Human capital and education
A Nobel laureate on our tertiary education system
ANU Vice Chancellor Brian Schmidt has called for a “nose to tail” rethink of our tertiary education system.
He has made a personal submission to the Review of Australia’s Higher Education System. You can read it, in which he explains his “three big ideas”, on the review’s website, or listen to an 8-minute interview on ABC Breakfast.
In that interview he observes that our present education arrangements are not closing our skills gap. The vocational education system, in particular, is failing. There should be far better integration between vocational education and university education, possibly leading to the development of new institutions.
He does not favour special incentives to fill skills gaps, such as the previous government’s imposition of high HECS fees on humanities in order to channel students into engineering and similar courses. An education system that trains students only for the skills they need right now (“job ready” is the conservatives’ favourite term) does not serve them well. Rather, if they develop capacities for critical thinking and analysis they will be open to the idea of lifelong learning, equipping them to adapt to society’s changing needs and to changing technologies.
Our run-down universities
A pandemic and a government hostile to learning have left our universities struggling. The immediate effect of the pandemic was on foreign student enrolments. Another was to replace human-to-human contact with online learning.
Universities have been using the internet as a supplement for face-to-face teaching for many years, but in response to the pandemic it became the dominant or even sole means of teaching in many institutions. Then the Morrison government, which had no trouble in distributing “Jobkeeper” funds to casinos and profitable furniture shops, excluded universities from this support, even as they lost 35 000 jobs. And in an attempt to suppress critical thinking and creativity, it foisted on universities its “job-ready graduates” program.
Writing in The Guardian Caitlin Cassidy describes how these pressures have affected teaching and learning, from the perspective of casual staff teaching undergraduate courses: “Appallingly unethical”: why Australian universities are at breaking point. Change the context a little, and Cassidy is describing the working conditions faced by gig workers exploited by fast food chains, subject to unrealistic and oppressive performance management systems.
At least in the fast food industry the worst consequences for customers are cold pizzas and curries short of a few ingredients, but for students the consequences are borne over a lifetime. It would be a misnomer to call what goes on in some of these undergraduate courses an “education”, just as one would not call the instructions to assemble an Ikea cupboard “academic literature”.
Have we completely lost sight of the purpose of a university?
The burdens of student debt
HECS-HELP debt is levied at a zero real interest rate. That is, the liability for outstanding HECS-HELP debt is increased each year by only the CPI. In the idealized world in which its designers lived, the debt would be frozen in real terms: as graduates’ pay increased in real terms, HECS-HELP debt would become less burdensome.
The reality, however, is that incomes generally, including incomes for many graduates, have been rising more slowly than the CPI. For many the real value of their HECS debt is becoming more burdensome.
The ABC’s Lexy Hamilton-Smith explains this with illustrations of how HECS debt can impose an increasing burden on graduates in low-salary occupations, while graduates with high salaries can pay off HECS quickly: Australia's HECS-HELP debt has topped $74b. How long does it take the average student to pay theirs off?
The Greens tried unsuccessfully to have the government waive the 7 percent indexation that will apply next financial year. It’s unclear, however, what policy principle lay behind this proposal – why only a once-off move?
Australia has some of the “developed” world’s highest fees for undergraduate students. The OECD document Education at a Glance, pages 294 to 311, reveals how Australia compares. In France, Germany and the Nordic countries university education is close to free: the social contract is that graduates will repay their debt to the community and finance education for the next generation through progressive taxes. “Mutual obligation” would be an appropriate description had not the right corrupted the term.
This was the case in Australia when there were plentiful Commonwealth scholarships and when, from 1974 to 1989, tertiary education was free for all. That was, until the Hawke government introduced HECS – initially at a flat rate of $1800 per student (equivalent to about $4 500 now). This was one of the most significant moves in shifting debt from the government to individuals and households, all for the sake of the cosmetics of the fiscal accounts. The $74 billion HECS-HELP debt is still debt; it has simply been pushed off the government’s books.
More basically, when students pay for education it becomes a product exchanged in a private market, rather than an exchange with the community. In a market the “supplier” has a contractual obligation to deliver to the “consumer”. That’s one reason why university staff are under pressure to set easy assignments and to allow poorly-performing students to free ride on group assignments. It also explains why one of a lecturer’s worst transgressions is to fail students and why there has been grade inflation in recent years: a “credit” in 2023 would have been a “pass” in 1993.
Literacy and numeracy gaps
Between 3 million and 7 million Australian adults struggle with the literacy skills necessary to cope with normal work and community life.
