VET & TAFE
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of the VET FEE-HELP funding available from government, and
pricing their programs at quite high prices and engaging in some
marketing practices that meant students weren’t necessarily sure of
the liability, the debt that they were taking on under VET FEE-HELP.
As a result of that, and as a result of the quite proper scrutiny
that then came onto those practices, the consumer demand
dampened across the whole sector. Consumers started to worry
about the worth of getting a qualification from a number of
organisations that were being accused of having dubious practices.
So OTI didn’t use VET FEE-HELP at any stage?
No. We never took advantage of it. We were given approval by the
government to offer VET FEE-HELP but we made the decision that
we weren’t going to offer that based on the practices of others in
the sector.
Can you outline the kinds of ‘dubious’ practices in the sector you
think were responsible for this dampening of consumer confidence?
Some of them are well documented so I don’t think I’m telling any
tales out of school, but there were inducements that certain agents
on behalf of RTOs were offering. [They were] incentivising students
to enrol by offering them a free iPad or a free laptop, and the
government has cracked down on that.
There was the practice of going to students who had little
prospect of being able to successfully complete their qualification,
and signing them up for courses with the promise, I guess, that
they would only ever have to repay the loan if they achieved
an income above a certain threshold. Other well-documented
practices include recruiting people outside of Centrelink offices
and in shopping centres, going to housing commission flats
and signing-up students who have little prospect of successfully
completing their qualifications.
As a result of all that, the public, media and government
expressed a fair degree of concern.
To play devil’s advocate, some cynics might suggest OUA failed at
something that wasn’t its core competency and that internal rather
than environmental factors were to blame – how do you respond
to that?
A cynic might make those sorts of observations but we would refute
them and say we were clear about where we were going with Open
Training Institute and we’ve made a strategic decision to move away
from the sector in order to concentrate on higher education.
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