HT Chronicle of Higher Education

The authors report a field experiment with skateboarders that demonstrates that physical risk taking by young men increases in the presence of an attractive female. This increased risk taking leads to more successes but also more crash landings in front of a female observer. Mediational analyses suggest that this increase in risk taking is caused in part by elevated testosterone levels of men who performed in front of the attractive female. In addition, skateboarders’ risk taking was predicted by their performance on a reversal-learning task, reversal-learning performance was disrupted by the presence of the attractive female, and the female’s presence moderated the observed relationship between risk taking and reversal learning. These results suggest that men use physical risk taking as a sexual display strategy, and they provide suggestive evidence regarding possible hormonal and neural mechanisms.

1. Mixing music The University of Otago has installed a new mixing desk and other equipment for its recording facility, costing around $1m. They plan to use a KAREN connection to enable real-time recording with others around NZ and the world. 
2. ITPs to Rugby SIT Council Chairperson Graham Cooney is seeking a Board position with the NZ Rugby Union.
3. New Bay building Bay of Plenty Polytechnic has opened a new welding and engineering facility. I hope it gets used well, as many polytechnics seem to have more lathes than students. The new facility includes space for the Titanium Industry Development Assn, which could be a big deal one day if that industry gets off the ground.

Many of you will have heard that a lot of our productivity growth in recent years has come from employing more people to work longer hours, which is not all that smart or sustainable (we’ll run out of people and our people are relatively expensive in the global sense).

But today’s release has something that I hadn’t noticed before. I’d always assumed that as the economy expanded in the 2000s that we were employing more people with lower skills. Stats NZ, however, has shown in their Hot Off The Press release (p.10) that more skilled people were employed on average from 1999-2009, and that their productivity was worse. See below for the details.

The composition-adjusted input series allows us to track changes in the skill level of the workforce over time. To do this, it needs to be compared with the unweighted labour volume series. The difference between these two series represents the change in the skill level – measured using qualification and experience proxies – of workers.

This composition-adjusted input series explicitly accounts for quality. It is generally considered to provide the most representative measure of labour input. Alternatively, the headline labour input series implicitly adjusts for quality. It does this by giving higher weight to industries with above average wage rates…

The composition-adjusted series is clearly growing faster than either the unweighted labour volume series or the headline measure. As labour productivity is measured as residual output growth above labour input growth, the implication is that composition-adjusted productivity is growing slower than the other productivity measures.

I’m happy to be corrected, as it’s the first time I’ve had a look at these stats and I could have the wrong end of the stick. But if it’s true, and more educated people are less productive, it might make budget bids a bit harder in tertiary education!

What do you think? I’d really rather be wrong on this one.

The project came out of the Canterbury employers’ summit last year and has been championed by Rod Carr, VC of the University of Canterbury, with the support of Canterbury Employers Chamber of Commerce and Christchurch Development Corporation. The Press has written a story and editorial on the issue that you can read, but I’d rather you focus on the projects that have won. Check out their storyboards and have a think about how you could help support similar big projects.

1. Central Plains Water Enhancement - major irrigation project
2. Hurunui Water Project - major irrigation project
3. International Student Village - central city initiative to attract another 1000 international students
4. Te Ao Hou - using waste runoff from agricultural land and solar technology to grow algae to support an aquaculture project (and much more).

The support package for each winner is detailed below at the V5 site and includes up to 50 days of professional services per project and other support.

I remember being on Nine to Noon with Anne Tolley last year, when I was representing the ITP sector, and she said that no-one would be allowed to go above their cap, because there was no money budgeted for extra student loan expenditure. It was the first time she’d said that publicly and TEC reinforced that message publicly and privately. I suspected at the time that universities would be given the nod and allowed to over-enrol (and heard some ITPs claim that they had been given leeway too) , but I was assured by TEC that the same message was going out to the whole sector – no exceeding the cap.

Now Roy Crawford, VC at the University of Waikato, has confirmed to The Waikato Times that they enrolled 106% of their cap last year (with 100% being spot on target), whereas the rules only allowed people to enrol up to 103% of their cap. Now did Waikato do this off their own bat or were they given encouragement by the government? And even if they weren’t given encouragement, will they face any sanction? The questions are important because thousands of extra students could have been enrolled last year, but most providers took the government’s statements seriously. If the government doesn’t deal with this, then we can expect a lot more enrolments above the 103% cap in 2010.

I have put in an OIA request on last year’s enrolments and will share them with readers when the answers come through. My guess is that 4-10 TEIs exceeded the 103% cap in 2009.

The Minister has been able to appoint four people to tertiary education institution councils under the Education Act 1989, but changes to the Act last last year mean that those four reps will be half of the total Council in ITPs. The Minister is also able to appoint the Chairperson at ITPs. He will do so next week.

I am supportive of the Minister appointing people to the Councils of ITPs, as the Minister does represent the ultimate owner of the institution (putting aside university sector semantics). But there are problems. If the Minister is to name representatives, then you would expect a clear vision as to what the Council is supposed to do and what competencies are needed on the Councils – I’m not confident that the current process consistently delivers on those issues (under this Minister or his predecessors over 20 years). I expect a pretty clear message from the Minister next week though. Of course, whatever you do with process design, Ministers are still bound to appoint party flunkies from time to time.

Another issue is the protection of institutional autonomy, but that is becoming less important in ITPs. Institutional autonomy has never been a standalone item – a better shorthand would be the “institutional autonomy-regulation balance”, which more accurately reflects section 160 of the Education Act 1989. And over the last couple of years, government agencies and Ministers have clearly decided that institutional autonomy is less important than institutional regulation in ITPs. In that light, it seems quite sensible to have greater Ministerial input in Councils.

Finally, whatever you or I might think about whether or how the Minister should appoint people to Councils, the political reality is that not many people care about it and that it was as easy as pie for the government to change the legislation last year. It’s a useful lesson for how things that seem set in stone can change very quickly, and one that we might see more or this year.