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Teaching degrees are uni cash cows: Dinham
Teaching degrees are used by universities as a cash cow and this can partially explain startling teacher attrition rates, an expert has said.
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it might also be the awful employment experience of beginning practitioners
Nope, first the ABC, now here. The 30 to 50% figures you quote are not from research by ANU. They’re also highly contested. If you go back to the Conversation article you will find that those two figures have links, one to Sydney Uni, which is a paper from 2005 (not recent) and the other is an article from EducationHQ which doesn’t make the citation clear and is largely not referring to Australian research. The fact is we don’t have exact figures.
Which isn’t to say that early career teacher attrition isn’t a problem. It is, but those figures are rubbery at best.
Paul Weldon’s comments sound like a conservative think tank reaction designed to stifle if not discredit a serious engagement on the problem. In a free market university it is logical that teaching degrees are cash cows from the perspective of the CEOs who now manager universities with efficiencies (read profit) in mind.