Opinion piece
By David Roberts
Campus Review
6 September 2010
Completion rates are, in the simplest sense, the proportion of people who finish a qualification they started. But what rate can be considered a good rate?
There are at least two reasons why completion rates are presently in the spotlight. One is the target set by the Council of Australian Governments, for increasing the number of people with vocational education and training (VET) qualifications at certificate III and above. This could have quite an impact: Professor Gerald Burke of Monash University and Skills Australia maintains that a 1% annual increase in the tertiary sector for the next ten years will result in an increase of 70 000 completions per year by 2020. The other reason is the recommendation of the Bradley Review of Australian Higher Education that 2.5% of funding to institutions be performance-based, with completion rates a suggested part of measured performance. This is stated in the context of higher education but, given the Review’s vision for a combined tertiary sector, it may be relevant for the vocational side as well.
Completion rates are a thorny issue as we cannot track individuals in the VET system. And while a simple, single percentage is an attractive idea, it can hide a complex story. NCVER’s Kevin Mark and Tom Karmel have developed an innovative probabilistic method to estimate course completion rates for those commencing a VET qualification in 2005, and they find that only 27.1% will complete that qualification. This figure contrasts strongly with the already low 51.8% (estimated) completion rate for non-trade apprenticeship or traineeship contracts commenced in 2004 (these include hospitality and retail, for example).
One important consideration is to examine how completion rates differ between groups of students. Unsurprisingly, VET completion rates vary highly between qualification levels and fields of education, making sector-wide generalisations risky. The completion rate for certificates I and II is 19.9%, not quite one in five. For higher-level qualifications, the completion rates look better. Certificates III and IV, and qualifications at diploma level and above, have completion rates between 33.5% and 28.6%.
If we examine the variation between fields of education, completion rates range from 48.3% for Education to 13.3% for mixed field programs. Since mixed field programs generally consist of foundation skills modules—basic literacy or computing, for example—they may suffer more than other fields from the ‘problem’ that participants are looking for skills, rather than qualifications.
To get a handle on the extent of ‘skills, not qualifications’, NCVER is developing a survey of student intentions. Imagine this: you have started a vocational qualification in order to find work. You are determined to get your certificate III, and perhaps enrol in further studies if necessary. After a spell of work experience you are offered a permanent job—just the thing you were looking for. You take the job, drop the studies ... and become part of the 72.9% of VET students who don’t finish their qualification.
The aim of the survey is to delve into the reasons why students discontinue training, or under what conditions they would consider doing so. This will measure the number of students who complete their training no matter what, the number who drop out because they feel the training has provided what they wanted, and the number who have dropped out for other reasons. It seems misguided to count someone as having dropped out when they never intended to finish the qualification in the first place.
The same goes for a student who changes into a related—or higher—qualification. This is not so much a case of intentions but pathways; how people move within the VET system. A unique student identifier would link up separate enrolments by the same student, and show their progression through courses. In this case, if one course is dropped in favour of another, then the completion of the second course could be considered as a completion for that student, rather than one drop-out and one completion for two qualifications. Even subtler is the case where the training package changes part-way through the course, and so the course identifier changes. This creates a false non-completion. Thus tracking students, rather than courses, is one way to improve measurement of completion rates.
There are many hypothetical reasons that can be considered as mitigating circumstances for a non-completing student. But without investigating the problem further, say via the incoming unique student identifier coupled with the intentions survey, these reasons cannot be said to explain the gap between completion rates as they are and as they perhaps should be. It must be pointed out that the fictional case study above is hardly typical, as only 26% of module completers in 2009 moved from non-employment to employment.
While we say only 27.1% of students complete at present, the real-world picture is more complex than a single number can convey ... but 27.1% does seem rather low.
David Roberts is a Graduate Research Officer at NCVER.
The likelihood of completing a VET qualification: A model-based approach can be downloaded from the NCVER website www.ncver.edu.au/publications/2272.html