Education

[sptrawler]

At last, someone with clout,stating the obvious.

Why we got it wrong on education and skill shortages

After 15 years of policies encouraging people to go to university, Australia’s skills tsar says it is now time for a reset if we are to address chronic skill shortages.

www.afr.com

Australia’s post-secondary education sector needs to be overhauled as young people flood the job market with worthless degrees while hundreds of occupations that require only vocational qualifications struggle to find applicants for well-paid jobs.

Australia’s skills tsar Barney Glover says 15 years of government policies designed to encourage young people to enrol in university have tipped the scales too far, leaving graduates without bright futures and vast tracts of industry without the skills they need.

In the decade to 2021, with both political parties in power, higher education qualifications grew by 67 per cent and vocational qualifications by 25 per cent, with the total population growing by 14 per cent,” said Professor Glover, who is the commissioner for Jobs and Skills Australia, the federal agency tasked with mapping the nation’s skills needs now and into the future.

“It really does put an imbalance into the post-secondary profile. We need to rebalance that to meet the jobs of the future.”

In NSW more than 90 per cent of the 400 occupations on the critical skills shortage list require only vocational qualifications.

large reason for the shift away from vocational and into higher education has been federal government policy. A 2008 national review recommended that 40 per cent of young people hold a university degree by 2020, leading to massive growth in the student population.

A second review known as the universities accord, published this year, recommended the proportion of young people with a degree rise to 55 per cent.

Professor Norton said the graduate premium, the additional amount of money people make over a lifetime because they hold a degree, has been diminishing over time, as more people gained degrees.

“The graduate premium is still there for people at the upper end of the ATAR spectrum, but it’s relatively high risk for people who are lower down the ATAR scale,” he said.

“So unless they really enjoyed their three years at university, it’s probably not going to be money well spent.”

 

[basilio]

The top students in the NSW Education system were announced today.
I was fascinated by the activities/projects some of these students did.

‘You legend, that’s mad’: year 12 students euphoric after coming first in HSC subjects

The 131 students from more than 80 schools who topped their subjects have been revealed, before the release of full HSC results on Wednesday

www.theguardian.com

Reconfirming Newton’s law​

Alex Zheng Qin’s initial reaction to getting a call from the NSW government was concern.

“It was really vague and ominous,” he says. “I thought they’d lost my paper or I spelt my student number wrong.”

Alex Zheng Quin came first in investigating science. Photograph: The Guardian
In reality, the Knox Grammar School student was being informed he’d topped his investigating science course – a dynamic subject that allows students to choose their own self-directed project.

They learned the fundamentals – Marie Curie’s discovery of radium, the structure of DNA – and then tested their knowledge in the laboratory.

Zheng Qin decided to test the physics law of torque – in his words, “because it was the simplest thing to measure”, and reconfirmed the mathematical formula.

In layperson’s terms, the law is one of rotational force – “the longer the distance, the more rotation will occur when you apply the use of force”.

If he attains a 95 for his Atar, Zheng Qin plans to apply to UCL in England and pursue biomedical engineering.

“I see science as a way for humanity to progress,” he says. “Why can’t we put a smashed plate back together?”

‘When you lose something, you really value it’​

When Asteer Saleem arrived in Australia from Iraq five years ago, she spoke no English and had missed her entire primary school education.

Now, the St Mary Catholic College student speaks four languages and has graduated first in the state from the Secondary College of Languages in Arabic extension.

Asteer Saleem came first in Arabic extension studies. Photograph: The Guardian
“When you lose something – you really value it,” she says.

“I’m thankful of the events I’ve been through, as much pain as it’s caused, it was all for a purpose … I value education so much, it’s the strongest tool that we have in this world.”

Saleem started HSC with a string of science and mathematics subjects but then flipped.

“I was like – that’s not me, I’m not doing what I want to do,” she says.

She switched to humanities courses three weeks in, and graduated with English, Arabic, legal studies and community family studies, and is planning to go on and study law.

Arabic extension was her favourite subject – “it has its own magic,” she says. “You express yourself differently in it.” But she doubted how she would go – she couldn’t even read the Arabic alphabet when she arrived in Australia.

“My teacher kept saying ‘you’ll get it, you’ll get it’ but when I came out of the exam I was crying, I was like, ‘I’m not going to do well’,” she says.

“Then I got a call from an unknown number … I wasn’t going to answer it,” she says. “They told me and I was like – ‘are you serious, oh my God, is that real?’”

‘Oh, I’ve written 20,000 words’​

Abigail Barfield learned about the First Fleet and the Stolen Generations in her early education, but it was the vast gaps in her knowledge that drew her to Aboriginal studies in the HSC.

The Pymble Ladies College student says the freedom of the course was its most exciting component – students were able to decide their own major work, drawn from any aspect of First Nations culture.

Abigail Barfield came first in Aboriginal studies. Photograph: Jessica Hromas/The Guardian
“There were no limits, so I wrote a 70-page, 20,000-word thesis on Aboriginal poetry and its applications,” she says. “The title of my work was ‘Contemporary Aboriginal poetry and expressing voice, culture and truth’.”

Dozens of interviews backgrounded the work, which included more than 30 poets and pieces of poetry.

“I’m the type of person that if I start something and have all this information … I don’t want to cut it down,” she says. “I loved writing it … and then it was like, ‘oh, I’ve written 20,000 words.”