VET & TAFE
Take it even higher
Budget reforms will improve access to education and help elevate the status of TAFE qualifications. By Martin Riordan
The new federal Budget’ s deregulation of higher education will position TAFE students in a much more favoured light with employers – and bring a welcome relief to their wallets.
Budget negotiations remain a huge task for education minister Christopher Pyne, but there is a good chance the barriers to TAFE students receiving access to Commonwealth-supported place funding and HELP loans may be distant memories by January 2016.
Let’ s hope so. The reforms might, for the first time, allow career counsellors, school leavers and adult learners to better view Australian higher education as the diverse entity that it has become, instead of seeing a separator between universities and the rest.
Imagine the joy of careers counsellors who can finally start to focus students on an institution’ s course offerings, the record( or lack) of teaching standards, work-ready skills for graduates and price – instead of just answering the question,‘ Is my study destination a university or not?’
It’ s true that price and student loan debt schemes will be critical. TAFE Directors Australia’ s policy of seeking equity for TAFE students has now firmly extended to caution about deregulation and unlimited university charges.
The United States, which pioneered community colleges offering four-year degrees about eight years ago, can serve as a case study here.
The biggest feature of the US higher education system is that most community colleges( similar to TAFEs), mainly offer specialist industry degree courses.
About 20 US states allow their community colleges to offer full degrees, and many operate successfully with differential charges to state and private universities. Accordingly, US state governments provide slightly less financial support to these colleges.
Looking worldwide, the growth of higher education in TAFE and private higher education providers in Australia echoes trends in North America, Europe, the UK, Hong Kong, Indonesia, New Zealand and Singapore. And recent reforms in China will convert almost 600 universities into applied technology universities by the close of 2014 – 15.
This development of applied technology universities across China may become far greater news, in fact, than even Australia’ s latest debate on deregulation.
These trends are the context in which TDA applauded the Kemp-Norton Review’ s recommendation to extend the demand-driven funding model to non-university providers. It had become clear a model that restricted the funding for Commonwealth-supported places to university students and TAFE institutes was untenable when much greater changes were emerging to higher education, not merely in Europe and North America, but across our Asian neighbours as well.
Further, the evidence supporting the 2014 Budget’ s changes in this area is extensive. Data from the Australian Council for Educational Research last year indicated that large proportions of students admitted to higher education programs in TAFE enter via alternatives to the ATAR system, including the mature-age special entry provision. Only 32 per cent are aged less than 20 years and likely to be school leavers. Students choosing to enter higher education in TAFE are often first in their family to do so, come from low socio-economic backgrounds and live in rural and remote areas. So TAFE has the largest share of students from disadvantaged backgrounds, and they are further financially disadvantaged by paying the full fees non-universities have to charge and by inequitable student loan schemes. For example, students studying at non-university providers are required to pay a loading of 20 per cent on VET FEE HELP, in comparison with their university counterparts.
Without funding, the cost of earning and maintaining registration for TAFE as a non-
24 | campusreview. com. au