At another conference, an information technology lecturer confided that his city's businesspeople no longer believed that the IT degrees his university was giving out to fee paying overseas students were worth more than the paper they were written on, after three graduates it employed were quickly dismissed for lack of any expertise. A university bureaucrat said the big bosses on campus didn't necessarily know what was happening in the faculties - they just set out impossible budgets, to be made almost bearable by fee paying students, and the line managers got their hands dirty by necessity. Another said Australia's reputation for quality was quickly being lost in Asia, as the long term cost of short term bottom lines reached its inevitable conclusion. Another problem for us is that we've got proportionately more citizens in the energetic years of 25 to 35 than the United States, and the Yanks are paying our brains lots to cross over, and there's nothing to keep them because they're overworked and underpaid here. Yet Howard washed his hands of it when quizzed on allegations of degree selling and academic corruption on Monday.
Universities are autonomous organisations.
We don't control the universities, we fund them. We have a very good university system. Kim Beazley is so confident on this issue that he disinterred the Whitlam legacy, once as much a no-no to the Labor rationalists of the 80's as Fraser's protectionism is to the Liberal dries. We on the progressive side of Australian politics all look with pride to Gough Whitlam's abolition of university fees as a landmark in education policy in this country. See our Reputation Index.