AUSTRALIA: Work looms large for undergraduates

Manifold factors affect the choices students make when they enrol in a university and are not just dependent on the students themselves. Academic interest in a particular course and idealism may play a role but family attitudes, peer group pressure and even popular culture - such as the growing interest in forensic science - are also important. Clearly, however, the desire for a well paid position in business or industry looms large in the minds of many students.

Then there is the crucial issue of the availability of places in a course - a factor beyond the students' control. Lack of government funding by the former conservative administration in Australia limited overall growth in enrolments by local students while the government's decision to rank certain fields as high priority meant those not considered important to the national economy have further restricted student access.

The new Labor Government's plan to ban Australian students from paying full-fees to enrol in the courses of their choice, thereby enabling them to overcome any shortage of subsidised places, could be another limiting factor. The government, however, says it will create more federally supported places although it is uncertain whether they will necessarily be in areas of high student demand.

Clearly, however, the desire for a well-paid position in business or industry looms large in the minds of many students. The choices they make about which field of study they apply for can also profoundly affect the universities themselves and nowhere has this been as obvious as in the faculties of information technology.

Over the past five years, IT across Australia has suffered the biggest falls of any field of study. Between 2001 and 2007, IT faculties and departments suffered a collapse in student numbers of up to 50% as the subject lost its popularity among school-leavers.

Up until this year, high unemployment meant almost one in three new IT graduates were still looking for work four months after leaving university. The prospect of not finding a job after spending three or four years of study, coupled with reduced government financial support and changing attitudes to careers in computer science, had a disastrous impact on applications for IT courses.

Nor is it just IT: despite a skills crisis that has caused alarm in government and business circles, applications for many university courses were down again this year. Australia's booming jobs market - especially in the resource-rich states - appears to have convinced growing numbers of school leavers to forgo a university education and take up jobs in industry, or to enrol in vocational courses in a technical college.

"A missed generation of young people who do not have tertiary education and therefore are ill-equipped to handle the big changes in the economy and society that may be expected over their lifetimes," is how Brisbane-based Griffith University Vice-Chancellor Professor Ian O'Connor put it to me.

O'Connor said Australia was creating a skills shortage for the future by failing to educate more young people to fill the jobs soon to be vacated by the retiring baby boomers: "Once the minerals boom winds back, we will end up with whole group of people excluded from higher education and their opportunity to participate in society will be significantly reduced."

Julie Wells, director of policy and planning at RMIT University in Melbourne, told a conference recently that while student demand was falling, the need to increase participation in higher education was growing.

"This shared problem underlines the competition for global knowledge labour that is under way," Wells said. "It also establishes a challenge for universities and policymakers in adapting higher education provision to respond to demographic and labour market demands in a way that acknowledges - that sells, in effect - the unique role that higher education can play in meeting the needs of a knowledge economy."

She drew attention to another significant issue. It was not just changes in enrolment trends that should concern universities: it was the extent to which some things were not changing. The ages of students had shifted only slightly in the past five years as had the ratio of part-time to full-time students.

Likewise, the socio-economic composition of the student population, the dominance of school-leaver qualifications in gaining access to university and the proportion of students undertaking education through distance education or flexible delivery had not changed substantially either, Wells said.

"We have to ask ourselves, is this simply a function of student choice or is it also a reflection of institutional inertia - an inherent slowness or reluctance to adapt to changing external realities?"

geoff.maslen@uw-news.com