Marcia Devlin

What is happening with higher education in this election? (Yes you should be worried)

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You might share my concerns about what is looming for higher education in the coming election. A returned conservative government would continue with its agenda to significantly cut funding to universities. It appears likely to continue with its plan to deregulate fees, albeit at a slower pace than previously proposed.

However the alternative that Labor seems to be proposing for higher education is based on a flawed assumption.

Pyne’s “dumped” package is still in play

Two years ago, the then federal Minister for Education, Christopher Pyne, proposed a radical set of changes for higher education funding including, among other things, a 20% cut to university base funding and full fee deregulation. While the latter received support from some institutions and Vice-Chancellors, there were very few supporters of the whole package.

Among those who did not support it were the ‘cross-benchers’, the independent and minor party members of the Parliament of Australia who have held the balance of power since elected in 2014. So, thankfully, the proposals were not passed.

The Turnbull government has since introduced Senate voting reforms which means the minor parties will not be able to swap preferences in order to secure Senate seats as they have done in the past, and there is less likelihood of a future cross bench like the current one. This is a shame for higher education, in my view, as these folk actually listened to the sector and public and responded accordingly.

Mr Pyne has now moved onto other responsibilities. I will remind you just before he moved on he told us he was “the fixer”.

The new and current Education Minister, Simon Birmingham, has released a discussion paper in lieu of budget measures.

However, a former senior Education bureaucrat, Mark Warburton, has pointed out in a piece in The Mandarin that Birmingham’s discussion paper includes some assumptions that were contained in Christopher Pyne’s 2014 budget, and abandons others. But is not completely clear what is in and what is out.

As Warburton says, it appears certain that the 20% cut to student subsidies under the Commonwealth Grant Scheme (CGS) remains in the budget and that the government has also made it clear that it remains committed to Pyne’s reforms.

He adds that the government has clearly announced two additions to the higher education package. The first is that there would be an additional one-year delay to the start date, until the beginning of 2018. The second is removing the full deregulation of fees.

But Warburton points out that the additional proposals in the minister’s discussion paper are not included or mentioned in the official budget papers. They are simply options in a discussion paper. And one of these options is the incremental introduction of fee deregulation. This is indeed not Christopher Pyne’s proposed one-step approach, however it is very much an introduction of higher education fee deregulation.

To sum up my concerns about the Turnbull Government’s plans for higher education

I’m worried about the potential impact of a 20% funding cut to the ability of some regional and other smaller universities to operate. The opportunities for regional, rural and remote students to access university education would surely be affected.

Fee deregulation, no matter how it is undertaken, will lead to fee increases. My concern is this will set up yet another hurdle for various non-traditional student cohorts, because of actual costs or the perception that university education is too expensive.

Labor’s intentions for higher education is based on a flawed assumption

But I’m also worried about Labor’s intentions around higher education. Kim Carr has indicated that Labor will fund universities differently in the future, pointing to the importance of students completing programs of study that they start. The logical follow-through is that universities will be funded for completions, and the get-paid-as-you-enrol-students-each-year arrangement will no longer apply.
The assumption behind this sort of initiative is that universities need to stop letting students drop out. As if we do let students drop out. In fact, universities employ a wide range of strategies to keep students.

The strategies we use include the following: pre-enrolment advising; enabling and preparatory programs; concurrent academic support; counselling services; options to change enrolment internally with credit should a student’s original choice not be suitable; scholarships and bursaries; equipment loan schemes; financial assistance with study related costs; student-friendly approaches to administration and interaction; monitoring and responding to at-risk sub-cohorts; proactive advice provision; mentoring from experienced senior students; transition programs; staff coordinators; strategic directions from Councils; senior appointments charged with improving retention. Significant funding is directed at all of these efforts.

We do our best, improving our efforts every single semester, following every piece of research and other robust evidence that guides our efforts. At my university we trial new ways to put in place preventions and interventions, and we closely monitor the effects of these.

