Crisis Needed to Reform Higher Education

Greetings from the National Library of Australia where Professor Bruce Chapman, architect of the HECS student loan scheme is speaking. He suggested that this radical reform was introduced due to a crisis in university funding. Professor Chapman argued that this contingent loan scheme (students only repay when their income reaches a specific level) was fairer than "free" university where the rich tended to attend. I asked Professor Chapman about vocational education and training (VET). He suggested that contingent loans could be relatively easily extended to VET (I will suggest this to the Senate on Monday).

Professor Chapman is speaking along with John Dawkins, former Minister of Education, Professor Linda Botterill, Professor Shirley Leitch at the 2018 Sir Roland Wilson Dialogue. A video will be available later.

Your future is Australia's future

The Australian Government is running a TV advertising campaign asking the public to search for "Your future is Australia's future: The facts about higher education". This is the title of a web page, discussing the share of of course fees paid by the federal government, the quality standards from the Tertiary Education Quality and Standards Agency and the HECS student loans scheme. This then links to a "Changes to Higher Education" page, which says "The Australian Government wants to reform our higher education system, opening more pathways, providing more support and offering more choices.". Curiously this does not appear to mention the key aspect of the government's HE reform, which is to allow universities to set their own fees. It will be interesting to see if this advertising campaign will change the views of cross-bench Senators, who up until now have declined to support the government's proposals. However, in my view the proposed reforms and much of the public debate is missing the most important question which needs to be addressed: Will Higher Education Reforms Position Australian Universities to Compete On-line? 

ps: The Your future web page has some technical problems: 65 HTML Errors, a MobileOK Rating of only 19 out of 100 and 24 Accessibility problems.

The graphic for the Your future web page, is similar to that showing two people at Domainname.edu.au.