Speaking to ifa, Deakin University associate professor Adrian Raftery said a number of factors have lead the school to look for master’s qualified advisers to lead courses.
“Internally with promotions and workloads I’m also losing some hours from other lecturers who are basically just doing other roles within the university rather than being in front of students,” he said.
“Just to maintain the status quo there’s obviously a need to recruit more staff, and then also we have an expectation that our number of student enrolments between now and 2024 will naturally increase purely because of the changes.”
Legally, lecturers are required to have a higher qualification than their students, Mr Raftery explained, meaning only master’s qualified advisers would be able to lead bachelor’s courses.
“We’ve had a large number of inquiries already on a part-time basis, which is fantastic because there are so many advisers who are willing to put back into the next generation and impart their knowledge,” he said.
“And I guess for us ourselves, one thing that we pride ourselves on is that all of our lecturers have practitioner experience, and we don’t recruit people from the finance department who don’t know an SOA from their backside, they’ve actually lived it and breathed it, which is dreadfully important.”
Mr Raftery added that most Australian universities will not have the right staff to meet the increased demand placed on financial advice courses in preparation for the incoming adviser standards.
“There’s a number of universities trying to get FPEC accreditation but don’t have the staffing – we know the staff aren’t out there, and all they’re going to be doing is poaching staff from other universities,” he said.
“There’s going to be some poaching that occurs, and that’s just shifting the problem rather than creating new opportunities.”
Considering what’s coming out of the royal commission we just need to get on with the business of cleaning up our industry, by creating barriers to entry such as minimum education requirements that society reasonably expects from any other group calling themselves “professionals” such as Accountants, Lawyers, Doctors. On the topic of the new education requirements, a line needs to be drawn in the sand and yes it will hurt some great advisors, but fortunately the cost will far out weigh the benefits in the longer term, by building a sustainable, trusted and valued profession, who are both academically and practically qualified to provided the very technical and complex advice it does provide. Adrian you are correct, the lecturers do need to be more qualified than their students, but good luck with finding suitable candidates within the industry to fill the quota that we will need to satisfy the courses that will result as the new standards are rolled out.
Adrian, put me through a Masters degree free of charge at Deakin in FP and then I’ll sign a contract to lecture for 3 years minimum following that.
Only maybe 10% of advisers will meet the new standards, why would they want to work for Deakin? And now Deakin are saying they don’t have the number or quality of teachers to help qualify the other 90%. Could this industry become more of a comedy?
cue Benny Hill Music. 😳
FASEA – increase standards to the point where Unis don’t have the personnel to teach them!!!! Hahahaha!!:lol::lol::shock:
So FASEA regulate we get a Degree ? from people that have no experience ? Aren’t the good ethical advisers working full time ?
yes, but that doesn’t make the FASEA board money via their conflicts of interest, so here we are
Perhaps yet another broke Australian University which at some point has made a whole bunch of expensive fixed full time academic teaching staff redundant, and is now replacing full time academics with Casuals..on a substantially lower rate of pay… and on short term contracts… that can easily be replaced if student enrollments turn out to be low. This is very common of most Uni’s since 2009. Before you know it, if you’re a full time academic you’re out drumming up business on TV, Social Media and speaking at conferences.
The article also forget to mention that candidates must be prepared to learn Chinese as 95% of students are now from an overseas market. Must also be prepared to mark papers and assignments twice because some Australians Universities are so broke they can’t fail students the first time.
Oh and some of these people have been put in charge of deciding the meaning of a degree and we wonder mysteriously about the outcome. I hope readers can appreciate from my above comments how shafted advisers are and how clueless the FPA are at gifting them FPEC and a submission stating experience is worth 17 points out of 100.
Think you will find that Deakin are one of the more profitable unis going around. We recruit for them regularly & see a lot of their financial planning students at events – most are WASPs with a very small sprinkle of internationals. I don’t think either myself or my business partner have met a first generation Chinese student via them – don’t they mostly do accounting where its all numbers & extra points for residency status?
Maybe Deakin is an exception in regards to the level of “brokeness”. You certainly couldn’t, in today’s environment, use the word “profitable” to describe any Uni, especially with the war going on between Uni’s and private sector education for students. Universities today are so broke the majority are heavily dependent on offshore enrollments for survival. A majority of Universities offering finance majors do have offshore students numbers at around 95%. Just Google calls by a leading academic for Uni’s to cut there dependency on foreign students. With these financial pressures and cuts of $2.2 billion from a freeze on University funding it highlights the financial pressures Universities face. I’m purely pointing out perhaps, just perhaps why FASEA came to a conclusion of a certain meaning of a degree.
What adviser would want a job lecturing people who are only in the classroom because of a gun to their head, many of whom would know much more than the lecturer? The pay better be good.
The role isn’t teaching postgraduate students but rather undergrad students (ie the kids with no experience) the way I read it.
Makes you wonder where all the PhD qualified staff with financial planning experience will come from in order to teach masters courses????
University of New England (UNE) offer Bachelor of Commerce (Financial Planning) and Graduate Diploma (Financial Planning). Their lecturers all have industry experience as real advisers.
This the same uni who closed down their financial planning programs a few years ago & shafted their students to finish their degrees elsewhere?
A good reason why FASEA should recognise all finance related degrees in Australia for experience advisers, regardless of age. It’s going to be hard for those advisers to get that course listed on FASEA list. Poor sods. Even RMIT dropped their Masters in FP as well.
“We don’t recruit people from the finance department who don’t know an SOA from their backside”. This comment here demonstrates the problem with the proposed education changes. No comment about appropriate advice, technical skills, interpersonal skills or real life experience with clients, just a focus on can you provide a 50+ page SOA that clients don’t want, and in the majority of cases don’t read. It’s funny how in this whole mess no one has every considered what the clients want, and if they are better off.
I would suggest that his comment basically encapsulates that the advisers rather than Finance academics would know more about all of those things & would be better equipped to be in front of the classroom.
Positive news on the standards implementation. [b][i]Lecturers who have actually done the job in the real world. [/i][/b] Adrian Raftery is a lecturer who has done the job in the real world so I suppose he understands what most of us have all been concerned about for decades. Adrian, you are a minority we need to make a majority. Thanks for your efforts and constructive approach.