Components of failure

Abstract

Since the publication of the Murray Committees report on Australian universities in 1957 it has become known that, of every hundred day students who commence courses at Australian universities, some sixtyfive fail to graduate in minimum time and forty-two fail to graduate at all. The rate of failure is not uniform among universities nor is it uniform among faculties within the one university, so that some faculties in some universities show or have shown failure rates of over fifty per cent. Failure in first year is particularly heavy. When the Murray Committee presses the need for 'more and more highly educated people all along the line, and in particular for more and more graduates of an increasing variety of kinds', the 'more' may be taken to mean not simply more as the population increases, but more in relation to population. Because of die complexity of life, if not because of the rivalry of nations, our age and country require competence and skill and specialist knowledge as never before. It is regrettable to employ a euphemism — that, at such a time, so many students are thwarted in their ambitions, and leave the universities unqualified to serve in ways they would wish and in ways essential to the nation's life and development. And to deplore the shortage of graduates vocationally or technically trained in physics, chemistry, engineering, genetics, bacteriology and the like, or prepared for the key profession of teaching, is not inconsistent with fidelity to the tradition that the university's central function is to offer a 'full and true education', to develop 'the whole man'.