One of the major differences here in Australia is the education system, particularly higher education (tertiary education, as they call it here). Perhaps there are just as many differences in primary (elementary) and secondary (middle school/high school), but we just aren’t as aware of them, since we don’t really have any way to know what school is like here. We can see that everyone wears uniforms, but apart from that difference, we can’t really report back on that aspect of the Australian education system.
However, we have been able to experience the university education experience here, and we can definitely say that things are pretty different. We’ll share with you the bits and pieces we’ve picked up from conversations with people about the education system here, which surely is not a comprehensive review of the Australian education system. But, it’s been an interesting and frequent topic of conversation for us, and one that certainly seems worth blogging about. So here goes…
When you go to university, you essentially decide what you’re going to study before you begin. The subject you study is largely determined by how well you do on exams at the end of secondary school (high school). Certain subjects, say physics or maths (as they call it here) or medicine, require higher marks on the exams than say psychology. There is flexibility for switching, and it sounds like some universities are experimenting with American-style systems, where you pick your major after a year or two of college, but for the most part, everyone sets out in a certain subject at the beginning.
Undergraduate degrees are only three years long here in Australia. However, this is also beginning to shift towards a more American-style system. Currently, you can stay for a fourth year dubbed ‘Honors’ where you get to do individual research (sort of like a senior thesis). So while that fourth year is not required, more and more employers are requiring that fourth year if you want an interesting job with prospects for advancement. In geology, students that only take three years can expect to be logging core in a warehouse for the next ten years. Actually, honors in geology at the University of Adelaide where Dave is teaching, is a great year—guided research and lots of amazing field trips (New Zealand and Arkaroola in the northern Flinders to name a couple).
So the undergraduate experience is becoming more equivalent to an American degree. However, PhDs are still a bit different. At only three years, you just don’t have the time to do the same amount of field work, publishing, and writing. The result is that a fair number of PhD projects are more like master’s projects in the United States. Don’t get me wrong, some of the PhD students are on par with average American PhD students, but they represent the best students here. Also, the Government funds the PhDs, and universities collect the money when students finish their PhDs, so universities have a clear incentive for people to finish their PhDs.
Another major difference is that a lot of university students live at home. Why do most students live with their parents? Well, it is the cultural. In some ways it makes sense—save some money until you have a job and can pay for your own place. However, it is also due at least in part to the ratio of schools to students in Australia, and perhaps limited options for on-campus housing. There really aren’t that many universities (just 3 four-year schools in the entire state of South Australia), so they are all pretty big. There’s definitely no such thing as a small liberal arts school. If you like numbers, here are some good ones: According to Wikipedia, there are 41 universities in Australia, only 2 of which are private. (Our neighbors thought that number even sounded high when we mentioned it.) In the US, there are 4,861 colleges. (For reference, our population is about 15 times bigger than Australia’s, but we have 100 times more schools, and about 25 times more students.)
Another reason students stay at home is because going to a school outside of your state is not very common. Moving from your home in Adelaide to Melbourne to attend Monash University would be almost unthinkable for an undergraduate degree. Even at the PhD level, the majority of students are still at their undergraduate institution in their home state.
This has some interesting consequences. While there is some difference in the prestige of schools (for example, University of Adelaide is considered the ‘better’ place to go in South Australia), the fact that students stay in their home state means that there is little concentration of the more talented and hard-working students. There are no Harvards or Stanfords in Australia, with the possible exception of Australian National University. Combined with the relatively short duration of undergraduate and PhD degrees, this puts Australians at a disadvantage compared to Britons, Americans, and northern Europeans.
Consequently, the research branches of CSIRO (Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation) have a huge percentage of foreign employees. (That’s a little ironic since CSIRO was created as a place to do research in Australia, since Universities didn’t initially conduct original research.) The teaching faculty in the geology department at Uni Adelaide is also one-third non-Australian. This isn’t to say that there aren’t talented individuals coming out of the Australian higher education system—international exchange is common among academics and researchers. However, when Australians are underrepresented in their own institutions, it speaks volumes about the system that is preparing them. And Australians coming from a PhD or a post-doc and going to the United States to compete for teaching or research jobs are, well, buried somewhere in a haystack.
Apparently, a large report came out in 2008 (called the Bradley Report), which highlighted the lack of university-qualified students in Australia. The report said that demand would outpace supply this year, which could be why it’s fairly easy to find a job here. Our view is almost certainly skewed by the fact that we come from the US, which has the highest percentage of people with college degrees. (In fact, I recently came across this article, which I thought was pretty interesting.) However, when other things here seem so similar to the US, it’s definitely startling for us to realize how different the higher education situations are in the two countries. It will certainly be interesting to see what happens to education here in Australia in the coming years.
