Publishing graduate incomes 5 years after finishing a course (using IRD data) could be the least expensive and most effective thing the Minister of Tertiary Education does to mitigate the vast waste of tax money that is Grant Robertson's interest free student loan scheme.
The government announcement must be low-key. I have not found it on the Minister's website. Reports talk of publishing in relation to "courses". Presumably that will mean courses at identified institutions. If so, for the first time the tertiary institutions will be ranked on a measure with a clear and simple meaning for enrolling students.
In the US private publishers sample graduate information. Often they measure average time to first job, starting salaries and salaries at five years. Their published gradings have a substantial influence on enrollment preferences. New Zealand Vice Chancellors have long had some survey information of this kind but it has never been published in a form likely to be useful to students.
The PBRF (Performance Based Research Fund) ranking is coming up for its second application as at June this year. It rates academics (and their schools and universities) according to their published research output. It is partly a response to fears that the enrollment based funding system had precipitated a race to the bottom, with university recruitment being driven by the profitability of courses that maximised student numbers. That in turn could be overly influenced by perceived ease of passing, not academic quality..
Employers on the other hand generally demand courses with rigour. They may not much care about the course content as long as the exam results can be a proxy or heuristic for the aptitudes that make workplace success likely (diligence, intelligence, ambition etc).
The relative starting salaries and salaries 5 years out, of graduates in the same "courses" but from different institutions, could create a stronger student demand for rigour, and more support from university management for .staff who weed out the unsuitable students, to maintain quality reputations
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Stephen, it was in National's election policy – p.5 at http://www.national.org.nz/PDF_General/Tertiary_Education_policy.pdf. It has been discussed with tertiary education leaders since before the election. It builds on previous Stats NZ/MOE/DOL work matching education and IRD data.