rehctub: Jayb, the problem with most tafe colleges, is this enrol lose doing the teaching, either didn't make it, or, they are so out of touch that they seek the safe haven of such institutions.

Exactly what I said earlier. Most of them have been to school, been to school been to school & are still at school. They have never run a business & are teaching courses designed by people that have been navel gazing & thought, "Oh, that would be a good idea." then teach it without having it tested in the workforce.

This is what you are paying for when you go to Uni. & as you said, compliance upon compliance upon compliance & no responsibility. This is why Uni costs so much.

The early, dissatisfied posters rather make my point about the perceived attitudes of universities to their students, and I could add other disparaging comments from within my large extended family.

Those intent on seeing management as the problem should remember that the managers are there because of the compliance pushed on to the universities by the Commonwealth when it relinquished real control over them in 1988. The abolition of CTEC, which told universities what they could and could not do and held them to account for doing it, was replaced with a system of 'freedom' accompanied by stringent compliance responsibilities that had not existed previously. Compliance requires management, and if there is a lot of it, then that is because universities are required to comply. The range is very wide. Data have to be obtained, maintained and reported. There are deadlines. There are punishments if the deadlines are not met. Little of this happened when I was a senior person in universities in the 1970s and 1980s. Oh, and then there are 'priorities', and new requirements that are part of general legislation, for example, for disabled students. There were seven distinct 'priorities' that various Commonwealth Governments had set up about students in the 1980s and 1990s — rural and regional, indigenous, women, foreign, mature, returning to the workforce, and so on.

If you want to get rid of management, get rid of the compliance requirements! I'm not sure that that would be a great idea, at least in the long run.

Don, my critique is not of management per se, but the process-driven bureaucratised managerialism that has turned intelligent professionals into clerks ticking boxes so that some other intelligent professional can tick a box in turn and they all get their bonuses.

However, let's not beg the question of causation. The people who constructed the regulatory compliance processes are products of the same education that produced those who implement them. The idea that best practise consists of constraining the agency of the functionaries who interchangeably occupy a given role by implementing rigid process did not suddenly arise from nowhere and impose itself on unsuspecting and unwilling people.

Instead, it is a limited application of TQM to the manufacture of a product, relying on process to ensure conformance with the specification at a defined price point while fulfilling customer orders that it is hoped will meet with consumer. While rigid process control minimises product non-conformance and maximises production volume, it can also lead to a large stock of unwanted product lying in the customer's warehouses if consumer demand does not respond to the supply of product.

Of course, in the educational context the product is students and the customer is the Government, while the consumer is both business and Government. The process control is designed to produce, at a set cost, graduates who will conform to a minimal professional standard that fits them to a career within a corporate world in which their roles are defined and constrained by process, interchangeable parts secure as long as they make sure they diligently follow process and easily replaced if they don't.

Such a model is now a norm for any large corporation, where the graduates who have most assiduously complied with the demands of process refine those processes to ensure that the disruptive potential of individual agency can be ignored when they produce their presentations and projections (all safely in conformance with the process for doing so) for the Board.

Just like they were shown at uni.

Don Aitkin writes: "If you want to get rid of management, get rid of the compliance requirements! I'm not sure that that would be a great idea, at least in the long run."

Universities managed to do excellent teaching and research before (pre-John Dawkins) this huge parasitical superstructure took them over, at great cost both to the university budgets and to the performance of the universities' proper function (which was not and should not be either social engineering for the sociology enthusiasts or R&D and staff training for the companies).

To get rid of the compliance requirements it is necessary first to get rid of the class that produces nothing and depends for its existence on inventing ever new compliance requirements. These are the drones who advise unthinking pollies on the shape of legislation and regulation. Yep, university and general public service management.

The ball is in the pollies' - and the voters' - court. The first step is to identify the problem, starting from a recognition that universities are there to do what nations can do and businesses can not.

And yes, restoring what has been destroyed really is a great idea, now, in the medium term and in the long run.

"One simple solution would be for the Federal Govt to cut funding to private schools, not sure of the figure but is in the high billions, particularly to Church run private schools, they have ridiculous fees for students and pay no tax, how is this fair?"

Nice work, Geoff of Perth - a broad, unfounded generalisation should sort things out.

No schools pay tax, other than the GST, so I'm not entirely sure what that has to do with anything. Perhaps we should tax all schools?

I think we overrate the benefits of university degrees. How often I hear no HSC no future, no degree no future. What about the value of apprenticeship trades and garbage collectors - they all contribute to society. Don't we want diversity? We do not need more useless and overeducated and institutionalised people. So many university graduates never pursue their field of study - what a waste. And I see a lot of clones who are unable to look outside the square - I see these young graduates in the workplace and they are hopeless, and tend to have poor people and managing skills, and only go by the book and what they are told to do.

There is a dumbing down at our universities today which I believe has been overtaken by the leftist academics and freedom of speech and academic freedom has been compromised. There is much administrative bureaucracy taking over and the quality of education is going down, particularly with the high intake of foreign students who are actually buying their degrees through fraud. There is a huge reliance on overseas students which is our third biggest export and which I believe is contributing to the problems. I wonder if the Dalia Lama’s unwelcome at Sydney Unversity means anything? Australia has the highest intake of foreign students in the West.

Most people are not meant for academia. I believe it should actually be more elitist (ie like it use to be without the flake) and not so money wasting. Training for nurses should have stayed in the hospitals for real learning.

There is a book out at the moment called "Whackademia" - an account by an insider by the name of Dr Richard Hil which I believe explains this. I have not yet read it.