Here's a bit of food for thought... Sydney uni offers a few dozen different art degrees, each one designed to capture a certain market. My one was created three years ago, and will be discontinued next year. Its casualty rate is higher than at the Somme. Not one student in the course pays full fees.

I think full-fee paying students are creating a demand for quality above all else, because those students generally opt into the most difficult courses, and avoid the ones based around selling. All the full-fee paying students I know are doing law or medicine, and are highly driven, well-rounded, and intelligent students who more often than not didn't get into their courses because they did so much co-curricular at school. Such students pick for quality alone, so that must be an improvement.

HECS students, on the other hand, like myself, are more willing to take the rubbish because we're paying less. If I were forking out 16 instead of 4 thousand a year, then I wouldn't take the bureaucracy, shoddy tutors, dodgy 1st year courses and nonesense degree titles.

I like the entry of Notre Dame and Bond into the system. Bond's 3 semester a year, 2 year arts degree is a welcome change to waffly 4 year Ba Arts(enter meaningless qualifier here) that you'll find in Sydney. ND seem to have taken a position between Bond and the Public universities... trying to offer degrees of lower cost, with more emphasis on ethics, yet more direct title. If ND would import their architecture course from their Indiana Campus, generally reknowned as one of the best traditional courses, it would be a welcome change to all the modernist trash that all the other universities get away with. Of the public universities, I find ANU to be the most straight-forward, possibly due to its position as our gateway to Asia.

Everything that AMSADL said was causing the decline of the university system is a step in the right direction. The rot began in 68'.

Well said Harry.I can still remember reading your blue science book in junior high school.We were also blessed with some good teachers then who mastered the art of story telling and had their science classes spellbound,whilst revealing to us the theories and laws of nature.

They stopped using your blue science book in the 70's because it was considered too academic.Apparently the bar needed lowering so people could just step over it.

Could there be too many invertebrates in our Education system who don't want to evolve beyond the comfort zones of their mediocrity?

Jeepers creepers Harry, you wrote -
"Australia must seriously question whether it should continue to spend a couple of thousand million dollars a year on a school system which appears to be turning out an ever increasing number of undisciplined, irresponsible, greedy, often near-illiterate, lawless individuals who don't give a tinker's curse for the country, their mates or anyone else."

sounds like the grumpy old man curse has finally caught up to you..

Remember, professors said similar things about you and you own age group back in your school days..

Rainer,you're following me around a like bad smell.Is there a nagging inferiority complex haunting you,now that you have realised that weak kneed lefty idealism of the last three decades have been an abysmal failure?

We have students with degrees who can't spell or construct sentences properly.I'm from the old school,not too bright,but a product of discipline and perseverance.I seem to have a greater grasp on reality than all than the modern trendy PHDs could muster in a a life time. Where does that leave you rainer on the richter scale of incompetence?

Arjay, anytime you'd like to come in and give my first year students a lecture on how to develop shock-jock perspectives from those 1960's Readers Digests you've read to death or from those old One Nation newsletters from the late 90's you covert as sacred texts- let me know. They need to be exposed to all sorts, even you.

Harry,

the situation is particularly bad in Asia, where I have seen the sweetheart commercial deals between Australian educators and private providers:

As you would know a typical semester course will run 12-14 weeks. In Singapore, students who can't matriculate into local universities go to commercial unicentres and readily gain entry into Australia (UK and some US) degree programmes. Here, there are what are called double-modules, wherein, the students can study say two subjects, say, both Philosophy and Psychology,in the same cass, from two different universities [!], in only ten weeks [NOT 24-26 WEEKS]. The marking is toned-down, to allow these marginal students pass. Skills-based IT subjects, requiring 15:1 student teaching ratios are delivered using ratios of 70:1!

In Hong Kong, I was invited to attend an address by the (past?) President of an Open University. I suggested, at question time, Masters degree should not be achieved by just adding-on extra non-incremental subjects [rather, should be harder real post-grad. sujects],and, that the Higher Education and Continuing Education need be considered together and pointed-out [as has been before]to have have 60% of your population with a university degree, statistically means a large minority of students with an IQ of less than 100 must be able to pass the examinations. Is this really Higher Ed? the HK uni's response? The question time MC (a business dean or VC? of the host university) became agitated and turned the question away to let the guest President of the hook.

Likewise, I wasn't very popular with phooney educators at the WTO in Hong Kong. I only had one friend, a guy, who headed a European professors institute.

Nelson and Dawkins have pretty much ruined how Education system. Nelson didn'e listen and Dawkins didn't understand the difference between a university and a car manufacturer.

Lastly, the universities should be rationalised and its administration centralised, like the Bank. More campuses and centralised record keeping. It would save millions in salaries to VCs and execs, and elmininate unnecessary duplicated adminstrative roles.