Australia’s group of eight elite universities has called on the Government to rein-in the demand-driven university system, claiming that it has been an expensive failure. From The Canberra Times:
Group of Eight chair Michael Spence said the uncapping of university places in 2012 had blown out the budget by billions of dollars while leaving important university research underfunded.
“Simply enrolling more students in underfunded places is not in the best interests of the country,” Dr Spence told Fairfax Media.
“We are on track of meeting the goal of 40 per cent of young people with an undergraduate degree by 2025…
University enrolments have grown by 30 per cent since 2008, leading to concerns about falling entry standards and the soaring cost of higher education.
Dr Spence, the vice-chancellor of the University of Sydney, said the government should consider placing an overall cap on the number of students each university can enrol and let them decide how many students are enrolled in each discipline.
It could also place caps on the number of students universities can enrol in courses such as teaching, nursing and allied health, he said…
They have a point. Total outstanding HELP loans have escalated, many of which will never be repaid, putting increasing pressures on the federal Budget:
Meanwhile, university entrance scores have plummeted, suggesting that every man and his dog can now get a degree, devaluing their worth.
Does Australia really need so many people holding expensive degrees, often working in totally unrelated fields? Isn’t this too much of a good thing?
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 to recruit school leavers and train 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.
The sad truth is that Australia’s universities have morphed from educational institutions providing a public good (boosting the nation’s productivity) 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.
And The Dumbening continues.
