1,422 research outputs found
Doubtful debt: the rising cost of student loans
The Commonwealth Government could save more than 6 billion a year. It has been a very effective policy. But it has become expensive. By 2017 the Commonwealth will have 51,309 a year. Income contingent loans cleverly help cash-poor students pay for their education when they can afford to do so. Some of them never earn enough in Australia to repay what they borrowed.
About 17 per cent of new lending is now classified as doubtful, meaning it is not expected to ever be fully repaid. This expense, which appears each year in the Commonwealth Budget, is projected to be 100,000 would radically improve HELP’s finances.
If all these reforms were implemented now, they would save $860 million a year by 2016–17, and remove the need for planned cuts to teaching and research expenditure.
HELP’s repayment system was never designed for lending on the scale we see today. With the reforms in this report, we can achieve the goals of HELP at a much lower cost
Mapping Australian higher education 2013 version
Over the last 40 years, higher education has moved from the periphery to the centre of Australian life. As recently as the mid- 1970s, only three out of every hundred working-age Australians had a higher education qualification. By 2012, the proportion had increased to 25 per cent. If current policies are successful, by 2025 40 per cent of young Australian adults will hold a bachelor degree or above. Many people study out of interest. But the main factor in this shift towards greater degree attainment – and the main reason governments give for their involvement in higher education policy – is a structural change to the labour market. More jobs require, or are more easily carried out, with the knowledge and skills higher education courses set out to teach. These professional and managerial occupations are now a third of all employment
Keep the caps off! Student access and choice in higher education
This paper argues that the Commonwealth Government should reconsider any plan to end its university open access policy.OverviewAfter just 18 months of operation, Australia’s radical experiment in uncapping undergraduate university enrolments is under threat. According to its critics – which include the higher education minister and a leading vice-chancellor – it admits academically under-prepared students and consumes higher education funding that could be better used elsewhere.This report, Keep the caps off!, shows that the new system is achieving its goals. It is lifting the supply of graduates to Australia’s economy, increasing student choice, and improving access to higher education for disadvantaged groups.The old system of government allocating student places to universities was unresponsive to student demand. With uncapping, universities are responding to demand trends in science, health and engineering by providing new student places. The last two fields are also areas of labour market shortage. Across most other disciplines, university applicants’ chances of admission to their first-preference field of study have increased.With their new freedom to offer more places, universities now offer Commonwealth-supported students innovative new options. Several new online ventures have started, ensuring that Australia is not left behind in this global trend. Universities are collaborating with TAFEs to meet the needs of new students.Uncapping has meant that more students with lower ATARs (Australian Tertiary Admission Rank) are admitted to study. A minimum ATAR of 60 has been suggested. But degree completions data show that 60 is an arbitrary cut-off point. It would exclude the more than half of low ATAR students who successfully complete a qualification.An ATAR cut-off of 60 would hit low socioeconomic status university applicants hard. In 2012, 8,000 low SES applicants would have been rejected without further consideration. With eased enrolment restrictions, the number of students from low SES backgrounds grew by 40 per cent after years of stagnation.University is not for everyone. Universities have an ethical responsibility to advise applicants who are at high risk of not completing a degree. Information about completion rates should be much more easily available to people considering further study. But there is too much variation between courses and individual applicants for a national policy on university admission.There are many hidden costs in capping university enrolments. Student places get misallocated between disciplines, because universities cannot easily adjust supply to demand. New higher education initiatives are hard to start. People miss out on their preferred careers. Social mobility suffers. There would be a high price to pay to offset $300 million in university funding cuts.It would be a policy tragedy to recap university places now. It would make Australia’s higher education system less fair, less efficient, and less productive
Adversarial-Playground: A Visualization Suite Showing How Adversarial Examples Fool Deep Learning
Recent studies have shown that attackers can force deep learning models to
misclassify so-called "adversarial examples": maliciously generated images
formed by making imperceptible modifications to pixel values. With growing
interest in deep learning for security applications, it is important for
security experts and users of machine learning to recognize how learning
systems may be attacked. Due to the complex nature of deep learning, it is
challenging to understand how deep models can be fooled by adversarial
examples. Thus, we present a web-based visualization tool,
Adversarial-Playground, to demonstrate the efficacy of common adversarial
methods against a convolutional neural network (CNN) system.
Adversarial-Playground is educational, modular and interactive. (1) It enables
non-experts to compare examples visually and to understand why an adversarial
example can fool a CNN-based image classifier. (2) It can help security experts
explore more vulnerability of deep learning as a software module. (3) Building
an interactive visualization is challenging in this domain due to the large
feature space of image classification (generating adversarial examples is slow
in general and visualizing images are costly). Through multiple novel design
choices, our tool can provide fast and accurate responses to user requests.
