Big-name business schools ‘give students less teaching time’
Students at research-intensive business schools receive about 75 per cent of the academic attention enjoyed by their peers at teaching-focused colleges, a new study suggests.
2019
Some Unis are Lifting Teaching Productivity
Victoria University has sharply lifted the productivity of its academic staff, which was one of the factors leading it to report a surplus this year after four years of deficits…
Third-party players vital to sector’s success
Readers of The Australian’s higher education pages last week (May 15) would have seen two articles, “Surge in third parties is like the ‘wild west’ ” and “Digital delivery redefines the efficiency frontier”.
Readers might falsely conflate the articles to conclude that improved efficiency can be achieved through third-party arrangements and lower quality outcomes.
On the efficiency frontier
Two weeks ago, The Australian’s higher education editor Tim Dodd commented on the “level of efficiency and effectiveness that online courses promised to deliver”. The comment came after entrepreneurial Australian online job placement firm Seek announced further strategic investments in online education.
Seek, a proponent of online education, joined with Swinburne University of Technology to create Swinburne Online in 2011.
Labor funding policy brought efficiency hike
The findings, revealed in The Australian today, show there was a marked improvement in the productivity between 2011 and 2013, coinciding with the phasing in of the demand-driven system, which removed limits on numbers of university places and drove a significant expansion of student numbers
Uncapping university efficiency
A key policy difference between the federal government and the opposition relates to the capping of federal funding for university places. There are multiple effects of this policy including those relating to society, economic opportunity and equity as well as government cashflow and university efficiency.