Having tried as hard as we can to keep them, we ask students who finally do decide to leave why they are leaving and feed that back to relevant parts of the university to drive continuous improvement. We ask students who stay what helped them to stay and succeed and feed that back to relevant parts of the university to recognise and reward efforts that work. Many other universities do the same.

But when students drop out, it is often because of demographic and/or personal factors, rather than because universities have stood by and let them fall away. Demographic factors that can contribute to the likelihood of drop out include being: part-time; mature-age; online; first year; an articulator from VET; the first in family to attend tertiary study; from a low socioeconomic status background; Indigenous; and/or a student with a disability. There are increasing numbers and proportions of these students in a massified university system.

Personal factors include challenges related to students’ physical and mental health, their finances, their family responsibilities, their paid employment commitments, relationship issues they might experience and/or accidents or misadventure. And when these personal challenges intersect with demographic characteristics, the impact can be profoundly negative for the student and their study success, despite every effort by a university to assist and to encourage them to stay in study.

Punishing universities for enabling students who have the characteristics above to get a higher education seems perverse. The exclusive universities will do well and the elite will prosper. Is this really what Labor wants?

We need an effective higher education package that will benefit all Australians

I’m worried that cuts to funding, fee hikes, funding formula changes and the absence of a cross bench who will not do deals with major parties will leave students, their families, their communities, the professions, the economy and society worse off.

As I see it the policies on offer so far will mean that many Australians will be turned away from higher education and the benefits it brings both personally and to the nation as a whole.

Marcia Feb 2016Professor Marcia Devlin is a Professor of Learning Enhancement and Deputy Vice-Chancellor (Learning and Quality) at Federation University Australia. @MarciaDevlin

ATAR is a university marketing tool: 4 reasons to stop obsessing about it

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The recent ‘revelation’ that Australian universities are not sticking to their advertised course cut-offs has caused a ruckus. Some even see it as a scandal: universities are admitting students with much lower (gasp) than advertised Australian Tertiary Admissions Ranks (ATARs), even into ‘top’ courses.

I think it is time to look at some facts around ATARs. I have four important ones for you. I believe everyone concerned about or discussing ATARs should know these facts.

Fact 1: Most university place offers are not made on the basis of the published ATAR.

Around two-thirds of the university places offered in Australia each year are made to students who do not have an ATAR. Almost 50 per cent of new university students are mature age, international, vocationally qualified or will have come to university through a myriad of alternative entry schemes.

Direct entry to university is growing exponentially at some universities, with the ATAR bypassed altogether. Direct entry, mature-age and international students, and students who come through VET pathways make up the majority of the Australian university cohort.

In my own state, Victoria, most courses that make offers to students through the Victorian Tertiary Admissions Centre (VTAC) do not publish ATARs for those courses. Yes, that’s right, most courses. Of the minority that do publish an ATAR for a course, two-thirds made more than 30 per cent of their offers to students with lower ATARs than the published figure.

All universities award ATAR bonus points. These extra points and how they are determined are not regulated in any way, nor are they usually transparent. Universities can award bonus points as they wish and for whatever they wish. This furtive awarding of points is disguised as recognising “leadership”, “community-mindedness” and other qualities of applicants.

Fact 2: The ATAR is not a score.

The ATAR is a numerical, relative ranking derived from senior high-school performance and a complex series of scaling and other adjustments. In a relative ranking system, students in one year’s cohort are ranked against each other.

An ATAR of 49 does not mean a student has failed, it means the student is ranked at the 49th percentile of a cohort that year in terms of their academic performance, as measured and scaled according to a complex series of mechanisms. In a cohort of, say, 45000 students in one year, a student with an ATAR of 49 has an academic performance equal to or better than 22000 students that same year. Hardly a failure.

And similarly, no matter how bright they are, nor how hard they or their teachers work, no more than ten per cent of students’ ATAR rankings will be in the top ten per cent of rankings. That’s how ranking works.

Fact 3: The ATAR is linked to socioeconomic status.

The evidence indicates that ATAR scores are correlated with socioeconomic status and social capital. To put it simply, the higher the socioeconomic status and capital of the student, the higher the ATAR is likely to be, and vice versa.

