local students to be admitted provided they paid a premium was
"problematic", as the academics say, and soon abandoned.
The problem is that continuing cuts in
government grants to unis have kept a protracted squeeze on uni finances,
prompting vice-chancellors to become obsessed with money-raising.
They pressure teaching staff to go easy on
fee-paying overseas students who don't reach accepted standards of learning,
form unhealthy relationships with business interests, and accept "soft
power" grants from foreign governments and their nationals without asking
awkward questions.
They pressure academics not so much to do more
research as to win more research funding from the government. Interesting to
compare the hours spent preparing grant applications with the hours actually
doing research. [Does this ring any bells in Launceston?]
A total of eight Australian universities have been listed among
the top 100 in the QS Graduate Employability Rankings.
To motivate the researchers, those who bring
in the big bucks are rewarded by being allowed to pay casuals to do their
teaching for them. (This after the vice-chancellors have argued straight-faced
what a crime it would be for students to be taught by someone who wasn't at the
forefront of their sub-sub research speciality.)
The unis' second greatest crime is the
appalling way they treat those of their brightest students foolish enough to
aspire to an academic career. Those who aren't part-timers are kept on serial
short-term contracts, leaving them open to exploitation by ambitious
professors.
However much the unis save by making
themselves case studies in precarious employment, it's surely not worth it. If
they're not driving away the most able of their future star performers it's a
tribute to the "treat 'em mean to keep 'em keen" school of
management.
But the greatest crime of our funding-obsessed
unis is the way they've descended to short-changing their students, so as to
cross-subsidise their research. At first they did this mainly by herding
students into overcrowded lecture theatres and tutorials.
Lately they're exploiting new technology to
achieve the introverted academic's greatest dream: minimal "face
time" with those annoying pimply students who keep asking questions.
PowerPoint is just about compulsory. Lectures
are recorded and put on the website – or, failing that, those barely
comprehensible "presentation" slides – together with other material
sufficient to discourage many students – most of whom have part-time jobs –
from bothering to attend lectures. Good thinking. [Does this ring any bells in Launceston?]
To be fair, an oddball minority of academics
takes a pride in lecturing well. They get a lot of love back from their
students, but little respect or gratitude from their peers. Vice-chancellors
make a great show of awarding them tin medals, but it counts zilch towards
their next promotion.
The one great exception to the 30-year quest
to drive uni funding off the budget was Julia Gillard's ill-considered
introduction of "demand-driven" funding of undergraduate places, part
of a crazy plan to get almost all school-leavers going on to uni, when many
would be better served going to TAFE.
The uni money-grubbers slashed their entrance
standards, thinking of every excuse to let older people in, admitting as many
students as possible so as to exploit the feds' fiscal loophole.
The result's been a marked lowering of the
quality of uni degrees, and unis being quite unconscionable in their
willingness to offer occupational degrees to far more people than could
conceivably be employed in those occupations.
I suspect those vice-chancellors who've
suggested that winding back the demand-determined system would be preferable to
the proposed across-the-board cuts (and all those to follow) are right."
Ross Gittins is the Herald's economics editor.
COMMENT:
If this is so and anywhere near being on the money why is that Launceston City Council is thinking that it's justifiable to give away public land to a 'money grabbing exploitative business'?
There might well be a case to go into business with the university but think about it. You get to give the land away and the community takes on extra debt for more infrastructure and the university is EXEMPT from paying rates. How does that work
The aldermen didn't see the university coming, for whatever reason it seems that council management (the GM?) didn't look AND the ratepayer get the bill because the council can levy ratepayers. How does that work??
The university here is shaping up as being the 'enterprise-from-hell' – the one that takes and does not give – and time is running out if there is a need to clip its wings!!
No comments:
Post a Comment