Victorian VET leads the nation in providing realistic on-campus training opportunities. And the balance sheets prove it. Victorian TAFEs have reinforced their image as the country’s most entrepreneurial institutes, staying well ahead of their interstate counterparts in earning revenue from ...

Should individual institutions be funded to deliver social inclusion programs, asks John Mitchell. One of the clear messages from the Bradley review of higher education was the need for tertiary education providers to address equity issues, such as the exclusion ...

Business as usual for NZ provider A NZ-based company linked to the Global Campus Management (GCM) group says its local colleges are not threatened by the collapse of GCM’s Australian operations. GCM ran four colleges across 13 campuses in Sydney ...

Non-completion in a recession can be disastrous for the apprentice, but the main issue for governments should be falling commencements. Australia may have dodged the recession bullet that has felled most other advanced economies. Apprentice and trainee numbers too seem ...

The professionalisation of the workforce is throwing out new challenges to VET. But is it keeping up, asks Tom Karmel. One of the eternal verities is that the workforce is continually changing. Structural change is ever present, with both labour ...

There are many good reasons why governments should concentrate public investment in elite universities, writes Michael Gallagher. Today we might define a research university in its ideal type as a community of intelligent people, new and experienced, together searching for ...

Tom Clark bemoans the amount of wasted time and effort in the research grants system. The Australian Research Council recently announced its major rounds of grants results for 2009. Once again, the clear winner is unpaid overtime. The Discovery program ...

Professor Ian Costa-Packet*, vice-chancellor of Wemakealot University, writes an open letter to the union. It is with great sadness, and considerable concern, that I view recent developments at some of Australia’s universities. The recent wave of strikes, orchestrated by the ...

Freedom from government interference is crucial to building world-class universities, an international gathering has heard. Phil Baty reports from Shanghai Government interference in the running of universities is damaging efforts to build world-class institutions, an international conference heard last week. ...

The Productivity Places Program has infiltrated state VET systems, fundamentally changing the way they’re funded and administered. The Productivity Places Program (PPP) is the “Trojan horse” of VET funding, according to the Australian Education Union, which says the $2.1 billion ...