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The Significance of Australian Vocational Education Institutions in Opening Access to Higher Education
Author(s) -
Moodie Gavin,
Wheelahan Leesa
Publication year - 2009
Publication title -
higher education quarterly
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.976
H-Index - 42
eISSN - 1468-2273
pISSN - 0951-5224
DOI - 10.1111/j.1468-2273.2009.00438.x
Subject(s) - vocational education , higher education , representativeness heuristic , dual (grammatical number) , further education , sociology , political science , pedagogy , medical education , economic growth , psychology , economics , medicine , social psychology , literature , art
Vocational education provides an educational but not a social ladder of opportunity to Australian higher education. The five dual‐sector universities with significant enrolments in both vocational and higher education admit about twice the proportion of students transferring from vocational education as other universities. However, since the students in the upper levels of vocational education have a socio‐economic composition similar to higher education students, vocational education does not provide a social ladder of opportunity by increasing access by students from a low socio‐economic status background. Nevertheless, the article argues for the extension of dual‐sector universities and other measures to articulate vocational and higher education and that more needs to be done to improve the representativeness of the upper levels of vocational education.