While in my view the discount for science students should never have been offered, the change again highlights the problems caused by the instability of higher education policy, with constant introductions and withdrawals of incentive policies. DEST/DEEWR/DIISR incentive programs rely on the naivety of the punters to work, because anyone who observed this policy area over time would assume that incentive policies lack long-term credibility, and not change their behaviour.

(Of course prospective students are unlikely to follow this detail, so temporary discounts may work. Oddly, a couple of articles (here and here) in today’s budget coverage repeat the Ian Chubb/ government line on science – too little demand for science university places, too little supply of university places, and too few scientists. The evidence does not support any of these propositions. A 2012 report on university applications showed not only that for the third successive year science experienced very large increases in applications and offers, but that science was doing exceptionally well in the 90+ ATAR group. And the argument that we are short of science graduates is not evident in any employment survey.)

Details here.

The good news is that back then there were reasonably good rates of employment in professional and managerial jobs, 74% of bachelor graduates and 83% of masters or above graduates. However, only a minority of them were working as journalists, as seen in the figure below. Around 9 percentage points more were in related occupations such as PR or advertising (and there could be more working in the media industry, but in other roles).

I had a quick look at the broad fields of study of people working as journalists. A caveat here is that the census asks about the main field of study in the respondent’s highest qualification. Many people taking a postgraduate journalism qualification are likely to have a bachelor degree in some other field. With that caveat, the broad “creative arts” category that includes journalism courses is the field of study of nearly half of journalists, with “society and culture” (essentially humanities and social sciences, but also law and economics) providing more than a quarter of journalists with their education.

Those paragraphs were the only part of the article that I had not reported before. In the past, I have said that science graduates as a whole have about average rates of graduate employment in professional and managerial jobs. However, closer analysis tells a more interesting story. People with postgraduate science qualifications have above rates of professional and managerial employment. But people with bachelor-level qualifications have lower rates of such employment – males 5 percentage points below the male average, and women a massive 13 percentage points below the female average. That’s a pretty bad outcome, and one worth further investigation when the 2011 census is released later this year.

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The Chief Scientist, Ian Chubb, is an energetic promoter of science and associated disciplines as courses and careers.

In January, Chubb assured summer school mathematics students that demand for their skills outstripped supply, and insisted that we must lift the number of mathematics students. In February, he lamented flat enrolment numbers in some science disciplines in the 2000s, and argued that we must foster student interest to help solve a range of problems, from food security to climate change. Last month, he claimed that to keep pace with US plans for science, technology, engineering and mathematics graduates, Australia needed a two-thirds increase in graduate numbers.

As it happens, demand for undergraduate science courses has grown strongly in recent years. Applications were up by more than 40 per cent between 2008 and last year, more than for any other broad field of study.

With a demand-driven funding system, this student interest is flowing through to enrolments. In a few years, these extra students will put Chubb’s science workforce optimism to an empirical test.

Unfortunately for the graduates of this science boom, employment statistics suggest that the Chief Scientist overstates our need for their knowledge and skills. As the Graduate Destination Survey shows, employers do not rush to employ new science graduates. When 2010 graduates were surveyed four months after completing their courses, those with main fields of study in mathematics, life sciences, chemistry or physical sciences had below-average rates of full-time employment.It is not that 2011 was an unusually tough year; similar employment underperformance can be seen in surveys going back decades.

However, employment opportunities do improve over time for science graduates, as for other graduates. Last year’s Beyond Graduation Survey, released last week, showed that three years after completion 90 per cent of science graduates seeking full-time work had found it. Not bad, but that is lower than for graduates of all other broad fields of study except the creative arts.

The Beyond Graduation Survey also asked its respondents whether or not their degree was important for their job. Among graduates in health and education disciplines, more than 90 per cent said their degree was required or very important, but for science graduates that figure was just 57 per cent. This lack of science relevant employment is consistent with the evidence of skills shortage lists. Some science-related occupations appear, but mostly for school science teachers. Here the problem is more of pay and conditions than numbers of graduates. The main skills shortages are in engineering and health-related occupations.

A shortage of science-specific jobs does not mean science graduates cannot find highly skilled work. Beyond Graduation reports that many science graduates are in professional or managerial occupations. The 2006 Census shows that this is also true of science graduates in general. However, for people with bachelor-level qualifications, a science degree increases the risk of not finding a highly skilled job, though with major gender differences. For employed men with science degrees, 71 per cent had professional or managerial employment, compared with 76 per cent of other male graduates. For women, only 60 per cent of science graduates had professional or managerial employment, compared with 73 per cent of other female graduates.

Many science graduates go on to postgraduate education and employment data shows this pays off. Both sexes do better than average in the labour market, with 90 per cent of men and 84 per cent of women with postgraduate science qualifications in professional or managerial employment. This compares with an average of 84 per cent of male and 83 per cent of female postgraduates across non-science fields.

While studying science is not a major employment quality risk except for women with bachelor degrees, it takes postgraduate study and diversion to non-science occupations to achieve reliable highly skilled employment. Health and engineering courses draw on similar interests and aptitudes to science, while offering more secure pathways to such employment.

Andrew Norton is the higher education program director at Grattan Institute.

Overall, I think it is a good start in giving students more information to help with their higher education choices. There is information by university and field of study on student satisfaction with teaching and generic skills development, attrition rates, employment rates, staff qualifications, student:staff ratios, and other things. The meaning of these numbers is often contested – the methodology section suggests caution on some matters – but overall it is better than general impressions or historical reputation.

