The educational singularity — just went by.
This article (Can vocational education make a comeback?) is about vocational training and higher ed in Australia. It contains some nice examples of dishonesty driven by financial gain. For example:
Regulators didn’t blink when a private college suddenly started charging A$22,000 (£12,350) for a web design diploma that cost about A$4,500 elsewhere, or when a competitor’s student population snowballed from about 300 one year to almost 12,000 the next.
Or how about these examples:
The light regulatory touch encouraged scores of scams, known in Australian parlance as “rorts”, as unscrupulous colleges pushed the rules to the fringes of criminality. In one infamous case, a Melbourne college awarded football club members certificates in outdoor recreation for a few nights of “learning” on their own premises. It gave participants and their clubs A$1,500 kickbacks, bankrolled from state government subsidies worth up to A$5,000 per student, and called them “scholarships”.
In another case, the directors of a soon-to-be-bankrupt college paid their shareholders – including themselves – A$15 million in dividends, on the same day that Australia’s consumer watchdog launched proceedings to recover tens of millions of dollars in improperly obtained student loans. The company subsequently collapsed with unpaid debts of about A$80 million, having swallowed A$222 million in loans.
Well, what do you expect? This is the higher ed equivalent of imagining that you can ‘install democracy’ everywhere overnight; or that you run a company based on legal contracts between its own employees. But what really caught my eye, was this critique of current higher ed in favour of shorter vocational courses (it is about the money, what else!).
This discourages degree-educated people from obtaining top-up training in areas such as coding and data analytics, which are now vital to many occupations. Such needs are best met through short VET courses after graduation, Gallagher says, because digital skills taught as part of three- or four-year degrees will be obsolete by the time people leave university. “The half-life of those skills is getting shorter and shorter,” he says.
I cannot think of a better definition of what higher education is not about than this. Now surely we know what degrees not to fund.
This discourages degree-educated people from obtaining top-up training in areas such as coding and data analytics, which are now vital to many occupations. Such needs are best met through short VET courses after graduation, Gallagher says, because digital skills taught as part of three- or four-year degrees will be obsolete by the time people leave university.
“The half-life of those skills is getting shorter and shorter,” he says.
Inter alia
Regulators didn’t blink when a private college suddenly started charging A$22,000 (£12,350) for a web design diploma that cost about A$4,500 elsewhere, or when a competitor’s student population snowballed from about 300 one year to almost 12,000 the next.
The light regulatory touch encouraged scores of scams, known in Australian parlance as “rorts”, as unscrupulous colleges pushed the rules to the fringes of criminality. In one infamous case, a Melbourne college awarded football club members certificates in outdoor recreation for a few nights of “learning” on their own premises. It gave participants and their clubs A$1,500 kickbacks, bankrolled from state government subsidies worth up to A$5,000 per student, and called them “scholarships”.
In another case, the directors of a soon-to-be-bankrupt college paid their shareholders – including themselves – A$15 million in dividends, on the same day that Australia’s consumer watchdog launched proceedings to recover tens of millions of dollars in improperly obtained student loans. The company subsequently collapsed with unpaid debts of about A$80 million, having swallowed A$222 million in loans.