Empirically, we find that our client-server division strategy reduced the
response time by an average of 1.5 seconds per sample. Our other innovation, a
faster variant of JSMA evasion algorithm, empirically performed twice as fast
as JSMA and yet maintains a comparable evasion rate.
Project source code and data from our experiments available at:
https://github.com/QData/AdversarialDNN-PlaygroundComment: 5 pages. {I.2.6}{Artificial Intelligence} ; {K.6.5}{Management of
Computing and Information Systems}{Security and Protection}. arXiv admin
note: substantial text overlap with arXiv:1706.0176
University fees: what students pay in deregulated markets
Overview
For more than a year Australia has debated deregulating university fees for domestic undergraduates. The issue is controversial, but for many years fees have been deregulated for international students and domestic postgraduate coursework students. This report looks at how much these students pay for their courses, and analyses differences between these fees.
Australian universities responded enthusiastically to the deregulation of the international and domestic postgraduate coursework markets. Although the fees charged are often high, strong enrolment growth shows students are willing to pay them.
Last year, for example, 312,500 international students were enrolled in Australian universities, nearly twice as many as in 2001. They comprise nearly a quarter of all enrolments.
Student fees from deregulated places are important to university finances. They provided a fifth of public university funding, or nearly 4.3 billion from international students in 2013, while most of the remaining amount came from fee-paying domestic postgraduates.
For both international and domestic students, fees vary by discipline and especially by university. International students usually pay significantly more, and never less, than domestic students in the same course. Their fees are set in a global, commercially-oriented market in which prestigious universities charge international students a substantial fee premium over less well known universities. In some disciplines, students at the most expensive university pay more than twice as much than students at the cheapest university.
Despite the cost, many international students prefer expensive universities. In most disciplines high-fee universities enrol more international students than low-fee universities.
Australian students are less willing than international students to pay a large prestige premium. They and their prospective employers understand the strengths of local universities. They know that research-driven international university rankings are an imperfect guide to the quality of graduates.
Many Australian postgraduate students already have a foothold in the labour market. They have less need to impress employers with university prestige. Even so, in several disciplines domestic students, like international students, prefer the more expensive universities.
In some postgraduate courses, the market is affected by price-controlled government-supported places. This is especially true of education and nursing degrees. These places help keep fees down for domestic students without a government-supported place. Many universities offer full-fee places at less than what they receive for a government-supported student.
A future Grattan report will explore what profits universities make on fee-paying students and the policy implications of what happens to the money
Review of the demand driven funding system
In 2012, the Australian Government lifted previously imposed limits on the funding of bachelor-degree students at public universities. This new system was called ‘demand driven’ because it allowed universities to respond to student demand and allowed more students to benefit from higher education.
On 12 November 2013 Minister for Education, the Hon Christopher Pyne, appointed a review panel to look at and make recommendations in relation to the demand driven funding arrangements. The review panel comprised the Hon Dr David Kemp and Mr Andrew Norton and is known as the Norton-Kemp review.
The panel looked at the impacts of the demand driven system and whether it is increasing participation, improving access to students from poorer backgrounds and rural and regional areas, and meeting the skill needs of the economy. It explored whether there were any adverse impacts on quality and considered the long term sustainability of the system.
The report found that public universities have responded well to changes under the demand driven system and improved access for all students. It found the new system has allowed universities to be more responsive to student needs, driven innovation and lifted quality.
The reviewers made 19 findings and 17 recommendations, including extending the demand driven system to diplomas, advanced diplomas and associate degrees, and to private universities and non-university higher education providers such as TAFEs.
The reviewers believe that extending the demand driven system will expand opportunities for students, and lead to further innovation in courses and modes of delivery, and in the quality of teaching and graduates
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HD 306414, the optical counterpart to the Peculiar X-Ray Transient IGR J11215-5952
HD 306414 is the optical counterpart to the transient X-ray source IGR J11215–5952, characterised by short flares occurring every 165 days. In order to improve our understanding of this source, we obtained high-resolution spectroscopy of HD 306414 around the time of the February 2007 X-ray outburst. Large variations in the shape of the H? emission feature and the radial velocities of metallic lines are seen around the time of the X-ray emission
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Neutron star masses in X-ray binaries
We discuss the determination of neutron star masses in X-ray binaries and explain the importance of such measurements. Examples are given of two of our recent neutron star mass determinations, in Cen X-3 and Vela X-1. We then discuss prospects for improving such measurements with SALT and the possibility of determining only the seventh neutron star mass in such a system by measuring the radial velocity curve of the recently discovered counterpart to the X-ray pulsar OAO1657--415
ESTIMATING THE EFFECTS OF PESTICIDE USE ON BURLEY AND FLUE-CURED TOBACCO
Crop Production/Industries,
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