4 August 2011

Dozspot asks what's the rush with UC/CIT merger?

4 August 2011 | johnboy

The Liberals’ Steve Dozspot is, not without reason, asking why exactly UC and CIT must merge with such urgency?

ACT Labor claimed the merger was a must for both institutions to survive financially, yet the Government-commissioned Bradley Review doesnt appear to have strongly based its recommendations on financial modelling, Mr Doszpot said.

This is the third review by the ACT Labor Government into a possible merger and none of them have yet made a business case for any change. The others were the Hawke Review and the Tertiary Taskforce, both of which gave little consideration to the financial implications.

If this merger is necessary for both institutions survival, as Mr Barr has suggested, why have such a study that doesnt explain the financial consequences? I would have thought that was paramount if survival strategies are being considered.

It would certainly be nice to know.

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bd841:18 pm 06 Aug 11

Well I agree that the government shouldn’t rush into merging the entities without properly planning the new structure and how it will work. As for the financial side of it a quick look at their financials in their annual reports reveal that both of them are pretty much financial basket cases. CIT makes losses and UC makes artificial profits based on one-off payments from the Commonwealth and has plenty of debt. Obviously something needs to be done and neither will survive in the long term without a lot of government help.

housebound12:28 pm 05 Aug 11

The bigger question is what does that say about having the “U” in “UC”?

I suspect that devolving UC back into something closer to the old CAE might take it back to the days of doing applied courses extremely well. If that happened, it could well be a good thing.

neanderthalsis11:47 am 05 Aug 11

I’m inclined to agree. I don’t think that there will be any positive impact on teaching and learning outcomes from the merger and we may see a decline in the lower end offerings (Cert I, II and III) as these are not big earners while seeing an increase in the diploma/ADip courses.

The merger idea seems to be more about propping up UC than any real benefit to the broader education sector. The real question that needs to be asked is that is Canberra big enough to support two universities?

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