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Coming Ready or Not

By Gavin Brown - posted Monday, 3 January 2000


In Australia we produce far too few graduates in IT&T. For the most part, those graduates we do produce are well-regarded, but that is a problem in itself because they are often recruited to work overseas. Some people have suggested some form of financial disincentive (increased HECS being due on leaving the country and reciprocal treaties with other countries). Roger Buckridge, the venture capital provider, expressed the opposite view at an Amdahl forum yesterday and I agree with him. He believes we should train more people, expect a brain-drain, but count on many of these expatriates returning in due course or sending back money to families. At the same time we should aggressively recruit highly qualified immigrants from other countries.

The capacity of universities to train good people is reduced across the board because of significant per capita cuts in funding coupled with political timidity which does not permit necessary deregulation. That means, for example, that my university, with 35,000 students and an annual income of $Aust 630 million, must compete with UCLA with $US 2.2 billion to service 27,000 students. That implies an adverse ratio of more than 1:7. Think what we could do if that even improved to 1:4, and we are working on it. Please give generously.

In the particular field of IT&T, matters are much worse because our graduates get offered more than the lecturers who teach them. How do we find incentives to retain good staff? The industry eats itself. Sometimes where there is a particular training need, the industry will provide supplementary funds for a position. This usually happens when the need is so acute there is nobody available to recruit to the position! A possible partial solution might be achieved by looking to the more ancient professions. In Medicine and Dentistry, for example, practitioners give back to their training schools by providing their services as teachers and mentors either at no cost or below cost. At the risk of being mugged by a nerd I have to say that the computer industry seems to have the spirituality of teenage pirates – not entirely surprising when some of the ablest practitioners are teenage pirates seeking a tree-house as big as Bill Gates’?

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An area of training where my university is on its own learning curve, concerns delivery of professional upgrade material, partially or fully in the workplace. This is obviously necessary. In the 1950s typical job tenure was 22 years, by the 1970s it was down to 7 years, and US Department of Labor statistics give three years for the 1990s. Moreover the changeover is employee driven.

That situation has lead, inter alia, to the phenomenon of the Corporate University – Motorola, McDonalds, Ford, Petronas and so on. This could be seen as a threat to traditional universities.

One response is to enter the territory ourselves. At the centenary birthday of Peking University, Willem Wagenaar, Rector of Leiden, warned against this and he used a particularly striking metaphor. He noted that student access is increasing enormously and the cost of research is escalating so that very specific applied work for clients is taking over. His broad conclusion is that universities and their societies are converging so that tertiary institutions no longer inhabit arcane sacred groves. He says, "the embracement of universities by society will be like a sweaty pliable pillow in which we slowly suffocate."

On the other hand we could stand aloof as the corporate universities provide much of the learning and certainly the retraining needs of society. That would merely change the definition of university in a different way.

Let me return to the wider training function of universities, the development of soft skills, an area where John Stuckey sees a deficiency in Australia. I am a very firm believer that the traditional campus-based experience is fundamental to this. Appropriate qualities are acquired through sport, debating, drama and the many other valuable activities which take place outside the classroom. That learning environment can never be replaced by net access.

I was explicitly asked to provide some case studies in education and training. Let me discuss two. The first is incomplete and I have my fingers crossed concerning the eventual outcome. It flows on naturally from the discussion of soft skills and the campus environment, because two years ago, after much discussion with the corporate sector, we introduced a new degree in liberal studies. "Soft" has a special meaning here because the course is restricted to high achievers and demands both a language together with other humane studies and quantitative science. There is a glue of informatics, with a mathematical base, linking these.

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As soon as we offered the program, demand outstripped supply and to keep faith with potential students we had to double the quota from 50 to 100. This led to no slackening in entry standards so we had to increase numbers again this year.

Why am I nervous? Employers will not have an opportunity to recruit the graduates until 2001. Will the degree be as exciting to them? The reason for a slight frisson is my experience that I discuss these matters with CEOs who are committed to recruiting outstanding well-rounded students with generic and adaptable skills. The same CEOs however, are perfectly capable of devolving recruitment to a junior employee who is primarily conscious that the company has immediate need of a widget tharkler. Nevertheless, these students of ours are so good, that I predict you will fall over each other to snare them.

The other case study is our Graduate Medical Program (GMP). The motivation is soft and people-oriented, of course. We determined that some maturity and experience should precede the decision to become a medical practitioner and so we set about designing a somewhat shorter problem-based program to train graduates from any feeder discipline.

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About the Author

Professor Gavin Brown, a mathematician, is Vice- Chancellor and Principal of the University of Sydney.

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