Outmoded VET-higher education split must end

A new report on the tertiary education system calls for sweeping change to end the “outmoded distinction” between higher and vocational education.

‘Reimagining tertiary education’ report co-author Stephen Parker.

A major new report on Australia’s tertiary education system calls for sweeping change to end the split between higher education and its vocational cousin.

The report, Reimagining Tertiary Education, from former University of Canberra vice-chancellor Stephen Parker, says the nation “needs to move beyond an unstable and outmoded distinction between higher education and VET (vocational education and training)”.

Professor Parker, now the lead education partner with consulting firm KPMG, says in the report that there must be a diversity of tertiary education providers and a legislative and funding system that treats all providers alike.

The report, written with two other higher education policy specialists — former ministerial ­adviser and university executive Andrew Dempster and former public servant Mark Warburton — identifies many shortfalls in present policy.

These include a funding system that encourages universities to grow without regard to the needs of the population, a dysfunctional separation of funding responsibilities between the commonwealth and the states, and a playing field that is tipped against students who study in the vocational, rather than the higher, education sector.

“Policy change is required so that support is available to those who wish to access trade, technical and vocational education on a comparable basis to that available for higher education,” the ­report says.

It urges the federal and state governments to agree to progressively introduce a single funding system, with the federal government taking primary responsibility. The paper points out that, even though the states are nominally responsible for vocational education funding, they cut funding by $1.5 billion between 2012 and 2016.

The paper also called for ­reform of the Australian Qualifications Framework, which all ­accredited tertiary courses must be measured against, and the integration of the two tertiary education regulatory agencies, the Australian Skills Quality Authority and the Tertiary Education Quality and Standards Agency.

The Turnbull government has already started a review of the AQF, and the “Reimagining tertiary education” paper says the framework is overly complex and does not sufficiently recognise other ways of learning, including practical experience.

It also calls for a return to the demand-driven funding system, which the Turnbull government has suspended, and the extension of HELP student loans to all tertiary students so it is not only university-level students who benefit from not paying fees upfront. The paper recommends setting up an independent tertiary education pricing authority to set a maximum level of student fees for each discipline that takes into account the expected private benefits. The authority would also separate funding for teaching from funding for research. This would remove the skewed incentive under the present funding system for universities to boost student numbers so they obtain subsidies to pay for research

It also says that universities need to rebalance in favour of ­ensuring they value excellence in teaching, as well as excellence in research.

Using 2016 data, the report ­estimates that its recommendations could be implemented for an annual cost of $1.7bn. A major new cost would be subsidising more than 300,000 now-unfunded students in vocational education.

Universities Australia chief executive Catriona Jackson said that while universities shared an ambition to repair the vocational education sector, it would be “a grave mistake” to dismantle policy settings that gave Australia a world class university system.

“To face the challenges of a rapidly changing economy, Australia needs both a high quality VET system and world class universities,” Ms Jackson said.

“There is no doubt that VET is facing serious problems after years of poor policy. The answer is to fix VET – not to subject universities to similar experiments.”