For example, poor people in rural areas generally have lower ATARs than rich people from metropolitan areas. But poor people are not stupid and do not compromise educational standards or outcomes. They just have less of the social and cultural capital that counts for school education outcomes (and, therefore, ATARs). No mater how tempting it is to think it: an ATAR rank is not a measure of intelligence, motivation, diligence, aptitude or ability.

Fact 4: The ATAR is now used primarily as a marketing tool to an under informed public

The ATAR was more important when the supply of university places was limited and demand for these exceeded supply. Cut-offs were a useful strategy for allocating too few places. However, in our current demand-driven system of university places, where there are few limits on the number of students a university can enrol, the ATAR is used primarily as a marketing tool. Universities rely on folk believing that the higher the ATAR, the better the quality of the course and possibly, the better the university. But what is it better at?

Many assume, understandably but incorrectly, that the higher the ATAR needed to get into a course of study, the “better” the quality of the course. But the ATAR has no correlation with objective measures of course quality. The simple truth is that the higher the ATAR for a course, the more popular the course is among school leavers.

The public are currently being misled by what is essentially a clever marketing system using ATARs as proxies of quality of courses and institutions. It needs to stop and Peter Shergold, the head of the federal Higher Education Standards Panel, has recently announced that the Panel will begin to increase transparency around this issue.

It is time to stop obsessing about entry standards and start focusing on exit standards

What we should be focused on as a society is what happens to students, regardless of their entry method, during their university study and after graduation. Many students who have very high ATARs come unstuck at university when the intensive support and guidance, to which they had become accustomed, falls away.

As Tim Pitman from the National Centre for Student Equity in Higher Education has recently emphasised, the point of university education is not to validate entry standards but to educate, value-add and ensure high quality outcome standards. We all know that elements of effective university education and high quality learning outcomes go far beyond the supposed standard at which the students enter the university. Teaching quality, the curriculum, learning support and student support are just some of the most obvious.

All universities must put in place proactive support structures, processes and programs to ensure all the students to whom they give access can meet their potential and have the highest chance of success possible.

I often ask: When a university graduate seeks employment, how many sensible employers will ask them to reveal their ATAR from all those years ago? On the other hand, how many will be interested in what the graduate knows, can do, and can contribute?

The main priority should be to focus on exit standards and outcomes, where students end up, not where they started. If we restrict access to university only to those guaranteed to succeed based on previous education scores, we block a life-changing opportunity for scores of thousands of people every year.

It’s important to keep educating a wide range of students

University education is now open to more students than in the past when it was just available to white, upper-class men. This is good for students, their futures, their families, the economy and society. Successive governments of both sides have encouraged and supported increased access to university education for a larger number and broader range of people. The alternative is to have fewer people educated at the highest levels and subsequent reduced capacity to lead and innovate in a rapidly changing world.

Case studies at my own universities show that despite starting with very low ATARs, those who go on to successfully complete courses will graduate as qualified professionals and subsequently contribute to the economy, their communities and society in enhanced ways.

What matters most about university education is the quality of the education offered and the capacity and knowledge of graduates and whether they can do what governments and society expect of them, having had the privilege of access to education at that level.

If the purpose of university education is to contribute to an educated society, that treats its members and members of other societies with dignity, respect and kindness, while simultaneously advancing economic, environmental and other fronts, then we should unburden ourselves of outdated and inaccurate notions about the power of a single number.

I believe we need to focus more closely on how to facilitate success for the many, rather than the few.

 

Devlin

 

Professor Marcia Devlin is a Professor of Learning Enhancement and Deputy Vice-Chancellor (Learning and Quality) at Federation University Australia.  @MarciaDevlin

 

 

 

Best pathway to university for disadvantaged students: latest research findings

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There are many pathways to higher education these days. I am a member of a national research team that has been examining how well pathways work for disadvantaged students.

In particular we are looking at what are called ‘enabling programs’. These are programs that prepare people for university study, who would otherwise be denied the opportunity to participate.

