Opposition opposes US 'two-tier' higher education model

[cal04]

The Federal Opposition has accused the Government of trying to force Australian universities down the path to an American-style, two-tier higher education system. Federal Education Minister Brendan Nelson is reported in today's Australian newspaper as wanting specialised graduate school universities with more public funding directed to regional and outer-suburban universities.

Labor's Jenny Macklin believes this will result in many students needing to complete two degrees and paying more. "The Howard Government seems to think that Australia should be like America, they want us to have an American-style industrial relations system," she said.

"Now they're saying they want us to have an American-style higher education system. There is one very bad thing wrong with it and that is that is costs students and their families an enormous amount of money."

http://www.abc.net.au/news/newsitems/200511/s1514795.htm

[Matilda]

1. I think a two-tier system is exactly what Howard wants.

I have a friend who lectures at Sydney Uni, and he tells me that they
are now managed by a team of "experts" from the US, whose sole
interest appears to be the bottom line. The university is regarded
as a business, and they are mainly interested in fee-paying students
from Asia, who generally study subjects like economics, medicine,
dentistry, and law. Arts and humanities, in their view, are outdated
and should be cut back as far as possible. These people are purely
business managers, with no interest in anything other than getting
as much money into the university as they can.

There are two major downsides to their policies - one is that there
is a perception on the part of fee-paying students and unfortuntely
some academics that if they're paying to get a degree, then they
should get a degree, whether or not they really qualify. The other
issue is that of Australians who can't afford the fees having to
get very high UAI (University Admissions Index) scores when they
graduate from high school in order to get in, because the more fee-
paying students the universities take, the fewer places there are
for those who pay only the minimum fees (which aren't as low as they used to be either).

The worst of this is that this began under Hawke and Keating; Howard
has simply taken it further and further down the path of payment-
only admission to universities.