Australian Financial Review | 26 August 2013
The elite Group of Eight (Go8) universities have stepped back from a controversial proposal to dump the uncapped, demand driven system, a proposition it has been pushing for the best part of a year. The Group has argued that savings of $750m over 4 years that would flow from the introduction of a minimum ATAR of 60 for university entry could offset higher education cuts of nearly $4b announced since last October, including $2.8b earlier this year.
But Fred Hilmer, Go8 chair and vice-chancellor of UNSW, now says that using an ATAR minimum to “regulate quality” is “too blunt an instrument” because of the impact it would have on the ability of disadvantaged students to access university.
In line with a recent Go8 policy paper, he says a better approach to ensuring quality in universities would be for the government to use “compacts”, or individual agreements with each university, to assist them to support disadvantaged students.
[Compacts] could include particular skill needs, but also growth in low SES regional and indigenous enrolments and lifting participation in parts of the country where it is too low.
He said that funding pathway programs, which prepare disadvantaged students for university and help them reach the standard needed to successfully complete courses, are a better option than having the government pay for students to do courses which they fail to complete, which is a waste of money.
But he said there need not be a choice between quality of education in universities and wider participation:
It is a false dichotomy.
Meanwhile, university of Melbourne v-c Glyn Davis has subtly resurrected the issue of fee deregulation, another perennial of the Go8 policy agenda.
See ATAR archive.
