Uni Students opportunities for work experience
UniSA run 2 programs, Industry Alliance Program http://www.cis.unisa.edu.au/iap/index.html and the Business Information Systems Program. http://www.unisa.edu.au/bis/
These programs involve interaction with Industry, the BIS program gives students 2 x 15 week placements for project work. The CS program invites industry to give problems or development for students to solve.
Last November I attended 2 events showing some of the results of these programs. There were presentations by BIS students on the their placement projects. I believe there were 10-15 students in this program. The second event, 90 groups of CS students (usually 2 or 3 in a group) demonstrated solutions to problems suggested by industry partners.
Our contribution was a CS student who developed a USB interface and software for one of our serial interfaced energy management controllers.
ACS recognized the need for students “work integrated learning” (work
experience) by creating the ACS Foundation in 2001.
http://www.acsfoundation.com.au
By giving a student an ACS Scholarship rather than putting the student on the payroll which adds all the HR things (super, hol and sick pay, employee count, insurance, etc) and the student pays tax on his pay. A scholarship through the ACS foundation avoids all this and in most cases the student gets the whole amount donated by the donor tax-free.
Universities can make it difficult for students to get work experience by limiting the time available for this. I am told some courses now have a unit of work experience as a part of the course.
University courses suffer as a new course takes 2 years to develop and implement. The designers have to predict what’s likely to happen over the next 5 or so years. Not knowing what vendors will still be around, they avoid the problem. When the first graduates emerge from a new course, the concepts can be over 4 years old. It makes it easy to question the current relevance of courses.
I have watched the Howard government tearing the universities apart in their 10 years in Government. For a good description of how bad it was, I am indebted to The Science Show where Robyn Williams interviewed Vicki Sara, Chancellor, University of Technology, Sydney http://www.abc.net.au/rn/scienceshow/stories/2007/2089488.htm#transcript
Vicki Sara points to a looming crisis in Australian universities as they lose their competitive position due to underfunding and over regulation.
Other OECD countries have increased funding for higher education. Australia has seen a decline of 4%.
