A university degree in Australia used to mean something.
It used to be that to gain entry to a decent course at a decent institution, students were required to work hard at school and gain a tertiary entrance score above a high threshold.
Those days are long gone. Thanks to the former Labor Government’s uncapping of university places in 2012, allowing universities to recruit as many students as they can fit, actual tertiary entrance scores have plummeted, meaning every man and his dog can now get a degree, devaluing their worth in the process.
Evidence of this is on display in the latest tertiary entrance scores, which has seen university offers to those with low ATAR scores balloon. From The Australian:
University offers to students with ATARs below 50 have trebled in just five years…
Offers to low-ATAR school-leavers increased in all disciplines this year, with the greatest growth in allied health, business and society and culture degrees.
New government data shows that offers to students with ATARs under 50 have risen from 3607 places in 2012 to 9723 this year. Alarmingly, that number increased by 2624 on last year…
The data shows that 1742 places in management and commerce courses were made to students with ATARs under 50, and 1568 places in health courses, including nursing. Another 2814 places were offered in the broad range of courses called society and culture…
The data shows that, in 2012, 71.6 per cent of all university offers went to students with ATARs above 70, which had dropped to just 40.5 per cent this year.
The share of offers to students with ATARs below 50 rose from 1.6 per cent to 4.4 per cent during that five-year period.
The sad truth is that Australia’s universities have morphed from educational institutions providing a public good into quantity-based degree factories, whereby they teach as many students as possible to accumulate Commonwealth government funding through HELP/HECS debts. Quality of teaching, and students’ ability to secure subsequent employment, remain distant priorities.
The problem is accentuated by the proliferation of international students, whereby degrees are sold to maximise profit at the expense of dumbed-down standards, with foreign students also enticed with the prospect of gaining permanent residency once they finish their courses, thus maintaining the population ponzi.
The more people that have a degree, the more this becomes a basic expectation for employers, leaving those without one further behind. Meanwhile, those that do obtain a degree are experiencing a gradual diminution in their pay, with graduate starting salaries for bachelor degree graduates deteriorating steadily since the 1970s, commensurate with the rise in university participation.
In a similar vein, employers in Australia no longer bother recruiting school leavers and training them up. Instead, they tend to recruit university graduates and then whinge when they don’t have the requisite skills. In the meantime, students are forgoing earnings while they study, while sinking tens-of-thousands of dollars of sunk costs into gaining their degree.
Australians need to ask themselves: what is tertiary education actually for and who does it benefit? Is it a public good used to boost the nation’s productivity and prosperity, or is it merely another commodity to be sold for short-term profit?
