ACPET National Monday Update Edition 599, 13 April 2015

Australia has  fantastic private VET colleges delivering high quality support to students and great outcomes.

However, we also have a more negative side that the media is shining the spotlight on.

I must ask myself at times like these, is the VET sector actually broken, or does the private sector play a legitimate role?

Let’s go to the data:

• Private tertiary education injects $5.8 billion per year to the national economy, employ almost 100,000 people and educate 1.4 million students.
• 1670 of the 4500 private RTOs received government funding in 2013 and enrolled 28% of students.
• In a sign quality does exist, private providers are the preferred choice for international students, attracting 109,700 overseas visa students studying onshore in 2013. As we often hear bad news reported out of Victoria, here is a fun fact – private VET providers have achieved an 85 per cent market share of international student enrolments in Victoria. Australian Education International Year to Date Data, (December 2014) reveals that Victorian TAFEs achieved 6,887 international student enrolments in 2014 compared to 37,452 enrolments in private institutions
• VET completion rates are 35.8 percent, yet 87% of graduates and 84% of module completers satisfied
• 77% of graduates were employed after undertaking training and 80% of those undertaking training for employment related reasons were employed after training
• In the broader VET sector (government and full fee for service activities) private VET providers are consistently the most preferred supplier of nationally recognised training with 45 per cent of employers choosing them as their main provider.  By contrast only 17 per cent of employers used TAFE as their main provider of nationally recognised training.

So it would not appear to be broken…. Read more