Enrolment-hoppers highlight antiquated view of PhD students
Full-time PhD students with good health and no dependants aren’t allowed to go part-time to get a job and bolster their finances, even though their scholarships are expected to dip below the poverty line for the first time this year.
And students who manage to change their enrolment status face tax and welfare penalties for doing so.
Submissions to the House of Representatives inquiry into research training in Australian universities have highlighted the triple bind facing postgraduate scholarship recipients – declining value, tight rules around enrolment status, and inequitable tax and income support rules for part-timers.
The Council of Postgraduate Associations (CAPA) argues that the arrangements are the result of an antiquated view of research students which buttonholes them into an idealised model of what a typical research student is supposed to be, and discourages variance from that model.
“If you look at the so-called support measures, they seem to fit neatly around an ideal view of a research candidate – someone in their early to mid-20s, single, no dependants and ideally living at home, with no family, financial or social pressures,” CAPA president Nigel Palmer told Campus Review.
Under the Australian Postgraduate Award (APA) guidelines, students have to satisfy strict eligibility criteria to receive part-time scholarships. In general, the only exceptions allowing part-study are significant caring commitments or a medical condition that limits the student’s capacity to undertake full-time study. Moreover – unlike their full-time equivalents – part-time scholarships are taxed and included in income assessments that determine eligibility for assistance such as disability and carer benefits.
Yet statistics suggest these are exactly the sorts of benefits many students may need. A 2005 national survey of PhD candidates revealed an average age of 35.
Palmer said the current measures specifically disadvantaged those who were most likely to be struggling, such as single parents. “The moment they go part-time, they’re at risk of losing other benefits. They’re totally incompatible policy measures,” he said.
The survey also revealed considerable mobility in the enrolment status of PhD candidates. While most students were full time, 20 per cent switched their enrolment status from full time to part time or vice-versa, outnumbering the 16 per cent who were permanently part time.
Given the difficulty of satisfying part-time enrolment criteria, many of these enrolment-hoppers had presumably always qualified to be part-time candidates – but elected not to until the going got too tough.
Retired Democrat senator Natasha Stott Despoja tried unsuccessfully to exempt part-time scholarships from tax and income assessments through a private members bill she introduced in 1997. Despite a Senate committee’s finding that the change could significantly benefit students with minimal impacts on tax revenue, the amendments have never been adopted.
“It’s a penny pinching measure which just doesn’t make sense – economically, but also in terms of parity with other scholarships and taxation arrangements,” Stott Despoja told CR.
“The private member’s bill is ready to be taken up by anyone, preferably government. It only requires some very simple amendments.”
The release of the 2005 survey findings coincides with the latest milestone in the downward trajectory of the real value of APAs, with projections showing the standard APA will fall below the poverty line for the first time by the end of 2008. But CAPA analysis shows the rate has been below the single parents’ poverty line for at least a decade.
In other words, the levels of APAs and the rules governing them are dovetailing into a couple of neat catch-22s. While your scholarship entails that you have to live in poverty, poverty is not a good enough reason to change the nature of your scholarship. And if your living costs force you to abandon fulltime study, doing so can add to your living costs.
But CAPA says the scholarship rules reveal an ignorance of what research students can offer, as well as what they need. “We hear of a lot of cases of people returning from industry to do a research degree – often from a very senior position,” Palmer said.
“They’re leaders in industry returning to study, as opposed to the stereotypical view of someone coming to university in order to be a leader in industry.”
Palmer said the part-time scholarship rules constrained people trying to put the most into their research. “What if you had the opportunity to work with industry in your field of research? To demonstrate a case to go part-time, you need to have carer responsibilities or be sick.”
There is a largely untapped potential in the diversity of the doctoral population, three of the researchers behind the 2005 survey argue in their own submission to the House of Representatives inquiry.
“Australian and international policies on doctoral education can be manacled by a conceptualisation of doctoral students as young, full time, on a scholarship and in need of being placed in the workplace on graduation,” say Professor Terry Evans, Dr Peter Macauley and Margot Pearson.
“This conceptualisation ignores or underestimates the role of doctoral candidates as active participants in the research enterprise. It assumes that doctoral education is preparation for work, not a form of productive work itself.
“This leads to a monocular policy focus which is blind to the needs and potential of the many candidates who are older and often mid-career, part time, salaried and in a good job. New national policy should take account of the broad circumstances of all doctoral candidates, and enhance their contribution to knowledge production and innovation.”
The three academics advocate supplementing the Research Training Scheme with what they call an industry research training scheme. “The IRTS needs to encourage flexible support strategies that explicitly identify and accommodate the range of needs, expertise and circumstances of fully employed candidates throughout their generally part-time candidature,” they suggest.
CAPA says the main challenge in supporting research education is to be “innovative in how we support innovation.
“The aims of the Research Training Scheme as they stand are too narrow. They are inadequately informed by the full range of potential benefits of properly resourced research education,” it says.
