ABC News | 27 January 2015
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One of the country’s largest training colleges had just 19 students graduate from any of its courses in a single year, reigniting concerns about the training sector. Data on the Government’s MySkills website showed Evocca College enrolled almost 14,000 students in 2012 but just 19 graduated.
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The company disputes the figures but others suggest they supported ongoing concerns about some players in the training industry.
In particular, criticism focused on the recruitment practices of companies which sometimes targeted disadvantaged students.
Such students often struggle to cope with high-level course content and dropped out, leaving them with hefty government training loans and no qualification.
Evocca College was one of the training market leaders with almost 40 campuses around Australia.
In a statement, Evocca said the MySkills figures were wrong and many hundreds of students graduated out of 2,770 enrolments in 2012, with its graduate rates at or above industry average.
It said not all students dropped out and many went on to work or other training.
One former student has also alleged that Evocca has copied content for a digital media course directly from Wikipedia. Shaquille Ray was supposed to be the first to graduate from the degree level course at Evocca’s Parramatta campus. But things went sour when he discovered course content had been copied directly from the internet community encyclopaedia Wikipedia. He knew this because he authored the Wikipedia entry.
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Renewed concerns about Australia’s training sector after MySkills data