The answer to teacher oversupply is not more university qualifications

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By Leith van Onselen

Last month, The SMH reported on the dire situation facing Australia’s university graduates, whereby there were 22 graduates fighting for every graduate job:

Across Australia, about 22 university graduates are competing for every new graduate position and many will need to settle for low-paying entry roles “just to get their foot in the jobs market”, a new national report has found…

Nationally, 130,105 people who recently left university with bachelor degrees are competing for 5783 advertised graduate positions, the report found, based on an analysis of the Department of Education’s university completion data and recent job advertisements.

…some fields, such as law and teaching, are much harder to find work in than others.

“It’s cheap for universities to churn out courses in certain areas, especially degrees outside the sciences with [fewer] contact hours and teachers,” Mr Watson said.

“With deregulation, there are more places and scores drop, but there just aren’t the jobs at the end of it, so you have a huge number of graduates who aren’t needed.

With the flood of graduate teachers in the market, the Australian Education Union (AEU) is now calling for all aspiring teachers to study an undergraduate degree followed by a two-year master’s degree in a bid to sort the ‘wheat from the chaff’. From The ABC:

“We surveyed over 4000 teachers and principals and just 13 per cent of our new teachers rated their teaching courses as very good,” Australian Education Union (AEU) federal president Correna Haythorpe said.

“This is of grave concern and one of the reasons we believe it is important to have a postgraduate degree.”

But critics of the proposal say five or potentially six years of higher education could deter many aspiring teachers and increase their financial burden.

The AEU has also called for minimum entry standards for teaching courses, including an Australian Tertiary Admission Rank of 70 or above.

The number of students entering university with an ATAR of lower than 70 has grown from 25 per cent in 2006 to 42 per cent in 2015.

“We don’t want to see universities treating teaching courses as a cash cow. We want to have very high minimum entry requirements so we can attract the top 30 per cent of students into the courses,” Ms Haythorpe said.

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MB shares many of the AEU’s concerns around the ‘quantitative easing’ of university places, whereby universities have lowered entrance scores and printed as many degrees as possible to accumulate Commonwealth government funding through HELP/HECS loans.

The end result is that the universities have flooded the market with so many graduates that a degree has lost its value, despite the significant cost to both students and the Budget. The torrent of graduates has also swamped the labour market, which is unable to keep up with the supply.

But how is requiring aspiring teachers to then undergo a two-year master’s degree a sensible solution? It would merely burden aspiring teachers with even greater debts and chew up another two years of their life, all the while leaving those with only bachelor degrees with worthless qualifications.

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No, the sustainable and lower cost solution lies with limiting the number of teaching places at university to match the jobs market (and the economy’s needs), and sorting the ‘wheat from the chaff’ by only accepting students with ATARs over a decent level (say 70, as mentioned above).

Teaching courses at university should also be closely monitored by the federal government to ensure that they meet required standards and deliver good educational outcomes for students.

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About the author
Leith van Onselen is Chief Economist at the MB Fund and MB Super. He is also a co-founder of MacroBusiness. Leith has previously worked at the Australian Treasury, Victorian Treasury and Goldman Sachs.