Question For The Aussies

[RinkyDink]

I was reading this interview http://www.salon.com/2016/03/10/i_was_w ... sness_too/ today and was wondering if the following quote describing the Australian education system is an accurate description. It sounds like a really good system to me, but I wonder if the Aussies agree.

I was especially interested in your discussion around schooling. We recently moved to Australia from Seattle. A BIG part of the reason was our four children and the cost to send them all to college. Our first child was a wake-up call, and while we had been able to pay and work our way through college many years ago, it really wasn’t an option for her. While my wife and I were able to get subsidized loans back in our day, there were none available for her because of our income level. To be honest, if it was just her, we could have invested in her and made it work. But with four children all likely college bound, it was going to be an impossibility. We investigated our options and moved back to my home country Australia so the kids could go to school.

I have been so impressed with how it works over here. School fees are regulated at all public universities, and the kids are able to get interest-free loans to cover all their tuition costs. Those loans don’t have to be paid back until the child graduates, gets a job, and then starts making more than $55,000 a year. Then the money is deducted from their paycheck along with their taxes, and it can never be more than a certain percentage of their paycheck. It is a way that makes the kids pay for college, but makes it reasonable and affordable.

Even high school I have been impressed with. We have two kids in high school right now, and the schools very clearly value students who are taking a vocational track as much as those students who are college bound. They actually spend a lot of time highlighting kids on the vocational track, and in everything we have seen, it is clear that they are just as valued as students on a college track. In addition, kids can work towards their trade certificates while in school, get apprenticeships that help them prepare, and by the time they graduate most of them have jobs lined up. It also helps that in Australia the trades are well paid and respected, unlike in the U.S.

Anyway, just thought you might be interested in another model that we have felt works so much better than the U.S. model. It is crazy how it works over there now.

Scott Martin

[jaffa1949]

I would like to think the Australian school system is better, the quote is fairly accurate, in th options available .
Teachers are better paid than their US counterparts. An achieving students is well looked after in options to go to university, there are specialist colleges for most trades and as the quotes noted there are apprenticeships for many trades. Often schools or technical colleges teaching school and trades together stream students to their choice with practical courses.

There are private schools to often based around religious groups and some of these are high end parent funded schools with an upper class attitude. They are Australia's answer to Etonian and such.
There are country campuses for the Major universities, linked by the Internet offering the beginnings of a wider range of subjects.
These campuses often align as a continuing campus from junior school.
Each State has several universities and what we call TAFE colleges, technical and further education colleges, diploma colleges which can be used to lead into university, but most are trade specific, these are more prevalent.
Overall the education here seems to have a much broader world view than many American systems.

There is a need for better support for poorer students ( in the academic sense) and schools here do not have as strong a "jock" culture as the US, some of the private school poach good sports people for their teams but they also poach good students with scholarships. Schools are rated against each other on state exam result, ( the state governing the syllabus).
The are select schools in the public system for gifted students the idea is that like challenges like!
There are performing arts schools and specifically purposed sports schools.
These lead into university levels of Drama/ drama production etc and high level sports coaching.
Hope that helps

[BoMan]

There are specialist colleges for most trades and as the quotes noted there are apprenticeships for many trades. Often schools or technical colleges teaching school and trades together stream students to their choice with practical courses.

This practice is spot on for the 21st century economy! I teach at an elementary school that's working on this too. We have a STEAM curriculum which emphasizes science, technology, engineering, art and math. Students will work on a project like Earthquake Safety and read for background knowledge, use math to analyze data, apply writing skills to make reports, draw safety solutions, build their solutions and present their findings to the community. In this way the kiddos see how skills taught at school can solve real problems.

There is a need for better support for poorer students ( in the academic sense)

So true! As the tech specialist, I work on dynamic support programs like iRead and Fastt Math which measure each student's entry skill and delivers interactive instruction they need. In this way, a fourth grader can work on 2nd grade reading and 5th grade math at the same time. Teachers get reports to revise their lessons.

Australia's better but there's hope for the USA.

