John Key takes a swipe at the Tertiary sector

by David Clendon

The Prime Minister took a swipe at the “increasingly urgent problems in our tertiary education sector” in his statement this week.

According to John Key, “there are a large number of tertiary programmes, particularly below degree-level, that have drop-out rates as high as 50 percent, and … some of these programmes fail to properly equip students for the jobs they seek.”

I suspect John has no idea that so-called “drop out” or non-completion rates are notoriously unreliable indicators of quality of “success.”

Students often enrol in a programme, and realise part-way through that their passion or aptitude lies elsewhere, so transfer to another discipline. The raw statistics will nevertheless lump them in with the “drop outs.”

Alternatively, they may enrol in a sub-degree programme in the belief that they are not capable of degree level study (a particular characteristic of “mature” or returning students), only to discover they have underestimated their ability and have pitched too low, so transfer into a higher level programme. Another sub-degree level “drop out” for the statistics!

A third common scenario I witnessed during my time in the sector, is that students may enrol, for example, in a two year vocational diploma programme, only to find after a year of study that they are highly employable, and so “drop out” and move into full time paid employment.

John Key went on to say that “the Government will be progressing the policy changes needed to ensure that tertiary education providers provide courses that are relevant to the modern job market and that are of a consistently high quality.”

Again he (and his advisers) reveals a lack of understanding of the sector and its complexity. The development of a degree programme typically takes at least two years (and often much longer). Add another three years for the first graduate to appear. Who out there is willing to accurately predict where the high demand in the job market will be in 5 or more years from now, and design new programmes for these areas that will guarantee jobs to graduates?

Sub-degree and undergraduate programmes are much more likely to deliver “quality” and improve people’s capacity to make positive social and economic contributions if they are broad-based and focus on developing critical and analytic thinkers.

People who are willing and able to innovate, to adopt new ideas and practices and adapt old ones, will always be in higher demand than those who emerge from highly-specialised prescriptive programmes of study.