Countries of the World/COUNTRYS.BIN/dp/0020/00205.txt

Text File | 1991-06-24 | 30KB | 497 lines

$Unique_ID{COW00205}
$Pretitle{369}
$Title{Australia
Chapter 6B.   Higher Education, Adult and Teacher Training}
$Subtitle{}
$Author{Donald P. Whitaker}
$Affiliation{HQ, Department of the Army}
$Subject{research
education
universities
australia
australian
science
teachers
colleges
government
university}
$Date{1974}
$Log{Figure 8.*0020501.scf
Table 18.*0020501.tab
Table 19.*0020502.tab
}
Country:     Australia
Book:        Australia, A Country Study
Author:      Donald P. Whitaker
Affiliation: HQ, Department of the Army
Date:        1974

Chapter 6B.   Higher Education, Adult and Teacher Training

Higher Education

     Tertiary education, to use the terminology preferred by Australians,
embraces the traditional universities as well as a complex skein of generally
more specialized institutions both old and new. The latter includes the new
nonuniversity colleges of advanced education, thirty-eight state-run and
twenty-eight nongovernment teachers colleges, and one independent and nine
state-run agricultural colleges. It also includes a variety of fine arts
institutions; technical institutes offering training in the performing,
plastic, and industrial arts; and in such fields as accounting. A few schools,
such as the conservatories of music attached to the universities of Melbourne
and Adelaide, offer degree courses. Most offer courses of two to four years'
duration at the subuniversity level leading to a diploma rather than a degree.

[See Figure 8.: Australia, Schools of the Air, 1970 Source: Adapted from
Australia, Department of Education and Science, Education in Australia,
Canberra, 1970, p. 11.]

     Until 1946 higher education at the degree level was the province of the
three "old" universities of Sydney and Melbourne, established in the 1850s,
and Adelaide, founded in 1874, and the three "middle" ones-Tasmania,
Queensland, and Western Australia-dating from near the end of the nineteenth
century. Forces born in the crucible of the Australian wartime experience
loosed a growth in university education that a scholarly work called
phenomenal. The system of six universities, which accommodated 17,000 students
plus some war veterans in 1946, had grown by 1973 to fifteen universities, and
three more were to open by 1975 that would accommodate 84,000 full-time,
37,000 part-time, and 8,000 external students. All the universities were state
government established and affiliated; all were autonomous and secular.

     A major qualitative improvement that has gone in hand with the
quantitative development of the universities has been in the field of
postgraduate studies and research. Until 1946 the universities had been almost
exclusively concerned with undergraduate teaching. They had offered higher
degrees, but only in 1945 did the old-tier university of Melbourne lead the
way in establishing a doctor of philosophy degree requirement of at least two
years of full-time research and submission of a thesis. An act of the
Federal Parliament in 1946, which founded the Australian National University
in Canberra and set out provisions for postgraduate and research study, gave
renewed impetus to the drive to make the universities centers of advanced
studies. By 1973 all of the universities and most faculties offered
established courses of higher degree study and research. The traditional
service station concept of the university that placed emphasis on a practical
product has been seen as gradually giving way under the impact of these
changes to a greater appreciation of the university as a place of intellectual
endeavor.

     Admission to universities and advanced colleges is most commonly by the
matriculation examination given in the fifth or sixth year of secondary
schooling. Most such schools also provide for entry by older students and
those of special circumstance. Increasingly, the barriers to transfer between
universities in different states have been eased or eliminated. Overcrowding
has led a growing number of universities to quotas for the admission of
first-year students to almost all courses. The universities are essentially
nonresidential.

     University courses are usually organized into units of one year. Many
institutions were experimenting with a semester system. Annual examinations
were still the rule, but use of other assessment procedures was gaining in
acceptance. Universities typically conferred the bachelor's degree for three
years of study and the honor's degree for four years' study and a thesis. Many
faculties required a second-class honor's degree or better to admit a student
for study for a higher degree.

     A transforming development in higher education since the mid-1960s has
been the creation of the colleges of advanced education, oriented toward
technical education. An outgrowth of a report to the federal government in
1964 of the Committee on the Future of Tertiary Education in Australia (the
Martin Committee), these colleges ushered in a binary system of higher
education within which an advanced education sector geared to specialist
education was to evolve parallel with the traditional universities. Owing
something to British innovations in this field after World War II, the new
scheme proposed to elevate technical education from a neglected limbo between
the secondary and tertiary sectors to a coordinated national system.

     Many of the colleges of advanced education were formed from elements of
existing institutions; others were entirely new. By 1973 some forty-five such
colleges had been established. Their role, however, was still evolving amid
lively debate and some uncertainty. In its third report, on the 1973-75
period, the Australian Commission on Advanced Education reaffirmed the "vital
need...to preserve [the colleges'] essentially vocational and community
orientation" and cautioned against the tendency toward academic upgrading in
favor of degree courses and postgraduate study and research in imitation of
the universities.

     A disparity of esteem between the colleges and the universities and a
disparity, at least as great in their shares of the public moneys spent on
education, were problems facing the colleges of advanced education in the
1970s. Underlying both situations was the persistence of what one Australian
educator called "a considerable degree of hesitation between the American view
that some sort of university education is the right of everyone who wants it,
and the traditional British view that it should be the privilege of the
gifted, who alone can use it properly." In the beginning of the 1970s there
was no indication of radical change in the relative elitism that has
traditionally characterized the universities (see table 18).

     Nevertheless, access to some form of higher education opened after World
War II as it never had before to working class youth, to the Aboriginal
population, and to working artisans and apprentices. A steadily expanded
program of financial aid to students contributed importantly to this. The
Commonwealth University Scholarship Scheme provided in 1973 up to 11,500
undergraduate university scholarships, 2,500 scholarships at tertiary
institutions other than universities, and up to 650 awards for full-time
postgraduate study. Since 1963 scholarships have also been made available
under a separate scheme to students in the last two years of secondary
education during which most students prepare for the matriculation
examinations. In 1973 more than half of all university students were receiving
some form of assistance. Further measures of financial assistance to students
were planned by the Whitlam government beginning in 1974.

     Although some two-thirds of Australian tertiary students were enrolled in
the universities as of the early 1970s, the colleges of advanced education
were recording notable increases. Enrollments in the latter increased 39
percent, for example, between 1969 and 1971, from 32,000 to 44,500 or 3.4
percent of the seventeen to twenty-two age group.

[See Table 18.: Australia, Occupations