Vocational Voices: Season 1, Episode 8
Shaken not stirred? The development of one tertiary education sector in Australia
Steve Davis (00:00)
Hello I'm Steve Davis. Welcome to this podcast for Australia's National Centre for Vocational Education Research.
The founders of Australia's further education and VET sectors would hardly recognise their handiwork today. Universities are offering VET programs, VET providers are offering higher education programs, TAFE institutes are offering VET in schools, senior school certificates and even five year higher education subjects, while some private providers are offering all of the above.
In the paper Shaken not stirred? The development of one tertiary education sector in Australia, Leesa Wheelahan, Sophie Arkoudis, Nick Fredman, Emmaline Bexley from Melbourne University and Gavin Moodie from RMIT explore this blurring of boundaries between educational sectors.
Now, I began by asking Lisa how this new study relates to her previous paper from 2009, which examined the nature of higher education offered by public VET providers.
Leesa Wheelahan (01:07)
Well, it was the second half of that project. The first project on higher education in TAFE allowed us to look at one type of provider in one sector, whereas this project allowed us to round that out completely and look at all different types of providers in tertiary education. And that included universities that offer just a little bit of VET, as well as the dual sector universities that have quite a lot of VET, but also private providers that offer both.
And it was by undertaking the second part of the study that we were able to draw conclusions from the two projects overall about the emerging single tertiary education sector.
Steve Davis (01:47)
Lisa, if we look at public mixed sector universities first, what vocational education and training are they offering and can you highlight any trends or motivations there?
Leesa Wheelahan (01:58)
There's two you've got to distinguish between the dual sector universities and what we're calling mixed sector universities, which only offer a little bit of VET. The five dual sector universities in Australia have big TAFE divisions. The remaining mixed sector universities, and there's about 16, offer only a little bit of VET. And they mostly do so in a few small areas. They don't offer comprehensive VET provision in the same way that the dual sectors do.
And they do it for a number of reasons. Sometimes it's like as an historical legacy, for example, the group of eight universities were offering diplomas in the 1930s in areas such as music and agriculture, and some of them are offering VET programs in those areas now.
Others do so to support vertical integration, that is, pathways from lower level qualifications to higher level qualifications, often to not only increase student numbers but also for social justice reasons where they're trying to make opportunities available to students. And others do it because they want to offer a full, they want to support the development of a particular industry.
So, for example, where one university in particular offers professional qualifications in a whole range of fields like dentistry, pharmacy and things like that, they also offer qualifications in VET, in technician roles like a dental hygienist or pharmacy attendant, those sorts of things. They're able to offer a whole range of qualifications for that particular industry.
So these are just some of the reasons. But the key thing that differentiates them from the dual sector universities is not just that they offer these programs in a few fields of education, but the reason they offer these programs is to support their purposes as a university. They don't have any desire, generally speaking, to become dual sector universities.
Steve Davis (04:01)
All right. That's very helpful clarification between the mixed and the dual sector with universities. In the private area, the mixed sector providers, how do you define them and how are these institutions incorporating VET into their offerings?
Leesa Wheelahan (04:16)
Well, we're defining them in the same way that we're defining the universities, that is, that they have most of their offerings in one sector but they're growing their offerings in the other sector. Many of them come from the VET sector originally. But there are a small number that started off in higher education and decided to offer VET. They are very different from the public providers in either sector.
Generally speaking private mixed sector providers only offer programs in a small range of fields of education. So they’re specialist providers, they tend to be specialist providers. This is even the big conglomerates. There's a number of big conglomerates that operate in Australia and they have a range of different providers, but they all tend to focus only on one or two or three fields of education. So it's quite different.
We've seen the growth of these sorts of institutions for a whole range of reasons. One, because the people who run them can see that this is a very good business opportunity, but also because it enables them to offer a full service. Again, I remember in one of our interviews, one institutional leader says that you're forced to become a mixed sector provider if you're going to offer the range of knowledge and skills that people need in your profession. If you're going to offer somewhere for them to go, you need to have pathways. And that was one of the reasons why they got into it.
Steve Davis (05:38)
So where does this leave TAFE institutions now?
Leesa Wheelahan (05:41)
The TAFEs that are offering higher education have different aspirations. When we did the higher education in TAFE project in 2009, we looked at six of the ten TAFEs that then offered higher education and three of those had aspirations to become sort of like a polytechnic or university college. And the other three didn't. The other three saw their higher education as an extension of their VET.
But things have changed since then. More TAFEs now offer higher education. There's only two states where TAFE doesn't, and that's Tasmania and the Northern Territory. But in the Northern Territory TAFE there is part of the dual sector university.
Generally TAFE is moving towards the polytechnic model, where they're trying to develop provision that is broad ranging and complements their VET provision. So they're going to be different types of institutions compared to the private providers.
