Rick Ede: Focus on value tertiary students get from courses

We clearly need a mix that includes high academic standards and qualifications that are relevant. Photo / Getty Images

The suggestion by Tertiary Education Minister Steven Joyce that part of the funding for tertiary education institutions might be linked to graduate employment outcomes has led to predictably knee-jerk and dogmatic reactions from those attached to institutions supposedly established to foster enlightened thinking and debate.

What we have seen is the same old self-serving responses laden with implied false dichotomies.

To set preparing people for a good career as some sort of contra-indicator to supposedly high academic standards is arrant, and arrogant, nonsense.

A case in point are comments attributed to Tertiary Education Union national president Tom Ryan, where he seems to imply that an institution that actually pays attention to delivering courses that might help people get ahead in life through giving them better career options is ipso facto not capable of high academic standards.

I wonder what his members, who work in New Zealand's 20 institutes of technology and polytechnics, think about that?

Likewise the New Zealand Vice-Chancellors' Committee has damned the idea with faint praise, intimating this is a side-show issue. The university approach to any threat of change, now and in the past, appears to translate as "push more money under the door and leave us to spend it wisely for you".

This is an age-old game in this sector, and is their standard approach to anything that might remotely suggest some measurable accountability for their contribution to society and the economy is warranted, and by the way, that some change in the way they operate might also be worthwhile.

How about moving this debate to a slightly higher level, and starting to discuss what we really want our tertiary education sector to deliver for New Zealand, and have sufficient courage of our convictions to put some stakes in the ground by which we measure our success or otherwise.

New Zealand clearly needs a mix that includes high academic standards, qualifications that are relevant to the needs of students, employers and to society, meets the needs of one of the most diverse learner populations in the world, critical thought and reflection, world-class research and responsive, relevant, high performing institutions.

We measure success against some of these indicators, but not all, and fund mainstream tertiary education delivery primarily on volume rather than achievement. We focus on what goes in, not what comes out.

At the end of the day a good proportion of university students, and a large proportion of students in our polytechnic system, are there because they have aspirations for a career, not necessarily a qualification.

Assessing how our tertiary institutions perform against that aspiration, and incentivising good behaviours through the age-old mechanism of allocation of resources, is a not unreasonable approach.

The devil, as always, will be in the detail. Those of us in the tertiary sector are well aware of how hard it is to develop credible measures of educational performance, as is being experienced by the Tertiary Education Commission looking to finalise and publish education performance indicators this year.

Developing some sort of national measure of graduate employment will be a heroic task - but it does not mean it should not be attempted.

Asking institutions to be accountable for their performance when they are primarily resourced by the taxpayer is fair enough.

While universities may feel they can hide behind their legislated autonomy, I would respectfully suggest they do not have a monopoly on academic quality, and careful examination of the university emperor may reveal there is a distinct lack of clothing covering some vulnerable areas.

In the polytechnic system in New Zealand, we have a number of institutes which pay more careful attention to how qualifications and curricula are constructed, whether these are fit for purpose from both a student and employer perspective, and which place a high degree of value on the development of staff as educators first and foremost, than may be the norm in the university system.

And our polytechnics do not get to pick and chose from the 25 per cent or so of the students who will go to university regardless, and for whom New Zealand's secondary education system seems to be designed.

The polytechnics, wananga and private training establishments provide pathways into tertiary study for those who have often been let down by the compulsory education sector, or who have fallen into the many gaps between our educational system's silos.

The educational, social and economic "value add" of having these students succeed, progress into employment, and build and develop their own careers and businesses is of at least equal value to that achieved through our university system.

And the hoary old aphorism that says students go to university to learn how to think, and to polytechnics to learn how to do, is so last millennium.

These days the difference between these two sectors of the tertiary system is much more about the approaches to the learning process, the diversity of learners and learning experiences delivered, the overall attributes of the graduates, the connection with employers and industry, and the relative weighting given to the career options for graduates.

A "vocational" qualification in 2010 can and does span anything from a trade certificate, through to degrees and even professional doctorates in the case of Unitec. Our graduates bring with them a mix of practical experience, problem solving and teamwork, critical reflection and analysis, and resourcefulness and resilience.

Jim Collins and Jerry Porras, both on the faculty of the Graduate School of Business at Stanford, in their seminal business book Built to Last talk about The Tyranny of the "Or", The Genius of the "And".

They note that in a number of professions, and notably in academia, people have traditionally had a very strong core ideology.

However, the downside is that often this generates the belief that you cannot live with two seemingly contradictory ideas at the same time; that you can have change or stability, you can be conservative or bold, you can have low costs or high quality, but never both.

Visionary organisations all operate in what Collins and Porras call "The Genius of the And" - the ferocious insistence that they can and must have both at once.

New Zealand needs the vision associated with the genius of the "And" in all facets of our society. Let's lift the standards of our debate to make sure of it.

* Dr Rick Ede is chief executive of Unitec Institute of Technology in Auckland, New Zealand's largest polytechnic.