by TIM WINKLER

My mum cut a lonely figure as she headed down to the big smoke from Geelong to go to university – the only one in her class and after getting a couple of degrees under her belt, the only woman working in nuclear medicine in Australia.

Two generations later, times have changed. As my sons head off to the beautiful experience of trying to enrol in arcane undergraduate timetables at our venerable institutions, the massification of higher education has made their experience almost commonplace.

Older citizens who swotted like maniacs to squeeze every percentage point out of their ATARs tend to support the view that too many of our youngsters are let into the ivory towers. This view is also held by some of those charged with teaching them, seemingly unaware of the nexus between their pay packet and the phone-scrolling teens hunched in front of their lecterns.

Which sets the scene for the hullabaloo about uni access in New South Wales this week. The news stories and opinion pieces about the quadrupling of early offers in NSW in less than a decade provides an excuse for a disarming side show, giving rise to creative licence describing the recipients of early offers as “quiet quitters”, “slackers” and worse (teenagers). It’s entertaining, but surely time to put an end to the misinformation that pops up annually at the start of Year 12 exams, as media seeks exam stress stories for the post-football season quiet period.

Firstly, it is admittedly interesting that there has been a proliferation of early offers in New South Wales and also that no less than Peter Shergold, wearing one of many hats, has undertaken to have a chat with uni bosses in the state to keep a lid on the trend.

There is hot conjecture as to whether receipt of an early offer enables a Year 12 student to perform better in an exam, because they feel less stress, or perform worse because they slacked off after receiving their offer, which one would think would be a great topic for study if only we could find some interested researchers. 100,000 people in Australian higher ed and not one has done a study yet on whether early offers are a good idea? Come on people, what are honours years and HDR degrees for if not for the collection of data and papers which plump up the citation rates of supervisors?

Perhaps one reason this has not yet been studied intensively (and please let me know if there is something out there with the results, we would all like to know), is that it early offers are GREAT for universities and pretty darn attractive for the students they are trying to attract.

Look at the mechanism – a university gets first dibs on a student who has shown they can pull in some good results in Year 11 and is keen on a course. The university gets a better idea of load forecasts, so they can manage personnel and budgets more effectively and even casuals get a better deal in theory, because savvy unis not only put out early offers, but also enrol those youngsters early as well, so they know if they need an extra tutor in microbiology one next year (or not).

We all want to see teenagers experiencing less unnecessary stress, so it’s hard to make an argument that early offers are bad for young people.

So who stands to lose if early offers to have a negative impact on year 12 scores?

Schools.

Last year’s ATARs are equivalent to next year’s enrolment bonus, particularly for higher fee schools, and if early offers do have a negative impact on ATAR performance, then it’s an issue for private schools and government schools that wish they were private schools.

The fact that the proliferation of early offers is a news story is symptomatic of an ongoing lack of comprehension at how offers and enrolments work. If a student doesn’t get an early offer, they can roll the dice at exam time and then if things don’t go well, they can still enrol into a low or no ATAR course.

Alternatively, they can enrol in a pathway program, or a TAFE course which articulates into a university course, or maybe just take a couple of gap years and come back as a mature age student when ATARs no longer matter. Our higher education system is set up to train and educate people to set standards so that a few short years later, the manner of them obtaining entry to their chosen course is irrelevant – it’s the piece of paper they emerge with that matters.

The discussion about minimum ATARs and early offers continues to myopically focus on gatekeeping – protecting students branded as underachievers from themselves, on the basis that they don’t have the skills or motivation to change their study habits once they leave school. Sure, it’s important to make sure that students have the capability to pass and succeed – but lets not cloak the admissions process in a mirage of infallibility that it has not earned.

A longer range discussion about teaching qualifications, standards and learning and teaching resources and techniques for the students who land in higher education should be coupled with any discussions about entry standards – we need to be trying just as hard as the teenagers who are knocking so hard on the door to get in.

Tim Winkler is Director of Twig Marketing, Australia’s first specialist higher education marketing services and strategy consultancy