Education

[sptrawler]

At last, someone with clout,stating the obvious.

Why we got it wrong on education and skill shortages

After 15 years of policies encouraging people to go to university, Australia’s skills tsar says it is now time for a reset if we are to address chronic skill shortages.

www.afr.com

Australia’s post-secondary education sector needs to be overhauled as young people flood the job market with worthless degrees while hundreds of occupations that require only vocational qualifications struggle to find applicants for well-paid jobs.

Australia’s skills tsar Barney Glover says 15 years of government policies designed to encourage young people to enrol in university have tipped the scales too far, leaving graduates without bright futures and vast tracts of industry without the skills they need.

In the decade to 2021, with both political parties in power, higher education qualifications grew by 67 per cent and vocational qualifications by 25 per cent, with the total population growing by 14 per cent,” said Professor Glover, who is the commissioner for Jobs and Skills Australia, the federal agency tasked with mapping the nation’s skills needs now and into the future.

“It really does put an imbalance into the post-secondary profile. We need to rebalance that to meet the jobs of the future.”

In NSW more than 90 per cent of the 400 occupations on the critical skills shortage list require only vocational qualifications.

large reason for the shift away from vocational and into higher education has been federal government policy. A 2008 national review recommended that 40 per cent of young people hold a university degree by 2020, leading to massive growth in the student population.

A second review known as the universities accord, published this year, recommended the proportion of young people with a degree rise to 55 per cent.

Professor Norton said the graduate premium, the additional amount of money people make over a lifetime because they hold a degree, has been diminishing over time, as more people gained degrees.

“The graduate premium is still there for people at the upper end of the ATAR spectrum, but it’s relatively high risk for people who are lower down the ATAR scale,” he said.

“So unless they really enjoyed their three years at university, it’s probably not going to be money well spent.”

 

[basilio]

The top students in the NSW Education system were announced today.
I was fascinated by the activities/projects some of these students did.

‘You legend, that’s mad’: year 12 students euphoric after coming first in HSC subjects

The 131 students from more than 80 schools who topped their subjects have been revealed, before the release of full HSC results on Wednesday

www.theguardian.com

Reconfirming Newton’s law​

Alex Zheng Qin’s initial reaction to getting a call from the NSW government was concern.

“It was really vague and ominous,” he says. “I thought they’d lost my paper or I spelt my student number wrong.”

Alex Zheng Quin came first in investigating science. Photograph: The Guardian
In reality, the Knox Grammar School student was being informed he’d topped his investigating science course – a dynamic subject that allows students to choose their own self-directed project.

They learned the fundamentals – Marie Curie’s discovery of radium, the structure of DNA – and then tested their knowledge in the laboratory.

Zheng Qin decided to test the physics law of torque – in his words, “because it was the simplest thing to measure”, and reconfirmed the mathematical formula.

In layperson’s terms, the law is one of rotational force – “the longer the distance, the more rotation will occur when you apply the use of force”.

If he attains a 95 for his Atar, Zheng Qin plans to apply to UCL in England and pursue biomedical engineering.

“I see science as a way for humanity to progress,” he says. “Why can’t we put a smashed plate back together?”

‘When you lose something, you really value it’​

When Asteer Saleem arrived in Australia from Iraq five years ago, she spoke no English and had missed her entire primary school education.

Now, the St Mary Catholic College student speaks four languages and has graduated first in the state from the Secondary College of Languages in Arabic extension.

Asteer Saleem came first in Arabic extension studies. Photograph: The Guardian
“When you lose something – you really value it,” she says.

“I’m thankful of the events I’ve been through, as much pain as it’s caused, it was all for a purpose … I value education so much, it’s the strongest tool that we have in this world.”

Saleem started HSC with a string of science and mathematics subjects but then flipped.

“I was like – that’s not me, I’m not doing what I want to do,” she says.

She switched to humanities courses three weeks in, and graduated with English, Arabic, legal studies and community family studies, and is planning to go on and study law.

Arabic extension was her favourite subject – “it has its own magic,” she says. “You express yourself differently in it.” But she doubted how she would go – she couldn’t even read the Arabic alphabet when she arrived in Australia.

“My teacher kept saying ‘you’ll get it, you’ll get it’ but when I came out of the exam I was crying, I was like, ‘I’m not going to do well’,” she says.

“Then I got a call from an unknown number … I wasn’t going to answer it,” she says. “They told me and I was like – ‘are you serious, oh my God, is that real?’”

‘Oh, I’ve written 20,000 words’​

Abigail Barfield learned about the First Fleet and the Stolen Generations in her early education, but it was the vast gaps in her knowledge that drew her to Aboriginal studies in the HSC.

The Pymble Ladies College student says the freedom of the course was its most exciting component – students were able to decide their own major work, drawn from any aspect of First Nations culture.

Abigail Barfield came first in Aboriginal studies. Photograph: Jessica Hromas/The Guardian
“There were no limits, so I wrote a 70-page, 20,000-word thesis on Aboriginal poetry and its applications,” she says. “The title of my work was ‘Contemporary Aboriginal poetry and expressing voice, culture and truth’.”

Dozens of interviews backgrounded the work, which included more than 30 poets and pieces of poetry.

“I’m the type of person that if I start something and have all this information … I don’t want to cut it down,” she says. “I loved writing it … and then it was like, ‘oh, I’ve written 20,000 words.”

 

[basilio]

I have been following the blog of SF writer Charles Stross this afternoon. Writes very well and has some very interesting experiences. I already posted a story on his in depth exploration of a State of te Art Nuclear Power plant in Scotland that was an eye opener.

This story of how MIT runs a Media Lab is also eyeopening. I've posted a short sample of the blog.