The two papers are among 90 submitted to the inquiry, which was commissioned in April by innovation minister Kim Carr. It’s expected to present its report by the end of 2008. Go to www. aph.gov.au/house/committee/isi/research/index.htm.
And students who manage to change their enrolment status face tax and welfare penalties for doing so.
Submissions to the House of Representatives inquiry into research training in Australian universities have highlighted the triple bind facing postgraduate scholarship recipients – declining value, tight rules around enrolment status, and inequitable tax and income support rules for part-timers.
The Council of Postgraduate Associations (CAPA) argues that the arrangements are the result of an antiquated view of research students which buttonholes them into an idealised model of what a typical research student is supposed to be, and discourages variance from that model.
“If you look at the so-called support measures, they seem to fit neatly around an ideal view of a research candidate – someone in their early to mid-20s, single, no dependants and ideally living at home, with no family, financial or social pressures,” CAPA president Nigel Palmer told Campus Review.
Under the Australian Postgraduate Award (APA) guidelines, students have to satisfy strict eligibility criteria to receive part-time scholarships. In general, the only exceptions allowing part-study are significant caring commitments or a medical condition that limits the student’s capacity to undertake full-time study. Moreover – unlike their full-time equivalents – part-time scholarships are taxed and included in income assessments that determine eligibility for assistance such as disability and carer benefits.
Yet statistics suggest these are exactly the sorts of benefits many students may need. A 2005 national survey of PhD candidates revealed an average age of 35.
Palmer said the current measures specifically disadvantaged those who were most likely to be struggling, such as single parents. “The moment they go part-time, they’re at risk of losing other benefits. They’re totally incompatible policy measures,” he said.
The survey also revealed considerable mobility in the enrolment status of PhD candidates. While most students were full time, 20 per cent switched their enrolment status from full time to part time or vice-versa, outnumbering the 16 per cent who were permanently part time.
Given the difficulty of satisfying part-time enrolment criteria, many of these enrolment-hoppers had presumably always qualified to be part-time candidates – but elected not to until the going got too tough.
Retired Democrat senator Natasha Stott Despoja tried unsuccessfully to exempt part-time scholarships from tax and income assessments through a private members bill she introduced in 1997. Despite a Senate committee’s finding that the change could significantly benefit students with minimal impacts on tax revenue, the amendments have never been adopted.
“It’s a penny pinching measure which just doesn’t make sense – economically, but also in terms of parity with other scholarships and taxation arrangements,” Stott Despoja told CR.
“The private member’s bill is ready to be taken up by anyone, preferably government. It only requires some very simple amendments.”
The release of the 2005 survey findings coincides with the latest milestone in the downward trajectory of the real value of APAs, with projections showing the standard APA will fall below the poverty line for the first time by the end of 2008. But CAPA analysis shows the rate has been below the single parents’ poverty line for at least a decade.
In other words, the levels of APAs and the rules governing them are dovetailing into a couple of neat catch-22s. While your scholarship entails that you have to live in poverty, poverty is not a good enough reason to change the nature of your scholarship. And if your living costs force you to abandon fulltime study, doing so can add to your living costs.
But CAPA says the scholarship rules reveal an ignorance of what research students can offer, as well as what they need. “We hear of a lot of cases of people returning from industry to do a research degree – often from a very senior position,” Palmer said.
“They’re leaders in industry returning to study, as opposed to the stereotypical view of someone coming to university in order to be a leader in industry.”
Palmer said the part-time scholarship rules constrained people trying to put the most into their research. “What if you had the opportunity to work with industry in your field of research? To demonstrate a case to go part-time, you need to have carer responsibilities or be sick.”
There is a largely untapped potential in the diversity of the doctoral population, three of the researchers behind the 2005 survey argue in their own submission to the House of Representatives inquiry.
“Australian and international policies on doctoral education can be manacled by a conceptualisation of doctoral students as young, full time, on a scholarship and in need of being placed in the workplace on graduation,” say Professor Terry Evans, Dr Peter Macauley and Margot Pearson.
“This conceptualisation ignores or underestimates the role of doctoral candidates as active participants in the research enterprise. It assumes that doctoral education is preparation for work, not a form of productive work itself.
“This leads to a monocular policy focus which is blind to the needs and potential of the many candidates who are older and often mid-career, part time, salaried and in a good job. New national policy should take account of the broad circumstances of all doctoral candidates, and enhance their contribution to knowledge production and innovation.”
The three academics advocate supplementing the Research Training Scheme with what they call an industry research training scheme. “The IRTS needs to encourage flexible support strategies that explicitly identify and accommodate the range of needs, expertise and circumstances of fully employed candidates throughout their generally part-time candidature,” they suggest.
CAPA says the main challenge in supporting research education is to be “innovative in how we support innovation.
“The aims of the Research Training Scheme as they stand are too narrow. They are inadequately informed by the full range of potential benefits of properly resourced research education,” it says.
The two papers are among 90 submitted to the inquiry, which was commissioned in April by innovation minister Kim Carr. It’s expected to present its report by the end of 2008. Go to www. aph.gov.au/house/committee/isi/research/index.htm.