We looked at how enabling programs compared to the pathway to university through Vocational Education and Training (VET) for disadvantaged students.

We have not yet finished our research, but what we have discovered already has implications for universities, governments and people from disadvantaged backgrounds who aspire to a university education.

What is an ‘enabling program’?

We identified forty-eight enabling programs across twenty-seven universities, ranging in length from four weeks to as long as eighteen months, longer if taken part-time.

These programs shared the following broad characteristics:

  • They were expressly for the purpose of preparing (that is, enabling) a student to undertake a higher education degree course;
  • They were free for domestic students, however some were also provided to other types of students (for example, international students) at a charge;
  • Most had no or minimal pre-requisites for entry, in terms of academic capability or past academic performance.

Enabling programs are generally offered at minimal cost to students because the Australian Government funds them. The relatively low cost is a significant attraction for disadvantaged students.

Enabling programs are not exclusive to, but enrol disproportionately from, groups of disadvantaged students. This is in line with their fundamental aim.

Disadvantaged students are defined by the Australian government as those who fit one of more of these categories:

  • Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people
  • People from low socio-economic status (low SES) backgrounds
  • People from regional and remote areas
  • People with disabilities
  • People from non-English speaking backgrounds (NESB) and/or
  • Women enrolled in non-traditional areas of study.

How enabling programs compare

Disadvantaged students who get into university via an enabling program generally experience better first-year retention rates than those using other pathways. This is a very important finding, as completing first year is a generally good predictor of likely future success in university studies.

Disadvantaged students who came to university through the enabling programs expressed greater satisfaction with the experience than those coming through VET. However, this finding can partly be explained by the fact that, unsurprisingly, most VET students undertook the VET qualification for its own benefits and not as a pathway to university studies.

Students from low SES students, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students, regional and remote students and NESB students who get into university via an enabling program experience better first-year retention rates than both the same type of equity group students who get in via a VET qualification and the same type of equity students who are in the university student population.

More details will be available as part of the project’s final report.

Enabling programs are not just for mature aged students

There is a common perception that enabling programs are for mature age people returning to study. However, our data shows the programs are popular across age ranges. In fact that there are more 17-18 year olds than 30-60 year olds enrolled in enabling programs across Australia.

It seems that enabling programs are a popular pathway for school leavers with lower ATARs. Expanding enabling places would therefore likely lead to more under-prepared school leavers choosing a pathway to university, rather than going straight into a Bachelor program. This would directly contribute to reducing university undergraduate attrition.

The potential of enabling programs

We surveyed the perceptions of 981 students who participated in enabling programs and 1230 who participated in VET prior at university. A detailed analysis of their responses is ongoing and will be available as part of the project’s final report.

One student from a low SES background sums up the sentiment on the benefits of completing an enabling program:

“It gave me the confidence I need to even try. I am 41 years old and had left high school when I was in year 10 and from then on had worked full time office based jobs. Due to being a poor student at school I had always thought that university was out of reach for me. However, completing [the enabling program] revealed I had more potential than I ever would have imagined.”

As you can see our findings could have a wide ranging impact, from government policy and funding, through how universities structure and offer enabling programs, to personal decisions made by disadvantaged students.

To register your interest in this project, and to have the final report sent to you upon its completion, please email ncsehe@curtin.edu.au

 

DevlinMarcia Devlin is Professor of Learning Enhancement and Deputy Vice-Chancellor (Learning and Quality) at Federation University Australia. @MarciaDevlin

The research team includes Professor Sue Trinidad and Dr Tim Pitman from the National Centre for Student Equity in Higher Education at Curtin University, Dr Andrew Harvey and Matt Brett from La Trobe University and Dr Jade McKay from Deakin University. The project was funded by the Australian Government Department of Education and Training via the Higher Education Participation Programme’s National Priorities Pool, 2014.

Andrew Harvey is presenting a paper Pathways To Higher Education: A Comparison Of Enabling Programs And Vet Pathways at the 2015 AARE conference in Fremantle, Western Australia, this week (with Tim Pitman present to help answer questions).