[oldmansurfer]

The USA is 19 trillion dollars in debt so what's a few more?

[RinkyDink]

I would like to think the Australian school system is better, the quote is fairly accurate, in th options available .
Teachers are better paid than their US counterparts. An achieving students is well looked after in options to go to university, there are specialist colleges for most trades and as the quotes noted there are apprenticeships for many trades. Often schools or technical colleges teaching school and trades together stream students to their choice with practical courses.

There are private schools to often based around religious groups and some of these are high end parent funded schools with an upper class attitude. They are Australia's answer to Etonian and such.
There are country campuses for the Major universities, linked by the Internet offering the beginnings of a wider range of subjects.
These campuses often align as a continuing campus from junior school.
Each State has several universities and what we call TAFE colleges, technical and further education colleges, diploma colleges which can be used to lead into university, but most are trade specific, these are more prevalent.
Overall the education here seems to have a much broader world view than many American systems.

There is a need for better support for poorer students ( in the academic sense) and schools here do not have as strong a "jock" culture as the US, some of the private school poach good sports people for their teams but they also poach good students with scholarships. Schools are rated against each other on state exam result, ( the state governing the syllabus).
The are select schools in the public system for gifted students the idea is that like challenges like!
There are performing arts schools and specifically purposed sports schools.
These lead into university levels of Drama/ drama production etc and high level sports coaching.
Hope that helps

I really like the Australian system. It actually demonstrates how intelligent public policy can improve people's quality of life. Unfortunately, the Australian export, Rupert Murdoch, has made actual policy making all but impossible in the states. Anyway, the US sorely needs to get a modernized vocational program in place in its education system. Maybe if enough Americans get exposed to alternative ways of doing things, they'll be able to start improving their antiquated systems.

[BoMan]

The US sorely needs to get a modernized vocational program in place in its education system.

Community colleges are a great place to start. Napa Valley College has practical, hands-on programs in wine making, culinary arts and hospitality. Local businesses provide financial support to the school and hire the graduates. Win-WIN!

My kids followed this path and earn more than me. My son is a chef and my daughter is the event planner for Morimoto's!

[dtc]

Although it's not a perfect system by any means, there is very very wide spread support in Australia (even by our right wing politicians) for a quality 'free' education system and medical system ('free' as in tax funded).

University was actually totally free until the early 1990s; as mentioned students now incur a debt to the government which is repayable through the tax system once you hit a certain income level (the debt is indexed to inflation I believe). Cost varies a bit depending on the course but roughly $10k per year as a rough average (3-5 yr degrees) at the top universities (colleges). I don't think that is full cost recovery, the govt tips in further funding. However there is no system of college donors - I think I've read that places like Harvard could make all study not only free but they could cover living costs etc out of their donor income. So the US college system is choosing to be broken, or I guess choosing to be as expensive as it is-it's treated as a consumer good like any other, rather than being seen as a social good of benefit to society.

[oldmansurfer]

America is $19,000,000,000,000 in debt. we are broke

[RinkyDink]

The US sorely needs to get a modernized vocational program in place in its education system.

Community colleges are a great place to start. Napa Valley College has practical, hands-on programs in wine making, culinary arts and hospitality. Local businesses provide financial support to the school and hire the graduates. Win-WIN!

My kids followed this path and earn more than me. My son is a chef and my daughter is the event planner for Morimoto's!

No argument from me. I think community colleges are great. I wish they were free. I'd like to see some kind of comprehensive vocational program for high schools so kids who really have no interest in academia have an alternative to sitting around annoying their teachers and disrupting their peers.

[RinkyDink]

So the US college system is choosing to be broken, or I guess choosing to be as expensive as it is-it's treated as a consumer good like any other, rather than being seen as a social good of benefit to society.

You hit the nail on the head. The current push, as far as I can tell, is to privatize the education system and permanently subsidize testing companies and textbook publishers.

[jaffa1949]

A genuine world wide wish from me, that education is universal and wide ranging in topic an content and has as an underlying theme them the ability to read between the lines and be free to work through all bias!

