Tertiary Update, Vol 13 No 12

Tertiary education minister Steven Joyce wants to create incentives for tertiary institutions to provide better pastoral care for students.”  The minister met with TEU national president Dr Tom Ryan and national secretary Sharn Riggs yesterday, for the first time.”  At the meeting the minister said the new performance-based funding system for tertiary institutions that he will introduce will be focused on student completions and that he will be looking to see that institutions have “a success rate commensurate with the sector”. The minister stated he was looking for a reasonably straightforward system.”  He”  does not want anything as complex as the PBRF funding system but is willing to consider different completion levels for different types of programme, such as foundation courses, vocational courses and so on.

Dr Ryan agreed that there needed to be a strong focus on pastoral care to support student completion rates, and hoped that the government would be looking to support pastoral care rather than just pressuring tertiary institutions to find funding for it out of their existing budgets or to add to the already significant workloads of current staff.

Mr Joyce also used the meeting to discuss the EFTS cap, saying that while” this year” there were more student places than ever before, it would be a challenge maintaining those levels in 2011; previous predictions that student numbers would start to fall again have not been borne out, with numbers likely to stay close to 2010 figures. The government and institutions will then need to find a way to maintain these numbers within current funding allocations. He also agreed that there were some short term issues with the current EFTS cap system but said that the focus after the budget would be on long term student enrolment trends and workforce requirements.

Also in Tertiary Update this week:

1. Tairāwhiti and EIT to merge?
2. Students are bearing burden of underfunding
3. GST, the cost of living and wages
4. Commission to audit industry training funding

Other news

To help bankroll tertiary education, Steven Joyce plans to increase international student numbers and encourage commercial university research. Tertiary institutes will not feel pressure to deny places to students with poor school grades, he said – Manawatu Standard

Tertiary education minister Steven Joyce is defending a government move to cut spending on workplace health and safety training, saying the Tertiary Education Commission should not fund courses designed to meet the legal obligations of employers. However Business New Zealand chief executive Phil O’Reilly says the Government has to be careful about its spending, but it does have responsibility for workplace health and safety training – Radio New Zealand

Otago Polytechnic has passed a statute abolishing its staff and student representation on council but establishing staff and student subcommittees to advise the reduced board. An election will be held to decide the staff subcommittee, of up to fourteen members – Otago Daily Times

The Guardian asks what led to a rise of academic bureaucracy in Britain. Statistics show that while in the UK higher education sector in 2003-04 there were 10,740 managers,” by 2008-09, this had grown to 14,250, an increase of 33%. During that time the number of academics increased by just 10 percent” while the total number of students rose by 9 percent. – The Guardian

American colleges and universities are outsourcing marking to a company that uses markers in India, Singapore and Malaysia. The benefit for the colleges is that they believe they can get more consistency and timeliness than from graduate teaching assistants. The company turns around essays in 3-4 days for US$12 per essay – Education Directions

The Australian government’s higher education spending is slanted to universities, colleges and research institutes in Labor electorates.”  $1.5 billion in allocations from the Education Investment Fund show Labor seats have received 84 per cent of spending from the first two funding rounds of the “nation-building” program controlled by Education Minister Julia Gillard – The Australian

A pay survey in Times Higher Education reveals that universities spent 10 percent more on vice-chancellors’ pay and benefits in 2008/09 than they did in the previous year, despite saying a year ago that bumper pay deals were unlikely to continue. Embarrassingly, the news of the huge rises for vice-chancellors comes just days after universities offered the higher education unions a pay freeze for this year – The University and College Union (UCU)

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TEU Tertiary Update is published weekly on Thursdays and distributed freely to members of the Tertiary Education Union and others. You can subscribe to Tertiary Update by email or feed reader. Back issues are available on the TEU website. Direct inquiries should be made to Stephen Day, email: http://scr.im/stephenday