Here is an example of how the information is presented, for Macquarie University business.

There is also information on general campus facilities. Here is an example for Murdoch University.

Some suggestions for future versions of the site:

* How to get to the course performance information is not intuitive. ‘Course search’ will provide a list of courses in the field of study of interest, but the comparison tool only gives ATARs and cost. The latter will be useful if fees are deregulated, but under the current system the student contributions will be much the same. To find course performance information, users have to go to ‘university search’, and then choose the field of study. Comparison between universities will be difficult without printing out results for each university.

* For non-university higher education providers (NUHEPs), their courses can be located through ‘course search’ but not ‘university search’. No information on admission requirements or cost was in any of the results from random searches. Nor is there any information on course performance, though some NUHEPs are in the relevant surveys (there may be sample size issues). To get a proper market, we need to include the NUHEPs as fully as possible.

First, its respondents were asked about the size of government, and the answer suggested that perhaps a large number of voters had suddenly converted to classical liberalism:

But more specific questions suggest that the vague feeling that governments are too big does not translate into wanting government to do less in key areas of activity. In every proposition put to the Essential respondents, a plurality wanted the government to do more, and in most clear majorities wanted the government to do more. The 44% of respondents who earlier in the survey had thought government did too much shrank to a constituency of between 1% and 10%.

This is why governments have so much trouble cutting spending, and why genuine ‘tough budgets’ are very rare.

The recently released Beyond Graduation 2011 report (pdf), of graduates three years out, provides further reason to be very cautious about science boosterism.

One question in the survey asks employed graduates whether their qualification was a formal requirement, important, somewhat important or not important for their job. The figure below shows that after three years those with science degrees are only just saved by the creative arts from having the qualifications least likely to be a formal requirement or important for their holder’s job.

As the text points out, many graduates who rate their degree as not important are in managerial or professional jobs. So the lack of direct relevance may not be a problem from their point of view. But that so many science graduates find employment where a science degree is not required hardly suggests general shortages of science qualifications.

Previously Queensland, like other jurisdictions, had a pay-per-vote system of election public funding (about $1.65 per vote in the QLD case). In the reforms legislated last year, this was changed to a system of reimbursement, up to a maximum of about $5.3 million. The formula works like this:

All of the first 10% of electoral expenditure
75% of the next 80% of electoral expenditure
50% of the remaining 10% of electoral expenditure

I’m not sure how much Queensland Labor spent this time around, but presumably they will walk away with several million dollars in public funding, while the old system would have netted them $1.2 million on yesterday’s vote.

The main argument for the new system is that it introduces a counter-cyclical element to the system. With donations tending to follow popular support, parties on the downward part of their cycle are dealt a double blow. This system of public funding lets them mount a decent-sized campaign (I’m not sure how big the Queensland Greens or Katter Party campaigns were, but this system also helps small parties, provided they reach a 4% threshold).

However, as the NSW and QLD elections demonstrate there is only so much money can do. From a campaign finance theory perspective, each campaign was a fairer and more even contest than it might otherwise have been. But that did not stop two of the biggest defeats in Australian electoral history.

If fees are deregulated, the more prestigious universities would charge higher fees than others. Schwartz suggests that if they did, their government subsidy should be reduced, and redistributed to other universities.

The reason is regulatory – the new Tertiary Education Quality and Standards Agency is imposing standards on all universities, but it is hard for the poorer universities to match the standards of the wealthier universities.

I doubt TEQSA will require all universities to be the same. A university licence to operate depends on meeting minimum standards, not being identical to all other universities. That said, there is a tendency in the standards released to date to codify common practices, some of which are of doubtful necessity. If this continues, the universities in the best financial position to try new things will tend to set the standards over the long term.

The most problematic current standards relate to research, though this is partly because their wording is so vague in parts that it is hard to know exactly what they mean. However meeting minimum research standards is much easier for the Group of Eight universities than others, because the federal research funding schemes favour universities with a strong research track record.

This makes student-driven research funding an attractive mechanism for allowing all universities to meet research standards. The higher-prestige universities can probably do it through the market by charging high fees. The less-prestigious universities are more likely to need government help. (Macquarie charges fees that are above the average, so it probably would not benefit from its VC’s proposal.)

One empirical unknown here is whether this would affect willingness to pay at the higher-prestige universities. There is criticism and resentment (eg international students complaining that they are ‘cash cows’) already that students are paying for research at the university they attend, but effectively paying for research at another university would surely make things worse. In an indirect way students hoping to buy prestige are getting what they pay for when they support prestige-promoting research at their own institution. But supporting regulatory tick-a-box research at some other university provides no such return on investment.

There are also normative issues involved. The usual argument for taxpayer-funded research is that research with general benefits should be financed from general revenue provided by all taxpayers, not the small number of people who enrol in courses in the institution conducting the research. From a libertarian perspective it is a voluntary transfer and students are always free to go elsewhere (the same argument that says universities should be allowed to bundle student services). But should the government encourage what appears to be an inequitable way of funding an activity of potential general benefit?

Further complicating matters, these student contributions will be put back up next year, so assuming that the required legislation is passed future calculations should take this into account. Other than via indexation the total won’t be affected, but the student contribution will go up, and the Commonwealth contribution will go down.