Following scandal after scandal, and a $3 billion Budget blow-out over four years, the Turnbull Government in December passed a bill through the Senate imposing stricter eligibility criteria for Vocational Education and Training (VET) courses, as well as capping student loans.
Now, two of Australia’s biggest private VET providers – Careers Australia and Evocca – are among 150 private colleges that will lose their accreditation and will have their funding stripped following “very poor completion rates” and aggressive recruitment practices. From The Canberra Times:
The two colleges have shed more than 24,000 students over the past year as the government cracked down on the sector.
They are two of more than 150 private colleges that found out on Tuesday that they have not had their accreditation approved, leaving up to 1700 students in limbo.
Approximately 1200 of these study at Evocca or Careers Australia, according to the Department of Education…
[Careers Australia] which once educated more than 13,000 students and has campuses in the Sydney and Melbourne CBDs, paid back $44 million in taxpayer funding last year after it admitted it had breached Australian consumer law and “engaged in unconscionable conduct” while it enrolled students in some of the poorest, most remote communities in Australia into thousands of dollars of debt…
The latest VET FEE HELP data for 2015 revealed Evocca earned $110,000 in taxpayer funding per graduate between 2013 and 2015 after only 1600 of its 13,000 students completed their courses. It earned $180 million in funding over that period.
In the same period, Careers Australia earned more than $264 million in taxpayer funding while graduating only 14.7 per cent of students…
The two were some of the biggest beneficiaries of the VET FEE HELP scheme which blew out from $325 million in 2012 to $2.9 billion in 2015…
Brilliant. The private VET sector has been riddled with rorting and waste, has produced poor educational outcomes, and has blown a huge hole in the Budget. The system has been an unmitigated disaster from the get go and reform cold not have come soon enough.
