[LINK] Corporatisation of education

[Tom Worthington]

On 21/01/14 11:08, Janet Hawtin wrote (was: Re: [LINK] Adverts on govt 
websites"):

> ... Schools and universities are short of funding
> That puts us squarely in line for corporatisation of education?

Australia's second private university, "Torrens University Australia", 
is offering courses from its Adelaide campus from 2014: 
http://www.tua.edu.au/about-us/our-mission/

Torrens is a for-profit institution, part of the Laureate International 
Universities network: 
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laureate_International_Universities

Professor Jim Barber, UNE Vice-Chancellor, has been advocating changes 
to government regulations, to allow pure on-line universities to be 
established in 
Australia:http://blog.une.edu.au/news/2013/12/06/une-unbundles-student-services-and-amenities-fee/

The UNE students have a different view, warning of a resulting two-tier 
student experience: http://www.nucleus.org.au/articles/news/

But it appears Torrens has been able to meet the current regulations 
with a university which will carry out teaching on-line using using 
international resources and few Australian staff. A search of Torrens 
staff on LinkedIn found in only eight: Vice-Chancellor, Assistant 
Professor - Business (Project Management), Academic Director, Lecturer - 
Business, Enrolment Advisor, Student Administration Manager and a 
Coordinator of IT Services. In comparison, LinkedIn lists 3,416 current 
staff for the University of Adelaide, which has 25,000 students.

Torrens will need more staff as it increases enrolments. But whereas the 
University of Adelaide has about one staff member for every 25 students, 
Torrens may only need one staff member in Australia for every thousand 
students.

It will be interesting to see how full service universities respond to 
this challenge.


-- 
Tom Worthington FACS CP, TomW Communications Pty Ltd. t: 0419496150
The Higher Education Whisperer http://blog.highereducationwhisperer.com/
PO Box 13, Belconnen ACT 2617, Australia  http://www.tomw.net.au
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Adjunct Senior Lecturer, Research School of Computer Science,
Australian National University http://cs.anu.edu.au/courses/COMP7310/