Month: November 2022

Microcredentials should not get FEE-HELP assistance

Andrew Norton4 Comments

In the last two years the government – the current and former governments are indistinguishable on this point – has encouraged universities to offer ‘microcredentials’, which certify and sell smaller bodies of knowledge and skills than an AQF qualification.

Government support for microcredentials

Late last month Labor reintroduced a Coalition amendment to the Higher Education Support Act 2003 that would extend FEE-HELP income-contingent loans to microcredentials, although with the potentially limiting caveat of ‘that meet the requirements specified in the FEE‑HELP Guidelines.’

Last week they promulgated a legislative instrument for the Coalition’s ‘microcredential pilot’, which offers subsidies to Table A universities to develop microcredentials. According to the explanatory memorandum ‘the purpose of the program is to examine newer, shorter forms of industry focused learning aimed at supporting people to upskill and reskill in areas of national priority such as health, teaching, IT and engineering.’

The pilot does not seem designed to attract applications – universities would have to give away their IP and accept Job-ready Graduates Commonwealth and student contributions – but the bigger issue is FEE-HELP.

Do microcredentials require government intervention?

Contrary to the impression given by some microcredential discussions, people taking short courses to increase their skills is nothing new. The ABS has asked about structured learning not for a credential many times over decades, and always found it is the most common form of post-school education on a headcount basis. The latest ABS survey is no different. Short courses overtake credentialed education by a person’s late 20s, as the chart below shows.

Microcredentials add certification and perhaps standardisation to short courses, which might increase short course informational value in the labour market. But lack of these things has not stopped this market functioning on a large scale. Proxy indicators of employee suitability such as qualifications are important for young or career shifting job applicants, but for people already established in their careers observation – directly by employers, by reputation or referee report – is usually the main information source.

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Careers in higher education policy – a few reflections at my 25 year mark

Andrew Norton9 Comments

Twenty-five years ago today I started my career in higher education policy – although I did not then know I was starting a career rather than a job – when I began in education minister David Kemp’s office as his higher education adviser. Since leaving this role I have been a higher education policy adviser to University of Melbourne vice-chancellors, the higher education program director at the Grattan Institute, and now ‘professor in the practice of higher education policy’ at the ANU.

Few people spend most of their careers in higher education policy. Career paths are limited or at least not easily planned in advance. Three of my four higher education jobs did not exist before I was appointed to them. At various points I considered alternative careers but higher education policy opportunities appeared and I took them.

Since the late 1990s a higher education policy career has, at least in one respect, become easier. Based on my interactions as a ministerial adviser only a handful of university staff at the time had primary responsibilities including government relations and/or higher education policy. Contact was usually made by senior university staff responsible for whatever issue they had to raise, or matters were delegated to the Australian Vice-Chancellors’ Committee (later Universities Australia).

When I started my U of M adviser role, leaving the government after the first of my major higher education political failures, it was a new position. Since the late 1990s, however, new higher education lobby groups and a proliferation of university policy adviser positions have made this kind of higher education policy work easier to find. What influence these advisers have on the direction of institutional and public policy is not clear, but their jobs create career options and a policy community that were not there before.

In other areas, however, higher education policy careers are more difficult. Regular public service ‘efficiency dividends’ have reduced the chance of a job in the Department of Education’s higher education division. The remaining staff spend too much of their time administering counter-productively complex and bureaucratic policies. Senior jobs often go to people with generic public service skills rather than specific higher education expertise.

The Department’s policy analysis and development capacity has been undermined in other ways too. It used to commission research regularly, but now this happens only occasionally. The exception is long-term support for equity research, which is worthwhile in itself but creates an imbalance. We have much more research on small-scale equity programs than multi-billion dollar programs such as the Commonwealth Grant Scheme, HELP and student income support.

The higher education sector also shows a surprising lack of curiosity about itself. The academics working regularly on higher education policy issues are small in number and scattered around the country, with no institution possessing the critical mass needed to pursue a major research agenda outside of equity issues – and equity research would be stronger if integrated with work on the bigger programs that ultimately drive opportunities for equity students.

Politics has its own imperatives and a strong policy community cannot guarantee good policy. But the last few years of government higher education policy have sometimes seemed like one of those Twitter threads that start with ‘wrong answers only’. Would Job-ready Graduates have made it through the policy process if we had accessible research on the drivers of student choices and university supply decisions? If we better understood the relationships between student debt, repayment times, and HELP’s costs to government?

The state of the higher education policy community means that Labor’s Universities Accord process, which sounds like a comprehensive review of higher education policy, is a high risk project. The university submissions will probably be of higher average quality than 20 years ago, but only a limited pool of people have the knowledge and experience needed to produce a politically feasible policy with a reasonable chance of achieving its goals.