Inside the MIT Media Lab​

..... ThinkCycle provides a central database of scientific challenges, and allows people to pick challenges off the database and submit answers, lessons learned, and their results. It's a weblog for basic applied science work, and it reaps dividends. Among the inventions ThinkCycle has already come up with are a low-cost water purification system for use in the developing world, a passive incubator for prematurely born infants, and new cholera treatments. It's an impressive example of what open collaboration can achieve — but it's only just starting. Why not get students working on spare unsolved problems rather than solving contrived problems in class for their coursework? asks Yale. Every year thousands of engineering students plod through the identical questions for their course credits. ThinkCycle might change that, harnessing some of that brainpower for productive tasks while providing their teachers with feedback on how well they've tackled the problem.

Then there's the Fab Lab.

Rehmi Post is just wrapping up his PhD. Among other things, he teaches a three month class to new students, titled how to fabricate (almost) anything. Students start with using CAD packages, then he takes them through fabrication of parts using machine tools, how to design circuit boards, and —literally — just about anything, up to and including MEMS, microelectromechanical machines etched out of silicon wafers using the same lithography techniques as microprocessors. One thing we've learned in the course of this study is that the fabrication tools currently available all suck, he says.

Which is why he and some other researchers are working on theFab Lab. The goal is to build a toolkit that can be sold for under $10,000 (£6500) and that contains everything you need in order to make almost anything. We want to take arts and crafts to a level where people can do their own prototyping,build their own radios, oscilloscopes, or computers, and do it on the cheap with full support in tools and hardware. He's not kidding. The Fab Lab — personal fabrication — includes a CAD workstation, a modified vinyl cutter able to carve circuit boards, a computer-controlled milling machine, an FPGA programmer, and may eventually include a 3D printer and other machine tools. One important element they're working on is a library of electronic components, royalty-free, than the system can be used to handle various tasks.

https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/rants/inside-the-mit-media-lab.html

 

[sptrawler]

'Throwaway mentality' threatening the life span of Aussie aircons

A quarter of electricity generated in Australia goes towards refrigeration and air conditioning, but are there enough qualified tradies to keep us cool this summer?

www.abc.net.au

Gregory Vaughan, who is the business manager at a Queensland air conditioning company, said after advertising senior fridgie vacancies for a month, he'd only got a handful of responses from overseas applicants.

"There's no-one in Australia with the skill set who can even do [the job]," Mr Vaughan said.

"It's horrible."

Jobs and Skills Australia confirmed there was more than 500 vacancies across the national industry, including almost 150 in Queensland.

 

[sptrawler]

It is hard to believe.

https://www.news.com.au/finance/economy/australian-economy/out-of-kilter-indian-migrants-fuel-surge-as-labor-struggles-to-rein-in-numbers/news-story/b2495b48a8c78afcff09a6cd732ee5f6

MD107 has wreaked havoc, stripping billions of dollars from the economy and inflicting incredibly serious financial harm on universities, particularly those in regional and outer suburban areas,” he said in a statement.

Fuelling the surge in Indian students is an agreement signed in May 2023 by Prime Ministers Anthony Albanese and Narendra Modi, the Australia-India Migration and Mobility Partnership Agreement, which opened the doors to more Indian students as well as graduates and early-career professionals.

The pact means Indians can apply for five-year student visas, with no limit on the number who can study in Australia, and graduates can apply to work in Australia for up to eight years without visa sponsorship.

The Albanese government also signed the Mechanism for Mutual Recognition of Qualifications, which covers a range of education qualifications including degrees and diplomas, meaning Australia will recognise Indian vocational and university graduates to be “holding the comparable” Australian Qualifications Framework (AQF) qualification for the purposes of admission to higher education and general employment.

“Internationalisation and international students are critically important to our economy, our society and our universities. They never deserved to be positioned as cannon fodder in a political battle over migration and housing.”

 

[Smurf1976]

Gregory Vaughan, who is the business manager at a Queensland air conditioning company, said after advertising senior fridgie vacancies for a month, he'd only got a handful of responses from overseas applicants.

Having to throw an air-conditioner away because nobody can fix it is one thing.

Just wait until the average person realises cars are rapidly heading into the same category with a lack of skilled workers to maintain them. It's coming to the point where if it's anything other than a basic service or an easily fixed, obvious problem then mechanics lose interest - because they're just too flat out doing the more profitable quick and easy jobs.

That's a concept not easily explained to those with an office background but very familiar to any trade that involves finding faults with equipment. Once you agree to do it, you've taken on a task of unknown magnitude in terms of time taken to identify what's wrong then repair it, and if it also comes with a much higher chance of a dissatisfied customer should it involve those two words every technician hates with a passion - "intermittent fault".

So we've gone from finding the exact problem and replacing the component to swapping modules to now seeing the entire device as the thing to be swapped if it's anything of moderate value.

Trouble is partly labour costs, partly just an outright lack of people.

FWIW - I recently repaired a set of Christmas lights that are somewhat non-standard and not easily replaced. But here's the problem - if I charged my time out at even just minimum wage then I've spent far more than anyone would sensibly pay for them. If I charged a commercial rate that a contractor would need to charge in order to run a viable business then it'd be $1000 to fix something worth no more than a tenth of that new, and of course my reconditioned lights are just that, they're not new.

Repairing consumer gadgets is thus firmly in the category of a hobby these days, it's not something anyone can make a living out of unless we're talking about expensive professional equipment or restoring antiques or something like that in situations where money's no object. Or in my case doing it because I wanted to do it, economics be damned.

 

[SirRumpole]

And what about things like medical equipment, industrial machinery, trucks, office aircons, aircraft ....

The consequences of not being able to get these things fixed are immense.