• Technical Support / Network...
• Chief Information Officer
• Solutions Architect
• Desktop Team Leader
• Wintel Systems Specialist

Do universities have an ethical responsibility to prospective students and Australia?

Ian Dennis, Information Age

04/01/2008 03:53:59

Does marketability mean "relevant to Australia's information technology skills needs, and likely to deliver a job to a graduate" or does marketability means "sounds like the sort of thing sufficient students will be attracted to so that their lecturers keep their jobs"?

Unfortunately, the mendicant nature of universities today, after a decade of under-funding, places incredible financial pressure upon them to ensure significant student numbers, (and especially student numbers sourced from overseas), in order to provide the fee income necessary for survival.

This mendicant nature seems to also make many universities reluctant to conduct, or have conducted for them, any real research on the long-term skills needs of Australia for particular professions - so they only seem to do so by means of anecdotal "freebies" from well-meaning members of various advisory boards -- who may or may not know what they are talking about, rather than by well-researched and validated research that looks at real skills needs.

Course construction and selection therefore becomes predominantly about saleability to students, rather than about relevance to their potential to gain jobs, or to contribute to Australia's economic growth.

In any industry sector, the capacity to absorb new graduates is limited. Most companies will not take on any more than 10 per cent of their workforce from new graduates, even in times of very fast expansion.

It is doubtful, for example, whether the small games software sector of the Australian ICT industry will ever be able to absorb the hundreds of graduates being produced for it by almost every university, just because a bunch of 17-year-olds thought games software was something they might like to do.

Creating graduate supply numbers that are close to the total employment size of an industry sector, as appears to be the case for games software, is not only poor planning, it is almost fraudulent for the student concerned.

Conversely, other less "fashionable" ICT skills, like project management, are undersold, and, consequently, undersupplied.

Anyone who reads university brochures, and especially the information technology sections, will find a plethora of courses (that appear to be only marginally divergent from each other) offered by a morass of competing schools and departments and centres or other silos of competition.

Not only do the course titles vary only marginally, often the course contents appear to be almost the same -- just offered by somebody else.

Anyone talking to people at universities will find that those silos of competition are often inwardly focused, operating in tiny. overlapping fiefdoms, with hierarchical staff platforms that appear to consume the lives of those within, (whilst confusing those without) over minuscule differences of perceived status.

Yet, when we talk to ICT employers, they are equally confused as to what, if anything, the myriad course variations actually mean and tend in the main to treat all "general" ICT degrees as equal.

We are left to wonder whether the huge duplication and replication of courseware effort both within and between universities, and the resultant administrative overhead that is created by what appears to be meaningless differences, does not, just by itself, significantly diminish the potential learning outcomes.

So -- if universities really want to structure qualifications just to ensure student uptake they should offer much better sounding courses -- for example:

• Bachelor of looking fabulous (A BA. Fab) • Master of instantaneous wealth. (M$c) • PhD in vapourware, ( Dr Cool) - however, this one is probably already available.

There is no doubt that the take-up from students who wish to be attractive, rich, and cool would exceed all previous targets, the lecturer would become a full professor overnight, a zillion extra overseas students would spend their parents' money chasing a dream, and, three years down track, another bunch of unemployable graduates with great sounding qualifications would wonder where the dreams went.

But if all we are after is the education dollar - then does it actually matter? I would argue that, whilst universities continue to be funded, at least partially, by the public purse, then it does matter.

The result of these over-complicated and marginally differentiated (or poorly targeted degrees) are students who can't get jobs because their "cool" degree is irrelevant, and the real ICT skills problems and shortages continue to constrain Australia's economic growth.

We need to know how many ICT people we need, and what they need to know, not right now, derived from current job ads, but downstream, when students starting today will be graduating -- and further downstream as they are building their careers. Five, 10 and 15-year time frames, not last month's anecdote.

We need to fund our universities and TAFE colleges properly, not to force them into desperate "attraction" practices just to stay alive, practices that are less likely to provide us with graduates with the skills that we need for economic growth.

Then our educators will be properly equipped to develop courses addressed to real ICT skills needs, rather than to student advertising slogans.

Ian Dennis is national chairman, Pearcey Foundation, chairman, ACS Victoria and director, economic and industry policy for the ACS, and chairman, Whitehorse Strategic Group.