Steve Davis (06:36)
Leesa are any of these mixed sector bodies we've talked about, do you think, better positioned to prosper in what we're calling the one tertiary education sector?
Leesa Wheelahan (06:46)
Well, I don't know if they've a better position to prosper. It's a matter of not having much choice really. There's a whole lot of factors that are driving the blurring, the sectoral divide. But one particular driver that's affecting TAFE, but also the private providers is the nature of the market.
For TAFE in particular, they have to compete with universities that are now offering lower level VET qualifications, private providers that are offering both and schools that are offering VET in schools. So unless they get into this market, they're going to lose what they've got.
But also the other issue for TAFE is that the qualifications that people need in order to get jobs, the same sorts of jobs that TAFE has always traditionally trained people for they now need degrees. And unless TAFE actually offers degrees for the same occupations that it's been teaching for the last twenty, thirty years they will they will become residual. So they're being compelled in a way to get into this space. It is a matter of choice, it is a matter of institutional aspiration. But it's the logic of the way things are going at the moment as well.
Steve Davis (07:55)
And when there is a sense of competition at play here too. One of the factors that could be deemed a little elusive is that thing called prestige. Do you think there is still some merit or extra advantage that the better, more solidly known universities have over the other players in this regard?
Leesa Wheelahan (08:15)
Oh absolutely. I mean, in fact, that's one of our key findings, which is that one tertiary education sector may be emerging, but it's actually more stratified and hierarchical than what was there before.
And that's because you've got many more players now in that one space, in that tertiary education space. And what we found is that people in TAFE and in private providers, their point of comparison was university programs. So whenever they talked about their own programs and compared it to other programs, it was always university programs. So that became the sort of gold standard. We don't as the research team don't think it's the gold standard, but we're just using that phrase to give people an idea of the way in which institutions were comparing their provision, they always compared it to what universities offered.
But even universities that offered a bit of VET, they compared their VET to TAFEs and they argued that their provision was more rigorous, that it was better able to prepare people for university and that sort of thing. So everybody used university qualifications as the point of comparison. And that shows us that the status hierarchy is alive and kicking.
Steve Davis (09:26)
I was actually intrigued to learn that some VET students in mixed sector institutions refer to themselves as going to uni, as opposed to undertaking VET studies. Is this what we're talking about?
Leesa Wheelahan (09:39)
Partly, yeah, that's partly that's partly a manifestation of it. But this has always been the case when if you talk to two students at the five dual sector universities and you ask them where they go, they'll say they go to uni or they'll say the name of the university that they go to. And I think that that's a bit of an indication of this whole status thing.
The other thing is that when we talk to higher ed and TAFE students and we ask them, you know, what do you tell people you do? Hardly any of them would say that they studied at X TAFE institution. They would say they'll go to college, they were going to uni, or that they were doing this or that program. They didn't usually volunteer the fact that they were studying at TAFE. And we found the same thing with the private provider students. They do exactly the same response. So yes, I think that that is an example or an illustration of the status problem that we've got.
Steve Davis (10:22)
And reflecting back on this latest paper and the research in 2009 now, what insights do you think there are and messages for government and for the VET and higher education sectors? What are some of the key things you'd like them to be thinking about?
Leesa Wheelahan (10:36)
Well, there's a whole range of things really, and we've tried to sort of sum them up in the mix, the shaken not stirred paper in trying to bring together the two projects. But the first thing is we need a national and coherent tertiary education policy framework. We don't have that at the moment. We still have separate quality assurance agencies, separate funding reporting and accountability guidelines, even separate definitions of equity. We need to have some consistency in the policy framework.
We also need to have a national data collection of what happens not only in terms of student numbers, but also teachers. We don't know anything about teachers in VET, really, but we can't even say how many students that we've got in VET because we don't collect that data, or at least it's not published. So we don't have enough information to make sensible policy.
We need a national register of tertiary education institutions. That does not exist. There's no scope for examining a whole institution. You've got to look at either its higher ed provision or its VET provision, and you've got to find them on the appropriate register. So that sort of thing is completely silly.
But the other thing that we also need to do is we need to support the capacity of teachers in TAFEs and in private providers who offer higher education to ensure that they can offer students a higher education experience. We have to build the capacity for scholarship in those institutions. There's still a long way to go on that.
We also need to ensure that those universities that offer a little bit of VET have a good understanding about what VET means, and the fact that then they have to ensure that their staff maintain their industry currency and that they have good connections with the industry.
So there's a lot of dangers with institutions that offer provision only in one sector then sort of getting into another sector, we have to make sure that they've got the capacity to do so. And I don't think we've focused enough on that yet. And we need to because this is only going to grow. It's not going to go away.
Steve Davis (12:43)
Thanks for listening to this podcast produced by the National Centre for Vocational Education Research, to download your copy of Shaken Not Stirred? The development of one tertiary education sector in Australia. Go to www.ncver.edu.au