Andrew, you are absolutely right and it is high time somebody spoke out against the ridiculous position that Universities should "pay their way" and operate like some kind of business. On the contrary, widespread tertiary education should be regarded as a national "good" from which we all benefit directly & indirectly as a country. The problem, I think lies deep in the national psyche, egged on by populist politicans of both parties and by the ratbag ranters of opinion pages of certain newspapers – that Universities are "elitist"; they are hotbeds of "leftist" academics; they are places where certain graduates like doctors & lawyers learn to get rich. Universities are national assets, not some superior "trade–school where the young learn how to get a job. Apropos this latter, I was invited, some 40 years ago, to a cocktail party in London given by Chase–Manhattan for their new recruits into international banking. All but one of them was an Oxbridge graduate in "Greats" because that very hard–headed bank wanted young people with a generalist education, not some vocational MBA or the like. Oh yes, the exception was my friend, and host, who had a brand new PhD in economics from Manchester.

"although the share of working age adults with a degree has tripled, the university wage premium has remained constant. Just as in the early-1980s, university graduates can expect to earn a cool 50 per cent wage premium over someone with no post-secondary qualifications.
...
Despite copious economic evidence on the benefits of higher school leaving ages,
...
from 2010 the majority of Australian children will face a leaving age of 17. ..."

Where is the economic benefit in paying 50% more for the same labour? No doubt there is a benefit to academic institutions by way of enrolment quotas, but slow-learners with degrees still make the same mistakes as the ones without, and the cycle is perpetuated when Justover Passlevel winds up back on the campus with 50% premium salary to carry on the dumbing-down-dumber tradition.

This particularly affects the customer when we have vice chancellors making stupid errors in enrolment confirmation letters, as I found this year back in semester 1, and simple oversights then confound the graduates at the other end of the tertiary line; Austudy.

Let's hope that Austudy can lift their game in 2010 and get the approvals completed before the financial-penalty deadlines that forced many students to withdraw before April Fools' Day this year.

Not that there's much chance of this rush for on-campus sanctuary doing anything to alleviate the national 'skills-shortage'. On the contrary, it just goes further towards reducing the real value of legitimate degrees.

'No doubt there is a benefit to academic institutions by way of enrolment quotas'

Bingo! Hence the article.

I recently spoke with someone who spent 3 years working in maintenance for a university campus.

I asked them if they ever saw a “Made in Australia” sticker on anything during their 3 years of travels through the rooms and corridors of the university campus. Their answer was (of course) “NO, NOT ONCE”.

Like the high schools and primary schools, the universities purchase almost nothing from Australian companies (and who has ever heard of an Australian textbook being used by an Australian university), and the link between the so called Australian education system and the rest of Australia becomes increasingly tenuous.

Training so many foreign students at universities is simply training the opposition, and telling foreign students that if they enroll in an Australian university they will get permanent residency is a lie being told by our universities to foreign students.

Telling the Australian public that they are an “export industry” (while at the same time asking for more and more taxpayer money) is also a lie being told by our universities.

Telling the Australian public that going to a so called Australian university makes good economic sense when this university system has now amounted a 14 Billion dollar HECS debt is also a lie being told by our so called Australian universities.

There is little connection left between our so called Australian universities and the Australian public, and about all the Australian public is now getting from our universities are lies and an ever increasing HECS debt.

Actually vanna, if you really meant that universities have little to no connection with YOU, then I would have to agree.

You appear to know nothing about universities and even less about education.

"You appear to know nothing about universities and even less about education."
(Posted by Bugsy)

I'd like to nominate that one as the quote of the day. What little connection there maybe between universities and education might depend on one's definition of education. What my 1997 HECS debt bought me was education enough to understand that the university is always right, even if they're wrong. They're still right, and don't question it.

Everything was nice and pretty for first-year psycho school until we got to try our first group experiment. We all 200 odd students got to be subjects for a fairly simple theorum of John Stroop (1935) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stroop_effect but our methods were adapted from the original to the computer age. Only problem was, they still wanted us to work on 10ms precision, and computers with Intel clock chips don't count to 10ms precision, but around 55ms precision. No more, even if the digits are there to the millisecond, the clock ticks at 55ms or around 18 times per second.

So I handed in my report with the two sets of data calculated at both timings, and by chance, the data at the wrongly counted 10ms proved Stroop wrong, while the correctly timed data came in as Stroop would have expected. For that, I was quietly failed without explanation and wasted the entire otherwise good year's study, all for that one report.

So that's what my university education taught me: they're always right, even when they're wrong. Don't question a thing and maybe they'll let you graduate and make 50% premium whether you're right or wrong.