Bob Birrell, Post-Covid Australian universities: The need for a new teaching and research vision, Australian Universities Review, vol. 62, no. 2, 2020 (September)
Kerry Breen and Bob Birrell*, Selling medical education to international students: time for review, Internal Medicine Review, 2020 (50) (May)
* TAPRI member
Bob Birrell, The root of Sydney and Melbourne’s housing crisis: we’re building the wrong thing, The Conversation, 2 November 2015
Media: opinion piece: Bob Kinnaird and Bob Birrell, Bending the truth on market tests for Chinese workers, The Age, 4 September 2015
Katharine Betts and Bob Birrell, Truthy untruths: behind the facade of the Intergenerational Report, The Conversation, 24 July 2015
Katharine Betts, The tenuous link between population and prosperity, The Conversation, 13 March 2015
Bob Birrell, ‘Too few or perhaps too many STEM graduates’, Australian Universities’ Review, vol. 56, no. 2, 2015, pp. 71-78
Abstract
Industry bodies, research and educational organisations have lobbied intensely for increased funding for training in the STEM disciplines. It is time to reassess this advocacy. Undergraduate commencements in STEM fields have increased strongly since 2009, yet the current employment prospects for these graduates are poor. Advocates have not made a convincing case that this situation will change. The outlook in the information technology (IT) fields is particularly concerning. Domestic graduates in IT face a labour market in which their numbers are being dwarfed by the influx of immigrant IT professionals, many of whom are employed by Indian IT service companies with branches in Australia. This is occurring at the same time as Australian public and private organisations are sending offshore much of their computing work through these same IT service companies.