Higher education continues to descend into a farce.
Despite numerous reports of widespread rorting by private colleges (see Friday’s post), the NSW Government will push ahead with controversial vocational training reforms that will force TAFE to compete with private sector providers for half of its funding next year. From The SMH:
A document seen by The Sun-Herald shows direct NSW government funding will be reduced to half of TAFE’s income in 2016…
To fill the gap, the 10 TAFE NSW institutes will have to compete with private colleges to attract state government funding based on enrollment numbers, strike private training deals with companies, and earn revenue from full-fee paying international students…
The NSW Greens and Labor claim that reducing TAFE’s guaranteed funding from three-quarters of its income in 2014, to half next year, risks repeating the TAFE collapses seen in Victoria…
“At the exact time that Australians are discovering that unrestrained public funding of private providers leads to large-scale rorting and exploitation, Skills Minister John Barilaro is throwing TAFE into competition with non-government providers for a rapidly growing share of its income,” said Greens MP John Kaye.
“The Baird government is handing almost half of the public system’s budget to a market that will attract the same dodgy private providers who have comprehensively rorted the federal scheme.”
“TAFE can’t operate without secure funding,” said Labor’s skills spokesman David Harris.
This is complete and utter madness.
Private colleges received more than $1.4 billion in government-funded VET Fee-Help loans last year, four times as much as was provided to public vocational education and training providers. Yet despite this massive funding imbalance, only 14,400 students managed to complete courses at private colleges last year, compared with 18,400 students at TAFE and other public providers.
The private “vocational education sales industry” has also been found to have targeted poor areas, providing them with “free” laptops if they sign-up to an expensive online diploma course. In the process, the private education providers have pocketed thousands of dollars in fees for students that will in all likelihood never finish their courses, courtesy of the Australian taxpayer.
And while Australian taxpayers are being reamed by a bunch of private shonks, Australia’s government-run schools, TAFEs and universities are being underfunded, forcing them to sell degrees/diplomas en masse to foreign students in order to make up the funding gap. In turn, educational standards are being eroded.
Yet, despite the widespread evidence that public funding of private vocational education has been an unmitigated disaster, the NSW Government now wants to double-down on them, and in the process further starve TAFEs of funding.
Seriously, can the NSW Government be any more stupid? Taxpayers, educational standards and productivity will continue to suffer the longer this madness persists.