That range of estimates is provided by Vanessa Iles, of the national Reading and Writing Hotline, in a short (5-minute) interview on the ABC. She welcomes the government’s decision to invest in a Foundation Skills Study, which will involve surveys designed to assess the level of foundation skills among adults.
Iles estimates that about 5 percent of Australians reach adulthood without any schooling. (Appears to be high!) Many more drop out of school at Year 10, which, a few generations ago, was considered as an adequate education for most people.
Many factors are at play: children’s poor experience at school, undetected and untreated specific learning difficulties, and frequent moves from school to school. She notes that deficiencies in literacy and numeracy are worst in non-metropolitan regions.
She warns that the government’s surveys will be difficult, because responding to surveys requires a degree of literacy. The government may miss those it most wants to record. Aware of this difficulty, the government has produced a discussion paper relating to the way it should go about the survey, which would be of interest to anyone specializing in numeracy and literacy.
On ABC Breakfast Gillian Bennett of the Australian Council for Adult Literacy explains how people with limited reading, mathematical and digital skills try to cope while not revealing their deficits: it can be embarrassing for people to admit their shortcomings and enrol in available courses. She observes that older people who missed out on education in their youth, are over-represented among people with such deficits.
Most people would regard basic gaps in literacy in numeracy as shortcomings. As Iles points out, we need basic literacy and numeracy, including computer skills, just to go through the hoops in getting a job, such are the requirements of contemporary workplaces. But within the Coalition there has been a belief that our economy should buck this trend, and that public policy should prioritize low-productivity jobs requiring little skill. More bag packers in supermarkets, more driveway attendants in garages, more doormen in hotels, and more domestic servants or “nannies”: this was John Howard’s vision when he regretted the passing of the “dead end job”.
Much responsibility for our basic skills deficiencies lies with the “right” in Australia, which has traditionally seen education only in terms of “job-ready” skills, and has a visceral hatred of learning and scholarship. It’s hard to convince a thinking, sceptical electorate to vote for the “right’s” lousy policies. But the “left” also bears some responsibility for its devaluing of hard sciences such as mathematics and physics, and for an attitude that there is something democratic and egalitarian in making it easy for everyone to get a certificate, diploma, or degree without expending too much effort.
The case for improved employment services and higher JobSeeker payments
The media has given a great deal of cover to the interim Report of the Economic Inclusion Advisory Committee. To read most of that media cover one would believe that it is a futile last-minute budget pitch to increase the unemployment benefit (JobSeeker) by 26 percent, linking it to 90 percent of the age pension, and to increase rent assistance.
In fact it is a well-researched document with carefully-considered recommendations. Writing in The Conversation, Ben Phillips of the ANU describes the work that went into the report: Boosting JobSeeker is the most effective way to tackle poverty: what the treasurer’s committee told him.
It is informative to read the report’s section “Trends in adequacy” (Pages 20 to 33), where JobSeeker payments are compared with past payments for the unemployed, with minimum wages, with the age pension, with poverty lines, and with unemployment benefits paid in other countries. Australians may be surprised to learn that for short periods of unemployment, Americans probably have more generous unemployment benefits than Australians.
By any reasonable normative standard, the JobSeeker payment should be raised.
Those recommendations relating to the level of JobSeeker payments relate only to the first of its five terms of reference. Its second term of reference is to recommend ways to “support more Australians to participate in the economy through commitment to a broader full employment objective”.
It reports that in its hearings it heard evidence that, at their worst, current social security policy settings actually work against workforce participation. They
… undermine people’s ability to participate by creating additional barriers, poorly investing in human capital, and adding to income uncertainty. The Committee began to examine services and settings which compound disadvantage and trap people in poverty.
It makes 37 recommendations in all. One that stands out is its seventh recommendation, calling for “major reform of employment services to support people who have been on payments for an extended period, including exploring demand-led and place-based approaches”.
This report is yet another criticism of the Howard Government’s decision, in 1988, to abolish the Commonwealth Employment Service and to privatize job-placement services.
The Treasurer’s response has disappointed many welfare advocates, but it is far from a standard pre-budget rejection of a lobby-group’s proposal. Perhaps the most revealing aspect of that response is that Treasurer Chalmers sees the report as an input into the government’s promised “Employment White Paper”, while the report makes frequent reference to “full employment” – a reminder that one of the government’s pre-election promises was to produce a White Paper on Full Employment as the Curtin government did in 1945.
The word “full” has gone missing in post-election announcements.