And spell check leaves my writing alone

[oldmansurfer]

If the USA gets free college any time soon they will be taught in Chinese because China is buying up all the debt

[RinkyDink]

If the USA gets free college any time soon they will be taught in Chinese because China is buying up all the debt

Here's a way of thinking about debt that you might find interesting. Government debt is not like personal debt; they are very different things. Paul Krugman explains it better than I can.

-snip-

Deficit-worriers portray a future in which we’re impoverished by the need to pay back money we’ve been borrowing. They see America as being like a family that took out too large a mortgage, and will have a hard time making the monthly payments.

This is, however, a really bad analogy in at least two ways.

First, families have to pay back their debt. Governments don’t — all they need to do is ensure that debt grows more slowly than their tax base. The debt from World War II was never repaid; it just became increasingly irrelevant as the U.S. economy grew, and with it the income subject to taxation.

Second — and this is the point almost nobody seems to get — an over-borrowed family owes money to someone else; U.S. debt is, to a large extent, money we owe to ourselves.

This was clearly true of the debt incurred to win World War II. Taxpayers were on the hook for a debt that was significantly bigger, as a percentage of G.D.P., than debt today; but that debt was also owned by taxpayers, such as all the people who bought savings bonds. So the debt didn’t make postwar America poorer. In particular, the debt didn’t prevent the postwar generation from experiencing the biggest rise in incomes and living standards in our nation’s history.

But isn’t this time different? Not as much as you think.

It’s true that foreigners now hold large claims on the United States, including a fair amount of government debt. But every dollar’s worth of foreign claims on America is matched by 89 cents’ worth of U.S. claims on foreigners. And because foreigners tend to put their U.S. investments into safe, low-yield assets, America actually earns more from its assets abroad than it pays to foreign investors. If your image is of a nation that’s already deep in hock to the Chinese, you’ve been misinformed. Nor are we heading rapidly in that direction.

Now, the fact that federal debt isn’t at all like a mortgage on America’s future doesn’t mean that the debt is harmless. Taxes must be levied to pay the interest, and you don’t have to be a right-wing ideologue to concede that taxes impose some cost on the economy, if nothing else by causing a diversion of resources away from productive activities into tax avoidance and evasion. But these costs are a lot less dramatic than the analogy with an overindebted family might suggest.

And that’s why nations with stable, responsible governments — that is, governments that are willing to impose modestly higher taxes when the situation warrants it — have historically been able to live with much higher levels of debt than today’s conventional wisdom would lead you to believe. Britain, in particular, has had debt exceeding 100 percent of G.D.P. for 81 of the last 170 years. When Keynes was writing about the need to spend your way out of a depression, Britain was deeper in debt than any advanced nation today, with the exception of Japan.

Of course, America, with its rabidly antitax conservative movement, may not have a government that is responsible in this sense. But in that case the fault lies not in our debt, but in ourselves.

So yes, debt matters. But right now, other things matter more. We need more, not less, government spending to get us out of our unemployment trap. And the wrongheaded, ill-informed obsession with debt is standing in the way. (http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/02/opini ... -debt.html)

[oldmansurfer]

Thanks,I knew it wasn't like personal debt but I do know it means we will likely have to have higher taxes and pay more interest on loans. I don't know if more government spending is going to help (neither does he).

[RinkyDink]

I don't know if more government spending is going to help (neither does he).

Well it depends on the spending. If there is massive unemployment and businesses aren't hiring because they can't sell their existing inventory (stuff that's stacking up in warehouses), then government spending on infrastructure (e.g.,building bridges or comprehensive vocational training) gets people employed again and those people start buying stuff and suddenly businesses need to start hiring people to keep up with the renewed consumer demand. Governments can spend on infrastructure or start wars and buy military hardware to spark an ailing economy. Voters have to decide what kind of remedy they can accept. Paying down government debt doesn't spark employment and doesn't reduce an inventory glut. The question is, when is it time to pay down the debt and when is it time to get the equilibrium of the economy back on track.