News & Views item - May 2005

 

 

Newly Installed RMIT Vice-Chancellor Margaret Gardner Gives Her Inaugural Speech. (May 24, 2005)

     Perhaps the new Vice-Chancellor of the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology, Professor Margaret Garden, went a bit over the top in suggesting, "We can take the strength that comes from offering both vocational and higher education qualifications and drawing on research by providing new combinations of these forms of education and training. We, and Australia, are still not capturing the full benefits that a dual-sector institution can deliver. We tend to think of vocational education and higher education qualifications in terms of ... one leads to another, but they provide different skills and capabilities. Why wouldn't we put them side by side?"

 

Appropriate diversification has something to recommend it when a corporation is looking to further the black on its balance sheet, but Australia's universities look to have enough on their plates just at the moment not to try that one on -- perhaps one of the most telling recent corporate lessons when you get it wrong was the amalgamation of Time-Warner with AOL.

 

It's not hard to know where Professor Garden is coming from - RMIT is debt ridden and according to The Australian's Ebru Yaman Professor Garden believes that the federal Government's system of encouraging universities to use fees charged to foreign students to support themselves was unsustainable.

 

 And as she points out in her address, "Our education system is generally viewed favourably overseas but there is much to be done. We are yet to come to grips with a national system of credit transfer across the post-secondary sector, let alone the harmonisation of our qualifications framework with others across the globe," and she advocates according to The Australian's that "Australian students and staff should be required to work, conduct research and study overseas for 'at least part' of their course."

 

The vice-chancellor went on to say, "Internationalisation of higher education must be a two-way street. Most Australian institutions are in the early stages of understanding the way they will operate offshore, because the emphasis to date has been on bringing students to Australia [but] [t]he future is not in attempting to be a large-volume, low-price and low-quality educational provider. The more challenging path requires dealing with the demands and perils of limiting growth in international fee-paying numbers."