Wednesday 19 May 2010
Tuesday 11 May 2010
The Footy
A few weeks back, we had the chance to watch the footy—live. For those of you who don’t know, footy is Australian Rules Football, and looks like a combination of many sports, including hockey, basketball, soccer, volleyball, football, rugby, and ultimate Frisbee.
There are 18 players per side, four goal posts, and no pads. You start the game with a ball up, which is essentially a jump ball. Then, if your team has the ball, you can either kick or hand ball (sort of like an underhand volleyball serve) the footy to another player on your team, or you can run and occasionally bounce (dribble) the ball down the field while you’re looking for someone to pass to, either via a kick or hand ball. The other team tries to tackle the player with the ball, or catch the ball in the air. If a player catches a kick that goes more than 15 m, then they get a free kick from where they caught it, meaning that no one can tackle them. The point of the game is to kick the ball through the middle two posts, which scores as a 6 point goal. If the ball instead goes through the first and second posts or third and fourth posts, then the team gets one point.
The game is much faster paced than American football, or gridiron, as they refer to it here. The players are very fit, as they have to be able to run, tackle and kick all the time. And, they wear very short shorts. The umpires have to be just as fit as the players (though certainly not as muscular). In fact, I’ve never seen umpires take their job so seriously as in footy. They sprint all over the field, even after a goal is scored. They practice their boundary throw-in technique while the teams are warming up before the game starts. They do bounce downs and ball ups and blow their whistles all the time. Interestingly, play doesn’t stop when they blow the whistle, which also seems to be the case in netball. I have to admit that it was a bit confusing for me at first, since I’m used to a whistle meaning stop play in sports.
Our team, the Adelaide Crows, played very poorly and lost to the Sydney Swans. Unfortunately, their season has continued to go badly, and they just finally won their first game against Richmond, the only other team that hadn’t yet won a game. That means the Crows narrowly avoided winning the Wooden Spoon. I’m not entirely clear about this award, but I think it goes to the worst team, and is definitely handed out in more sports than just footy. Anyways, on the front page of the paper the day the Crows played Richmond, there was a picture of a little girl in a Crows uniform crying and holding an enormous wooden spoon.
A few things surprised me a little bit about the game. First, Adelaide has organized for there to be free Footy Shuttles to the game from suburbs all over Adelaide. They also take people home. I think this is a wonderful idea—the oval is not really in a convenient location, and it seems to make so much sense to reduce the amount of traffic by encouraging the people to ride free buses. We rode one home, and it was great apart from the three drunk guys sitting just ahead of us. I think people like that should just be kicked off the bus and have to find their own way home. I suppose that’s the down side of free transportation—people know they have a designated driver, so feel like they can behave irresponsibly. However, given the choice, I would still opt for drunk guys on free shuttles than heaps of cars creating loads of traffic.
A second interesting thing I noticed was that there were several groups of women who had come to the game together, without any men. It was neat, because as we were walking out after the game, I heard at least two different groups of women analyzing the game. That probably happens in the US as well, but it definitely is not a common thing, and I thought it was pretty neat to see. As we’ve come to realize, footy is a huge thing here, and is a major source of community for lots of towns. Almost every little town has an oval, and people come out to watch the footy at their local ovals every weekend. People work hard to fundraise to support the footy clubs with things like lights for night games, and better facilities. Pretty cool.
The history of the game is fairly interesting, and you can read more on Wikipedia, if you're interested. It started in Melbourne, and was even known as Victorian rules football for quite awhile. New South Wales and Queensland resisted the game for a long time, playing rugby instead. But, now there are footy teams everywhere, and it’s really gaining strength throughout the country. Aussies really love the footy.
Dave and I managed to catch the very end of the Tiwi Islands Footy premiership on TV. The Tiwi Islands are part of the Northern Territory and are north of Darwin. We were watching as they were doing the awards. The team that lost was nowhere to be seen. The guy announcing said that they had left the stadium and returned to their boats to start the journey back to their island. What a way to travel to a footy premiership!
The Tiwi Island Premiership is a fairly substantial tourist attraction for the Aussies. Here are some fascinating facts that I just learned about the Tiwi Islands Football League from the Wikipedia article:
- The Tiwi Australian Football League has 900 participants out of a community of about 2600, the highest football participation rate in Australia (35%).
- Many of the players have a preference for participating barefoot.
