While metropolitan campuses have not delivered regional Australian universities a parity share of international students, one vice-chancellor says they can complement the bush’s natural advantages in work-integrated learning.

Federation University, headquartered in regional Ballarat, says its newly acquired campus in much larger Melbourne will play an important role in making internships and cadetships standard parts of every undergraduate degree.

Vice-chancellor Duncan Bentley said Federation’s , now being rolled out after a year of “intensive” testing, was the university’s response to “the crying need” from regional industry.

“We’ve got huge demand from employers. We can…provide them with the workforce they need, in their context, in their location, for their sector, where they are now.”

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In a scheme inspired by Britain’s degree apprenticeships, Germany’s and the cooperative education models of Boston’s Northeastern and Canada’s Waterloo universities, “pretty much” every Federation undergraduate will undertake a placement – generally paid at the minimum wage – for academic credit.

Stints will range from 60 days to longer-term cadetships of at least three days a week. Bentley said employers would co-design the placements, conduct academic assessment in the workplace and co-deliver some of the teaching, ensuring that the workplaces made a meaningful contribution to the students’ education – and vice versa.

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“It isn’t just your sort of standard model of education where you do a bit of work stuff on the way. You’ve got to make sure that the employer knows exactly what is required of them. The supervisors need to be trained.”

He said the scheme would also help overcome a recent phenomenon where employers, desperate for staff, recruited students in the middle of their degrees – ultimately derailing students’ long-term careers and industries’ future supply of qualified workers.

Nevertheless, he said, employers did not necessarily need workers with full degrees. “I’m not wedded to this…traditional view [that] qualifications have to be three- or four-year undergraduate degrees and two-year master’s or whatever. For goodness’ sake, let’s co-design with the employers the sort of credentials they want [where] students [are] learning as they need it through their careers.”

Federation’s inner Melbourne campus, to be officially launched on 20 February, currently houses about 230 foreign business, engineering, health and information technology students. The university was obliged to take it over following the dissolution of the Australian Technical and Management College, which had been teaching courses on Federation’s behalf.

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Regionally based universities have often used third-party providers to deliver their degrees in metropolitan campuses, as a way of drawing revenue from international students attracted to the big cities. But these arrangements have sometimes backfired, with universities incurring regulatory action because of quality concerns about their partners.

Regional universities’ city campuses also suffered from the border closures during the coronavirus pandemic, and from rampant poaching of students by agents and private colleges after the borders reopened. Federation its Brisbane campus last year, citing “low enrolment numbers”. 

Bentley said the Melbourne campus would operate differently by catering to domestic as well as foreign students, with a brief to support placements in the metropolitan area. He said demand from employers in Melbourne’s outer suburbs had been strong.

But demand in regional centres like Ballarat, where operating costs were cheaper, were even stronger. “We’re regional,” he said. “We’ve got the employers. We might as well do it.”

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john.ross@timeshighereducation.com