CAPA slams Minister's suppression of Higher Education Council Report

CAPA has hit out at the underhanded way in which the release of a Higher Education Council report Access to Postgraduate Courses: Opportunities and Obstacles has been handled by Minister Kemp.

A hard copy of the report appeared without announcement yesterday and is dated April 2000. However on DETYA's web page it is dated December 1998 and is not listed in their 2000 publications data nor listed by author.

CAPA President, Bradley Smith, hit out at the "cynical attempt to cover up the findings of the report by pretending that it was released over 18 months ago." The report analysed data from 1996 and 1997 and found that full fees for postgraduate education were a significant barrier to access postgraduate studies, particularly for women and students from socially disadvantaged or rural backgrounds.

Mr Smith said "the situation described in the report has deteriorated significantly since 1997 as the Coalitions' cutbacks to Higher Education have taken hold. The series of cuts announced in the 1996 budget, were explicitly targeted at postgraduate coursework students. Funded places for postgraduate students were cut by 25,000 (effective full time) places between 1996 - 2000. This is numerically equivalent to a large Australian university being shut down."

"The obstacles to postgraduate education have resulted in declining numbers of domestic postgraduate students. Between 1996 - 1999 student numbers declined by 8%. The decline in key strategic disciplines are alarming with science declining by 25% and agriculture by 26.5% in the same period."

"The government's ideological commitment to fee-paying and 'marketisation' of education and refusal to address equity and access has produced consequences that can only be described as 'social engineering", Mr Smith said.

"An increasing number of vocations require postgraduate qualifications for initial vocational entry and/or progress beyond initial entry (eg. psychology, librarianship, midwifery)."

"If students can't afford the fees or access commercial loans they cannot get a job in such fields. Thus many of the most able can no longer enter or progress in an increasing range of fields."