Pretty awesome. From the sounds of it, a lot of the Tiwi Island footballers are pretty good players, but very few of them play in the AFL (Australian Football League). It would probably be an interesting research project to learn about how the Islanders came to adopt footy, and to compare the footy league there with the footy league on the mainland. Anyways, I'm not sure I'll ever really catch the footy fever, but it is entertaining, and I definitely like the uniforms : )
There are 18 players per side, four goal posts, and no pads. You start the game with a ball up, which is essentially a jump ball. Then, if your team has the ball, you can either kick or hand ball (sort of like an underhand volleyball serve) the footy to another player on your team, or you can run and occasionally bounce (dribble) the ball down the field while you’re looking for someone to pass to, either via a kick or hand ball. The other team tries to tackle the player with the ball, or catch the ball in the air. If a player catches a kick that goes more than 15 m, then they get a free kick from where they caught it, meaning that no one can tackle them. The point of the game is to kick the ball through the middle two posts, which scores as a 6 point goal. If the ball instead goes through the first and second posts or third and fourth posts, then the team gets one point.The game is much faster paced than American football, or gridiron, as they refer to it here. The players are very fit, as they have to be able to run, tackle and kick all the time. And, they wear very short shorts. The umpires have to be just as fit as the players (though certainly not as muscular). In fact, I’ve never seen umpires take their job so seriously as in footy. They sprint all over the field, even after a goal is scored. They practice their boundary throw-in technique while the teams are warming up before the game starts. They do bounce downs and ball ups and blow their whistles all the time. Interestingly, play doesn’t stop when they blow the whistle, which also seems to be the case in netball. I have to admit that it was a bit confusing for me at first, since I’m used to a whistle meaning stop play in sports.Our team, the Adelaide Crows, played very poorly and lost to the Sydney Swans. Unfortunately, their season has continued to go badly, and they just finally won their first game against Richmond, the only other team that hadn’t yet won a game. That means the Crows narrowly avoided winning the Wooden Spoon. I’m not entirely clear about this award, but I think it goes to the worst team, and is definitely handed out in more sports than just footy. Anyways, on the front page of the paper the day the Crows played Richmond, there was a picture of a little girl in a Crows uniform crying and holding an enormous wooden spoon.
A few things surprised me a little bit about the game. First, Adelaide has organized for there to be free Footy Shuttles to the game from suburbs all over Adelaide. They also take people home. I think this is a wonderful idea—the oval is not really in a convenient location, and it seems to make so much sense to reduce the amount of traffic by encouraging the people to ride free buses. We rode one home, and it was great apart from the three drunk guys sitting just ahead of us. I think people like that should just be kicked off the bus and have to find their own way home. I suppose that’s the down side of free transportation—people know they have a designated driver, so feel like they can behave irresponsibly. However, given the choice, I would still opt for drunk guys on free shuttles than heaps of cars creating loads of traffic.A second interesting thing I noticed was that there were several groups of women who had come to the game together, without any men. It was neat, because as we were walking out after the game, I heard at least two different groups of women analyzing the game. That probably happens in the US as well, but it definitely is not a common thing, and I thought it was pretty neat to see. As we’ve come to realize, footy is a huge thing here, and is a major source of community for lots of towns. Almost every little town has an oval, and people come out to watch the footy at their local ovals every weekend. People work hard to fundraise to support the footy clubs with things like lights for night games, and better facilities. Pretty cool.
The history of the game is fairly interesting, and you can read more on Wikipedia, if you're interested. It started in Melbourne, and was even known as Victorian rules football for quite awhile. New South Wales and Queensland resisted the game for a long time, playing rugby instead. But, now there are footy teams everywhere, and it’s really gaining strength throughout the country. Aussies really love the footy.
Dave and I managed to catch the very end of the Tiwi Islands Footy premiership on TV. The Tiwi Islands are part of the Northern Territory and are north of Darwin. We were watching as they were doing the awards. The team that lost was nowhere to be seen. The guy announcing said that they had left the stadium and returned to their boats to start the journey back to their island. What a way to travel to a footy premiership!
The Tiwi Island Premiership is a fairly substantial tourist attraction for the Aussies. Here are some fascinating facts that I just learned about the Tiwi Islands Football League from the Wikipedia article:
- The Tiwi Australian Football League has 900 participants out of a community of about 2600, the highest football participation rate in Australia (35%).
- Many of the players have a preference for participating barefoot.
Pretty awesome. From the sounds of it, a lot of the Tiwi Island footballers are pretty good players, but very few of them play in the AFL (Australian Football League). It would probably be an interesting research project to learn about how the Islanders came to adopt footy, and to compare the footy league there with the footy league on the mainland. Anyways, I'm not sure I'll ever really catch the footy fever, but it is entertaining, and I definitely like the uniforms : )
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