Tertiary Education Union
13 March 2012
Publishing graduate incomes is bureaucratic beancounting.
"The minister of tertiary education, Steven Joyce’s desire to measure and count meaningless data is flooding tertiary education with unnecessary bureaucracy," says TEU national president Dr Sandra Grey.
Dr Grey’s comments follow news that the minister wants to publish the average income of graduates from specific courses as part of a push to get more out of the tertiary sector.
"This is not helpful data for graduates, and it is a ridiculous criterion against which to measure courses and tertiary institutions."
"We know already that people studying medicine earn more, on average, than people studying humanities or trades. Everybody knows that occupations with large numbers of female graduates earn less on average than occupations with large numbers of male graduates. And we know the biggest determinant of someone’s income is how much his or her parents earned. We have no need for data to be published on this."
"If the minister really wants to collect this data and make good use of it, he should be sending it on to the Department of Labour and employers, pressuring them to do something about those areas where the wages and salaries of qualified and skilled New Zealanders are too low," said Dr Grey
ends