Exam time for the tertiary education sector

POLITICAL WEEK - BY MARTIN KAY

Welcome to Tertiary Education Challenge, here is your starter for 10: How many tourism qualifications does a country of four million people need?

Let's put it another way. How many degrees, diplomas and certificates does it take to change an economy?

Newly appointed Tertiary Education Minister Steven Joyce (Massey, zoology) does not pretend to have definitive answers, but is pretty sure it is not 123 for the first nor more than 6000 for the second – the numbers presently on the books.

If there was any question about the importance Prime Minister John Key is placing on tertiary education reform as part of the Government's plans for economic growth, it was put to rest when he took the portfolio from struggling Education Minister Anne Tolley and gave it to Mr Joyce.

Officially, the move was to allow Mrs Tolley to focus on bedding in national standards for primary and intermediate pupils in the face of vociferous opposition from teacher unions, which she failed to get on board.

But it is now clear the Government wants changes to higher education in place quickly, and it is difficult to escape the conclusion that Mr Key was reluctant to trust Mrs Tolley with another round of potentially controversial reforms.

Mr Joyce was the natural choice for the job after he made a safe start to the transport and communications portfolios – also central pillars of the Government's economic programme.

But steering through rapid tertiary education reforms that achieve the twin aims of high participation rates matched to skills needed in the economy, while keeping the sector on board, will be his biggest test yet.

He made a rare slip this week when he failed to ensure Maori Party co-leader Pita Sharples, who is associate education minister, was fully briefed on the plans before they were announced (though, to be fair to Mr Joyce, he gave Dr Sharples the broad outline and they were clearly signalled in the tertiary education strategy published at the end of last year).

Having assured Dr Sharples the reforms are not aimed at axing lower-level courses, many of which are run by wananga and seen as important to getting Maori back into education, Mr Joyce now faces the task of easing concerns in the tertiary education sector itself.

The planned reforms build on work set in train by Labour, which rejigged funding arrangements put in place by National in the 1990s and largely blamed for the present ad hoc state of higher education.

The 1990s reforms were aimed at increasing participation in tertiary education through a funding model that saw money follow students, rather than being dished out in bulk to institutions.

That led to a bums-on-seats mentality, particularly at below-degree-course level. While it boosted the number of people in tertiary education, it eroded the link between the qualifications students were getting and the skills they needed to go on to further education or get the jobs they wanted and the economy needed in key industries.

In many cases, qualifications, especially in those lower levels, were established by individual institutions with no regard to national uniformity, leading to a proliferation of diplomas and certificates that can mean little to employers outside the areas where they were obtained.

Labour began refreshing the link between qualifications and skills needed with three-year funding aimed at improving course planning and relevance.

The first phase of National's reforms will see a stocktake of the more than 6000 qualifications now on the books.

That is expected to see a quarter of them culled by the middle of the year, mostly by weeding out those no longer offered by the institutions that developed them.

In the next phase, the ruler will be run over the qualifications that are left, with the aim of bringing some uniformity.

At the same time, the Government is planning to cut funding by 5-10 per cent from 2012 for courses with high dropout and failure rates.

Labour has seized on that as evidence National will cut courses at the bottom of the tertiary ladder – mostly foundation-skills courses aimed at getting people who failed at school back into education.

It has raised fears course providers will either bend the rules to get students over the line or reject disadvantaged applicants in favour of those most likely to pass.

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Mr Joyce has rejected those claims, insisting that aspects such as the cohort of students in individual courses will be taken into account when determining what is regarded as too high a non-completion rate. Courses will also be monitored for quality.

He is adamant it does not automatically follow that the reforms will see courses cut, saying the most likely change is that they will remain, but the qualifications offered will become more uniform.

But it is inevitable that the Government will have to make decisions on how many places it funds in some areas.

Just last week, this newspaper reported that New Zealand is turning out twice as many graduates as needed in sport, fitness and recreation and just an eighth of those required for the food industry and a third of what is needed in infrastructure construction.

With Mr Joyce making clear that money in the sector will be tight for the foreseeable future, there is a looming tension between what courses the Government will want to fund and those now on offer.

A budget squeeze is not the only factor in this, however. There has long been concern about the plight of students running up big debts for no gain by doing courses that were not right for the careers they hoped to get.

Mr Joyce is clearly eyeing the many courses in levels one, two and three which he says have non-completion rates of up to 70 per cent.

Part of the reforms will see students given much greater information on the type of job they are likely to get from the qualification they are doing and the success rates for graduates. That will require research into how graduates fare long-term, both in terms of career paths and – especially in the case of entry level courses – moving into further education.

That raises the spectre of the bums-on-seats mentality being replaced with a "get-a-job" focus on tertiary education, but Mr Joyce is rejecting such concerns.

He says career paths are not necessarily dependent on qualifications gained, and that the aim of tertiary education should be to build skills that can be applied broadly – what he calls "learning to learn".

In that respect, he points to his own experience. After qualifying from Massey with a degree in zoology, he pursued a career in business, building a radio station empire on the back of a passion for the medium that he discovered at university.

- © Fairfax NZ News