News 10/9 – Response from Minister to Quake (Weak Effort, Too)

September 10th 2010 at 9:07am, By Dave Guerin

  1. Education Performance Stats
    • The Manawatu Standard has written a story with the headline “Massey fights worst university ranking” and covers defences from the Uni, TEU and students. Of course, no-one is attacking them for that ranking…
    • The TEU’s newsletter has a review of some of the responses to the data release.
    • The Waikato Times puts a lot of stats together and shows the challenge the media will have with this data.
    • Otago Poly is celebrating that they are top in the country for degree completions at 91% (personally, I’m not sure being top in the league tables means that much and may even be negative. In any case, Whitecliffe College of Art and Design has higher degree completion results at 100%. NB Meant to point out that these are actually L7-8 qual completions, not degree completions – Otago Poly called them degree completions.)
  2. Quake
    • Steven Joyce put out a media release about his visit to Christchurch, but there’s not much in it. It has less context than in this blog over the last few days and also only focuses on a few TEIs reopening - it omits SIT, Aoraki, Tai Poutini and WelTec, along with lots of PTEs and ITOs. It states that TEC and MOE staff are working with providers to open – I’d be curious to know what they’re doing. I’m not criticising those agencies, but neither has an operational focus that would seem to be that helpful to TEOs (MOE does in schools). Overall, I’m a bit confused as to why the media release went out so late and with so little useful info. I think this is the first time I’ve criticised a Joyce media release, but it really is a weak effort. He should have stuck to talking about roads and bridges.
    • The Press has more in a related story, including a request from UC for help. UC has also gained support from book and journal vendors to get free access to online material, which is important as the main library is closed. Here’s the latest VC’s update from UC - 400 staff were back yesterday.
    • KAREN is now going south through UC again and they even put a 1km temporary cable across the Waimakariri River.
    • A UC PhD student has a column in the Herald on geological issues.
    • A VUW academic is promoting his research on retrofitting houses for quake resistance.
  3. Education at a Glance The OECD released their annual Education at a Glance publication on Wed. Grant Robertson suggests that the government should heed the OECD’s media release that more spending on tertiary education will lead to more jobs. Normally I would hassle Grant for running that argument, but since the OECD’s release is so monumentally facile, I’ll go for them. I went to an MOE briefing on Wed on this issue and they showed an OECD chart that had a pretty clear relationship (no correlation) that countries with more skilled people had lower income premiums over unskilled people – a simple case of demand and supply. The OECD’s argument that if you train people, growth will come, is just plain silly and not worthy of such a talented group of analysts. Education is useful, but life is more complicated than the OECD’s media release.
  4. Top Ad School The Adschool at Auckland’s Media Design School has been named the fourth best advertising school of the decade by the YoungGuns Awards, which recognise the world’s hottest creative talent under the age of thirty. The Media Design School’s fourth placing is based on the number of YoungGuns awards its students have won in the last decade. Other winners included prestigious institutions such as the New York School of Visual Arts and the Miami Ad School. The Media Design School beat out Australian counterparts RMIT and AWARD School, who came 5th and 6th respectively. That is superb!
  5. Student Loans Stephen Franks argues on his blog for cutting interest free student  loans.
  6. KiaOraMai The service sector ITOs’ KiaOraMai customer service programme is celebrating its first year of operation.
  7. Massey Star Massey’s Jacqueline Rowarth is profiled in the Dom Post – she really is a star in her media work on agriculture.
  8. A Real Student Rally Six Wintec petrolhead students need $8,500 to be able to compete in next month’s Targa Rally.
  9. Literacy The ITF put out a release on Wednesday about World Literacy Day but I can’t see it on their website, so no link!
  10. Ballet Otago Uni’s Selwyn Ballet performed at a Rugby World Cup event yesterday. Also at Otago Uni, law students won a national competiion and a volunteer scheme is being set up.

Comment Form

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  • Dave Guerin: My guess Jim is that we should take two zeros off all the numbers :) [...]
  • Jim Doyle: 50,000 - 65,000, 150,000 EFTS??? [...]
  • Dave Guerin: Those issues of Treasury's rationale are well worth wider discussion Stephen. [...]
  • Dave Guerin: comments on Yahoo are amongst the most colourful, especially since various commenters have running b [...]
  • Stephen Day: Yeah, I just about fell off my chair laughing when I read the 'communism' comment under Woodham's co [...]

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