Education minister Dan Tehan met with university Vice Chancellors in Wollongong this week to discuss a new report on an upcoming funding formula for universities – performance-based funding. This report, and the proposed funding approach detailed in it, has been some time coming. In 2017, the government ended the policy of demand-driven funding to universities, introduced by the previous Labor government […] … learn more→

When I started my undergraduate education 21 years ago, computers were a luxury and talking to the professor meant coming to office hours — emails were not a thing. A student’s room would be filled with course syllabi, lecture notes and marked papers. Today, I look at the university classroom from the other side. Students […] … learn more→

Our “leaders” in higher ed have had a blank check for decades, literally able to do whatever they want as long the student loan money kept pouring in. The kind of corruption this has led to is breathtaking, and I assure the gentle reader that the horrific activities at Penn State, the intergenerational fraud at […] … learn more→

Often when I speak with students who are majoring in computer sciences, many of them tell me that they have never taken a computer science course until college. This is especially true for the female, black, and Latino students I’ve spoken with as a computer science professor. But newly released data from the College Board suggests […] … learn more→

Yes, many college degrees are worthless, but even among those supposed fields where a degree is of value, there’s an issue that I only touch on from time to time: grade inflation. Suppose you’re an employer, and you’ve already restricted applicants to some very job-specific degree. Can you narrow it down further than that? Well, […] … learn more→

The real problem with our higher education system is the academic fraud, predominantly paid for by the student loan scam. If our schools offered a legitimate education, the bulk of the issues we’re seeing there would be irrelevant. A somewhat buried scandal gives a clue what’s going on here: NCAA Punishes Missouri in Blatant Academic […] … learn more→

Most seasoned university teaching staff will have encountered them at some point in their careers. They are the mysterious “ghost” or “no-show” students who enrol in your modules, sometimes in significant numbers, but then fail to attempt any assessment tasks. In many cases, these students also avoid the lectures and tutorials, or don’t participate in […] … learn more→

On behalf of student here from Hong Kong I am so worried to tell my parents that the work is too much. They want me to study hard and continue at an Australian university. – Anonymous Key points first and foremost, look after yourself try to talk to your parents, remembering they only want what’s […] … learn more→

Posts and comments on this blog talk about the lack of respect for doctoral qualifications awarded to us elites, closeted in our ivory towers. We not only have the ability to change this misconception, I believe we have an obligation. We must stop worrying what other academics will think and write for the general public once we […] … learn more→

At many times during my PhD years (2013-2018) I wished for a ‘pause button’ which would freeze the lives of those around me. Mainly, I wanted to put on pause the lives of my sons who were aged 13 and 10 when I embarked on my PhD but had become teenagers before I submitted my […] … learn more→