TAFE
Can students get thecomplete package?
Qualification completion rates vary widely by education sectors and industries. So how do we support these students? By Susan Hartigan
Many educators measure the success of their offered qualifications by their rate of course completion.
Qualification completion is an important performance indicator to educators because to some extent it measures how successful their delivery of the course has been.
If a high proportion of students does not complete, is that a reflection of the facilitator? Or the mode of delivery? Or is it a reflection of the relevance of the content to the students’ chosen career paths? As educators, we grapple with the issue of completions and how we can ensure that students are given the best opportunities of education success.
On paper, the average completion rates of vocational qualifications are alarmingly low. The National Centre for Vocational Education Research( NCVER) recently reported that for qualifications commencing in 2009, the national estimated completion rate for VET qualifications was 31.7 per cent.
For higher education in Australia, attrition
30 | May 2013 rates vary between Melbourne University’ s 3.36 per cent and CQU’ s 30.62 per cent, these percentages indicating the proportion of students no longer studying within a year of their commencement.
In The value of completing a VET qualification, Karmel and Fieger discuss completions in terms of having a payoff which is dependent on the student’ s reason for studying.
They find that for students wishing to go on to further study and those not employed before commencement of their studies, qualification completion has the biggest pay-off.
However, some of those who are simply looking for a promotion believe that they simply need to develop their skills and not necessarily complete an entire qualification.
Although it is possible for students to gain credit in their further studies for the individual units they completed, I believe that qualification completion in itself is something all students should work towards, particularly in light of the federal government’ s efforts to raise the