Ah, group assignments. Anyone who’s been to university in the last decade or so knows exactly how it goes. One local-born student is lumped in a group of Chinese and Indian students who barely read and write English. Guess who does all the actual work?
More and more, of course, it’s a bold assumption that even the local-born student is capable of writing at a primary school, let alone university-level. Up to 80 per cent of university students don’t read assigned materials. Increasingly likely, because they can’t. Yet, despite catastrophic declines in literacy and numeracy in high school students, university enrolments keep going up.
It’s almost as if university have just become gigantic sausage machines that swallow money and churn out credentialled dullards.
Australian universities are “degree factories’’ that dilute academic standards through group assignments, woke teaching and cheating, a conservative think-tank has warned.
When I finished high school, back when Madonna was a fresh new face on the pop scene instead of the animated Madam Tussaud hag she’s become, I was already in the top echelons of education. If I’d gone on to university then, rather than much later, I’d have been among the true academic elite. Nowadays, a uni degree is as common as muck.
Have we all got that much smarter? Or is a degree the same now as what it was?
The report concludes that “a culture of credentialism’’ is watering down the value of a university degree, and calls for independent checks on student achievement and academic research.
“Universities are incentivised to accept academically marginal students and then lower the standards to pass them,’’ it states.
“Young people feel forced to obtain a tertiary qualification even though it provides them with no specific skills.
“Students and taxpayers have no guarantee about the quality of teaching they are purchasing with billions worth of student fees and taxpayer dollars.’’
The degree industry is short-changing everyone. Not least, students who are being set out on the path of life saddled with debt for increasingly useless degrees.
For taxpayers, the whole debacle is a betrayal of what the Good Oil’s Chris Trotter once wrote was a tacit agreement: working people paid taxes to fund universities who delivered a culture of excellence. Now, taxpayers are being stiffed more and more, to fund a culture of greedy mediocrity.
The report calls for changes to the Higher Education Loans Scheme (HELP), which lets students borrow their tuition fees from the federal government and then repay the debt through higher taxes once they earn more than the minimum wage. The report says HELP loans “blunt the immediate price signal’’ to students, and encourage universities to “herd academically marginal students” into degrees.
It wants universities to be held liable for paying the indexation – which is pegged to the lower of inflation or wage growth – on student loans outstanding after five years.
This is an interesting and provocative idea. At the moment, universities have no skin in the game: they get their funding, whether they deliver results or not. If they were suddenly penalised for churning out credentialled unemployables, watch all those women’s studies courses vanish in a puff of economic rationalism.
“Universities receive loan-financed student fees regardless of whether the tertiary training that it pays for is equipping these students with valuable or marketable skills and knowledge,’’ the report states.
“There is no penalty when universities fail to equip students with the skills they paid for.
“While the universities get off scot-free, it is the students themselves – along with the taxpayers … who are left bearing the burden.
“Future loans should be amended to include an interest charge to universities on any loan balances still outstanding after (five years).
“This reform would immediately force universities to start to care … whether their courses are actually equipping students with any meaningful understanding and skills.’’
Expect the universities to squeal even harder than they did when Covid cut off their foreign rivers of gold.
