Battle of the Universities: Change of preference Days
With the VTAC change of preferences deadline fast approaching, Victorian universities have been holding information events this week. I attended those from Deakin, Monash, RMIT and Melbourne in my capacity as a non year-12 mature student.
For those unfamiliar with this process, these events are aimed at helping would-be students realise alternative courses which can still be added to their VTAC preferences list. Mostly though, it’s a last ditch marketing push for the universities to entice would-be students to move their university to the top of their preference list. It’s not so much that the universities don’t have enough places, actually they don’t have enough, but it’s more than more applicants means more competition which tends to push the ENTER scores upwards which is desirable for them for many reasons. So what of the events?
First of all, it’s clear that these events are aimed at year 12 students. If you talk to staff they will all tend to sell up the idea of trying to increase mature students but it seemed pretty theoretical to me. Getting down to the events, my experience with the prestigious universities (Melbourne and Monash) has been pretty negative. Condescending and patronising staff, poor and even false information, and of course the wider issue of completely unreasonable entry requirements. On this latter point, most people appear to think it’s easy to get into a university as a mature student – that your industry experience bypasses other requirements. How I wish that were true.
A case in point that even as a journalist for a number of years, including a magazine editor, Melbourne University wont cut my any kind of break on having to demonstrate English aptitude would you believe. That means that if using their single-subject pathway I’d need to pick up an actual English subject in order to be able to gain entry into a standard BA Arts. Which is a demonstration of how inflexible they are in the face of blatantly relevant industry experience. On the other hand I don’t mind so much, such a subject would be quite fun. Often when browsing available units at the universities I feel like a kid in a candy store, so’s to speak.
So anyway, back to those events… I noticed a few things in general. The first being that they each offered a sort of faculty expo whereby in a common area they set up a desk for every faculty with some staff there able to offer specific advice and information pertaining to each course. Awesome in principal but here’s how it actually worked: All faculty desks but one were deserted. The arts desk, at every university, had a sea of people in front of it. I find that kind of depressing but I suppose that faculty tends to lend itself to an audience that still isn’t sure about what they want to do at this late stage in the game.
Unfortunately that meant that at most events I didn’t get to speak to the one person I really wanted to, that is the actual selection officer of their arts department. If I got to speak to them I planned to ask them what you look for in a mature student entry path (Eg. the Pi form) and what sort of numbers of places are available. Ultimately just trying to gauge some level of chance. In fact out of every University, I’ve only really got one good answer and that was via email from RMIT. These guys are excellent with events and they’re also excellent with email. Sadly in that case the answer is “Not much chance mate,” to paraphrase. Still, that was useful.
At these events only Deakin made me feel at home. They still had some organisational issues and it seems latest information hadn’t really filtered down through everyone (they gave a presentation where they openly spoke about full-fee places in VTAC, despite the fact that these haven’t existed for the last year due to a directive from the Rudd government to abolish such places), but in general it was pretty easy to talk to general staff, no hint of sneery condescension, although it too had that issue where arts was rammed all the way up until the expo closed… I had a nice feeling about Deakin. It’s kind of hard to ignore the fact that it’s ranked so much worse than everyone else though, but I’m not sure how much I care about that. It’s not like I’d get a job off the back of how prestigious the university is, I’m genuinely in this for the skills. Deakin offer me much more than any other university would do, I’m free to add very interesting double degree options such as Arts (Chinese) and Commerce. For that reason Deakin dominates my VTAC list. I really need to speak to their Chinese coordinator though, but they’re sadly on holidays until the new year.
Monash had their event at the Caulfield campus which was annoying because I was only interested in the Clayton campus. Kind of baffled why, since it’s a horrid campus where Clayton is apparently lovely (my wife has been). These guys take the gold star for making me feel like a prize wanker for wanting to study with them, and giving me out and out wrong information. Crumbs the guy I spoke to didn’t even know what the VTAC web site was. Bizarrely he did give me the one bit of info that proved fruitful, the existence of Monash single-subject study.
I’ll do another update about this later, what I’ve learned invalidates some of my earlier whining about the lack of full-fee places. In terms of VTAC, I’ve got Arts Languages in my list, because it’s the only thing which doesn’t have further entry requirements. That would actually be pretty nice if they did make me an offer, Clayton campus is as well located for me as Deakin (looks like a very nice bus journey from leafy Belgrave in fact) and I know their Chinese program is very well respected too. If I thought it’d make any difference I’d raise the preference on my list but I expect they wont make me an offer anyway. I’ve fired them a query regarding the single-subject pathway, with a request that I go down to Clayton and speak to someone. I need that campus tour and to see if earlier treatment I got was an aberration or if they really don’t like my sort around these parts.
At Melbourne I walked up and enquired about CAP. They pointed me to Arts. Or rather the sea of people in front of the arts desk. That’s actually fine, Melbourne University have a ‘CAP officer’ in charge of this stuff and that person had already been extremely helpful in email. Since Melbourne’s entry requirements precluded me putting a BA on the VTAC list I had no reason to talk to anyone else there anyway so I just went on my own campus tour. Gosh, it’s really very lovely there. Almost too lovely. I sort of felt a bit disappointed I couldn’t walk up to a scruffy community post and have a go at reading the Chinese personal ads placed there. I think my dress code would definitely go up a notch if I went to Melbourne!
RMIT… well they’re excellent, they’re always excellent. I think this is because of their heavy bias on the TAFE side of things, they’re used to dealing with people from various pathways but ultimately they seem to have a way higher ratio of genuinely clued up staff who are extremely good at their jobs. Every event they do is excellent. They even put people on the street so you can’t miss the event, and people walking around who look at a loss are actively chased down and pointed in the right direction. To be fair they’re vastly smaller in undergrad stuff so they have to deal with a bunch less people. I don’t even really know why I went to this one, I know everything I need to know, they only do one course I want, it’s top of my VTAC list but I’ve no chance of getting into it. Still had a conversation with a staff member there and asked them about single subject study. Turns out they do it too but also follow that great Victorian tertiary tradition of calling it something entirely different from anyone else. Still, it was good info and provided a new lead to chase.
After all of these events I didn’t make a single change to my VTAC. That’s because I didn’t learn anything I couldn’t easily find out concerning undergrad courses. Fortunately the deadlines for single subject/CAP like schemes is way later into the new year so I’ve plenty of time to formulate a plan while I wait and see what happens with round 1 offers.
Rather than that uncertain Christmas, things are looking up. I’ve got lots of stuff to research regarding back-up plans with single-subject pathways. This seems less like a cripplingly expensive fall back plan now I know every university offers a form of it and I can basically do one semester of it and then hit every uni up again directly for a mid-year entry. Not that dumping thousands of dollars in fees up front wont hurt but at least it’s a definate path way…
Tell you what though, it’s been a long road figuring out that this pathway even existed.
