Graduate Careers Australia
Graduate Grapevine - Number 11, Winter 2008
New Department, New Opportunities
The Australian Government is committed to ensuring that Australians are equipped with high-level knowledge and skills to make Australia a more productive and prosperous nation. Education is at the heart of the productivity agenda because it is an investment in human capital, and the Government believes that human capital has the potential to drive productivity growth in the 21st century.
The newly established Department of Education, Employment and Workplace Relations (DEEWR) has been given the task of delivering on the Australian Government’s ‘Education Revolution’, which will provide $19.3 billion in new initiatives over the next four years.
In higher education, the ‘Education Revolution’ will:
- ensure better integration between vocational education and training and higher education in the delivery of tertiary education
- encourage global mobility of students, teachers and academics
- secure international recognition for Australian qualifications and courses
- ensure collaborations with key stakeholders to encourage the delivery of high-quality education and training, and facilitate improved transition to work arrangements for all students.
The 2008-09 Budget focuses on immediate priorities in higher education. It will provide $500 million to support campus renewal and improve facilities to support teaching, research and student amenities. It will ensure students gain access to higher education on merit rather than on their ability to pay by phasing out full-fee paying undergraduate places for domestic students from 2009. It will also address skills shortages in critical areas by reducing student contributions for Maths and Science students, and providing additional places for Nursing and Early Childhood Education students.
The Government will also provide a contribution to enhance arrangements for the exchange of information between universities and Centrelink. This will reduce study-related debts associated with student income support overpayments that may result from students varying their study load.
Improving productivity, social inclusion and equity of access to higher education is an important objective for the ‘Education Revolution’. The Australian Government will double the number of Commonwealth Scholarships to 88,000 by 2012, which will give more young people from a low socioeconomic status background the chance to participate in higher education.
Australian students, including Indigenous students and those from regional and remote areas, will receive financial assistance to assist them with their education and accommodation costs (if they have to access higher education away from home).
Delivering for the Future
In addition to these immediate priorities, the Government recognises the need for longer term, system-wide reform to enable higher education to make a major contribution to productivity and economic prosperity.
The Australian Government has therefore launched a major review of this country’s higher education system. This review will examine and report on the future direction of the higher education sector, its ability to meet the needs of the Australian community and economy and the options for ongoing reform. It will build on the Government’s key higher education initiatives and its overall economic and social policy development.
The review will inform the preparation of the Australian Government’s policy agenda for higher education through 2009-10. It will also help to develop a long-term vision for higher education into the next decade and beyond. The reform to higher education will be supported through the $11 billion Education Investment Fund – which will also provide funding for vocational education and training.
To build productive partnerships with universities, the Government has committed to the introduction of a new funding framework from 2010, using mission-based compacts. The compacts are agreements between public universities and the Australian Government detailing public funding commitments and university obligations. They will be developed collaboratively with each university to recognise their individual missions and their multiple roles in modern societies, and will include appropriate accountability mechanisms. Consultations on compact funding arrangements will take place during 2008, followed by the negotiation of compacts in 2009.
DEEWR
The new DEEWR brings together the core elements of the Australian Government’s productivity and participation agenda, from early childhood, schools, trades training and wider vocational education to universities, as well as the workplace participation agenda itself.
Bringing together the education and employment portfolios is strategically important because it provides better opportunities for aligning the Government’s policy objectives in these areas.
The opportunities for better alignment in the graduate careers sector are obvious, particularly given the Australian Government’s goal to improve transition to work arrangements for all students.
One of the key expectations of the higher education sector is that it will assist in meeting Australia’s needs for highly skilled and capable people. Aside from the challenge of forecasting demand and ensuring the system is geared to graduating the appropriate number of students in each field of study, this also raises the issue of getting the right person into the right job.
In the future, the graduate careers sector will have a significant role to play in helping the Government to meet its objectives for the productivity agenda. It will continue to meet the needs of students by providing advice, information and guidance. It will also need to provide increasing levels of support to industry, and to be innovative in forging stronger connections between graduates and prospective employers.
DEEWR looks forward to working with the graduate careers sector to deliver the best outcomes for the Australian community.
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