Mapping Australian higher education 2023 is now available from the ANU Centre for Social Research and Methods website.
Update 26/10/23: A reader has pointed out that list of FEE-HELP NUHEPs is incomplete. A column of names from the original Excel file was omitted during production. The full list is available here. This list also includes three non-FEE-HELP providers registered by TEQSA since the pdf version was finalised. A corrected version of Mapping with the full list of NUHEPs, as of mid-2023, is here.
If anyone has noticed other errors please let me know.
The updated funding agreements let us see how much the government paid to get Centre Alliance Senator Stirling Griff to vote for Job-ready Graduates, which is $68.6 million for South Australian universities over the 2021-2023 funding agreement period. Unlike much of the other additional money in the funding agreements, these increases are ongoing rather than temporary.
I am not sure what criteria were used in dividing the money between the South Australian universities. In 2021 Adelaide gets 1.9 per cent more than it presumably would have otherwise, Flinders 2.7 per cent, and the University of South Australia 3.1 per cent.
More short course places allocated
In my earlier post the allocated short courses fell short of the announced budget value of $252 million. Now they slightly exceed it at $258.7 million, divided between 256 undergraduate certificates valued at $102.9 million and 491 graduate certificates worth $155.8 million. My updated spreadsheet of short courses is here.
Update 7/7/21: Some of the data in this post has been updated here.
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Last month I wrote an overview and critique of the new university funding agreements. This post looks at new allocations of funding for student places, while a subsequent post will look at total funding allocations. Not all my numbers match previously announced total funding for the relevant program, so that is a caveat on both posts.
Under Job-ready Graduates universities are free of sub-bachelor and postgraduate student places being allocated by funding cluster, but the funding agreements show that universities have significant additional work to do in applying for and reporting on a range of small programs.
Numbers of universities getting different allocations
Job-ready Graduates introduced several new or substantially revised pots of money. Not all universities receive each of these. As the chart below shows, programs driven by criteria or formulas set out in legislative instruments (NPILF and transition funding) or the legislation itself (demand driven funding for Indigenous students from regional and remote areas) benefit the largest number of universities. Apart from the general grants for higher education courses (sub-bachelor through to masters coursework, except medicine), the ministerial/departmental discretion programs benefit fewer universities.
Short courses funding
According to the funding agreements, 27 of the 37 public universities have received once-off 2021 funding for undergraduate certificate and/or graduate certificate short courses. When a university’s funding agreement reported $0 for short courses I cross-checked against CourseSeeker with its ‘short course’ filter on and found three more universities. I am not sure whether this is because those universities adopted the ‘short course’ brand without a specific funding allocation, or because their funding agreements are yet to be updated, or because CourseSeeker is wrong. My adding up of the value of funding agreement short courses gets me to $213 million, out of the $252 million allocated for 2020-21 in the October 2020 Budget.Read More »
Generally, universities have significant autonomy over what they teach. Changes in courses and subjects occur every year, in good as well as bad economic times.
But the funding agreements universities sign with the government impose some controls over course closures.
For courses leading to occupations deemed to be experiencing a skills shortage, and subjects teaching ‘nationally strategic’ languages, universities have to get government approval prior to closure.
The draft legislation for the Tehan higher education package, released on Tuesday, includes several previously unannounced measures. These include new – or least new for public universities – rules for managing under-performing students.
Among the measures are greater monitoring of student progress, restrictions on study load, and as the media has been reporting today students losing Commonwealth funding if they fail more than half the subjects they have taken. The minister’s media release is here.
I will get to the sometimes arcane detail in a subsequent post (or posts, there is a lot). I am not convinced that the government is going about this in the best way. But I don’t want complaints about the details to obscure the point that this is an area worth policy attention.
In the Grattan Institute Dropping Out report we argued that disengaged students are needlessly incurring HELP debt and blemished academic records. With demand likely to exceed supply for higher education next year, disengaged students are also using Commonwealth supported places that would benefit other people more.
Update 24/07/20: The Commonwealth Grant Scheme Guidelines discussed below have now been amended, including 16 NUHEPs that did not previously receive Commonwealth supported places.
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Back in May, I posted on concerns about the legal issues surrounding the new ‘undergraduate certificates’, the half-diplomas announced as part of the Easter Sunday COVID-19 measures. One issue, listing on the Australian Qualifications Framework, was being remedied as I wrote.
First, it means that the source of Commonwealth Grant Scheme funding (if any, more soon) for undergraduate certificates moves from the bachelor degree to the sub-bachelor and enabling fund.
But as I was writing that blog post a band aid legal fix was being applied. Undergraduate certificates have been temporarily added to the Australian Qualifications Framework. They can be awarded between this month and December 2021. This gets universities, and the Department, which otherwise lacked legal authority to pay Commonwealth Grant Scheme or HELP money to universities, off the legal hook.
Apart from highlighting AQF governance weaknesses – it is just an agreement between education ministers – this leaves the question of what happens to undergraduate certificates after December 2021.
The links between short courses and qualifications
In answering this question we are not starting with a blank sheet of paper. The AQF recently had a major review, which reported in October last year. The review was sympathetic, as I am in general, to helping students build towards a credential. Students don’t necessarily want or need a formal qualification, but where they do we should, where we can do so efficiently with low integrity risks, help them achieve their goals incrementally and cost effectively.Read More »
A couple of weeks ago I posted on the surprising apparent decline of reskilling and retraining. Mature-age undergraduate, postgraduate, vocational qualification, ABS work-related training, and ATO self-education expenses have all trended down in recent years. These trends did not seem consistent with the oft-repeated claims of workplace change and the need to reskill and retrain.
Especially on LinkedIn, much of the reaction to the post suggested that this was due to online self-education as a substitute for credentialed and uncredentialed courses and training. While I haven’t found any time series data on how online self-education has grown, I am persuaded that this must be a significant part of the explanation.
In a recent Pearson global survey of learners, employed respondents who required further training were asked how they did it. In Australia, organised courses or training are still more widely used than online self-education. But a third of the sample had used this method (chart below).
Andrew Norton 