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Issue Two June 2008

 

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This second issue of the Tertiary Analysis Newsletter brings you information on further analysis of school to tertiary transitions, international student research and the results of the Adult Literacy and Life Skills Survey. It highlights reports of interest to tertiary education from other agencies and reveals some hidden treasures in last year’s Profile and Trends.

New from the Ministry:

Hei titiro anō i te whāinga: Māori achievement in bachelors degrees revisited

This report revisits and updates Te whai i ngā taumata atakura — supporting Māori achievement in bachelors degrees. In this report, we look in greater detail at the link between NCEA results and Māori success in first-year bachelors degree study.

The findings in this report confirm the earlier study, while providing more detail on the link between school performance and tertiary success. An important finding is that Māori students enter degree study, on average, with lower school qualifications and lower NCEA results than their non-Māori peers. Māori students who had the same level of performance in NCEA as non-Māori did slightly less well on average in their first-year degree studies.

The report can be found on the Education Counts website.

Post-school choices: additional short analyses

These four fact sheets are intended to supplement the report Post-school choices by building on the statistical model used in that report and narrowing the focus to look at the post-school choices of these three groups of students:

• High achieving students.
• Māori students.
• Students from low decile schools.

In addition, the fourth fact sheet looks at how the number of unit standard credits students attain while at secondary school is associated with their post-school choices.

The fact sheets can be found on the Education Counts website.

The Experiences of International Students in New Zealand: report on the results of the national survey 2007

The current research was conducted, in partnership with the Department of Labour, to monitor the health of the education and pastoral support provided to international students in New Zealand. The Ministry and the Department were particularly interested in examining the changes since the 2003 survey in the following areas:

• The characteristics of international students
• Self-reported academic performance or success
• Satisfaction with educational, pastoral and support services, living conditions and social services
• Experiences of working in New Zealand
• Future plans, including work plans.

The report can be found on the Education Counts website.

The Adult Literacy and Life Skills Survey: Education, Work and Literacy

This report presents an overview of New Zealanders’ skills in relation to educational and labour force characteristics and compares results from the 1996 International Adult Literacy Survey with results from the 2006 Adult Literacy and Life Skills Survey.

The report looks at:

• How is literacy skill distributed across the New Zealand adult population according to educational participation?
• How is literacy skill distributed across the New Zealand adult population according to work-related factors such as labour force status, occupation or industry of employment?
• Have there been any changes in these distributions over the past 10 years?
• How do the up-skilling (ie, further education and training) activities of New Zealand adults vary according to both their measured and their self-assessed numeracy skill?

The report can be found on the Education counts website.

Participation rates data

Data for participation rates in tertiary education for 2007 has now been added to the Education Counts website. This data provides information on the proportion of New Zealanders enrolled with tertiary education providers.

The data can be found on the tertiary statistics pages of the Education Counts website.

Coming out soon:

A number of new pieces of work are about to be released by the Ministry - look out for them on Education Counts:

• Two further reports on the Adult Literacy and Lifeskills Survey are due out shortly, one looking at gender and ethnicity in relation to literacy and numeracy, and the other looking at age.
• The Ministry is completing a report on the shifts between 2003 and 2006 in the scores achieved by people who were assessed in the first and second quality evaluation undertaken as part of the Performance-Based Research Fund. Expect this report to be out in July.
• The second report on advanced trade, technical and professional qualifications is likely to be out in July. It builds on the recently released report Advanced trade, technical and professional qualifications — identifying demand. It will look at the high demand qualifications identified in the first report and how well they are matched to occupations.

From other agencies

There have been a number of reports of interest to tertiary education recently released by other agencies:

• The Skills-Productivity Nexus : Connecting Industry Training and Business Performance is a report written as part of a joint Department of Labour/Industry Training Federation project aimed at improving the ability of Industry Training Organisations to assist workplaces to raise their productivity. The report sets out results of a literature scan exploring the links between skills, their application, and productivity, and also documents the experience of a number of manufacturing ITOs in expanding the breadth of their services beyond skills development. It can be found on the Department of Labour website.

• Life in New Zealand: Settlement Experiences of Skilled Migrants Results from the 2007 Survey, from the Department of Labour provides results from their latest survey of skilled migrants, including participation in education and training.

• Treasury Productivity Papers are a new series of papers from The Treasury focusing on New Zealand’s productivity performance and policy. New Zealand’s Productivity Performance provides an easy introduction to the definitions of productivity and the factors that have influenced New Zealand’s low performance in this area. Working Smarter: Driving Productivity Growth Through Skills looks at the evidence for the link between improving skills and raising productivity.

Hidden treasures

You may have noticed there were major changes last year’s annual report on the tertiary sector, Profile and Trends. There was much more emphasis on the display of the key trends, interspersed with a series of short articles covering a wide range of topics of interest on aspects of the sector. Those articles contain some of the most interesting analysis of the performance of the system released recently.

A good example is Improving the Relevance of Tertiary education, an account of the impact of the changes made by government in 2005 as it initiated a series of reviews of the relevance of non-degree tertiary education. The article traces the impact of the resulting changes in different parts of the sector, on different student groups and in different fields of study. This article can be found in Chapter 7.

Another good example is Parental Income and Choice of Participation. This article sets out to summarise and present the results of some important research on the determinants of tertiary education participation published in 2006 in an economics journal by Sholeh Maani, the University of Auckland economist. Sholeh’s original journal article is hard going for those unused to the econometrics literature, while this article presents these important results in a simple clear way. Look for this article in Chapter 9.

Other articles look at trends in tertiary education staffing over ten years, the research performance of the eight universities and what the 2006 Census tells us about the outcomes of tertiary education.

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