High standards urged for ag graduates

A collaboration between four universities - the University of Tas; Charles Sturt University, NSW; the University of Western Sydney; and the University of Adelaide - has come up with a set of guidelines for the aims of all agricultural courses.

University of Adelaide project lead Amanda Able said agriculture had traditionally been placed in the science division and expected to work within its standards and learning thresholds.

"Even though agriculture fits in science it also has business and social aspects not captured in science," Prof Able said.

"We wanted to make sure we had a set of standards for agriculture specifically."

Overall project leader, University of Tas's undergraduate degree coordinator of agriculture Tina Acuna, said the standards would represent what students should know, understand and be able to do at the time of graduation.

"The aim of the standards isn't to make every university the same or even to standardise the curriculum - it is about enabling students to have confidence that their degree is held to a high standard," she said.

"It is important that we raise the profile and reputation of university education in agriculture to help address the current skills shortage where there are almost six jobs for every agriculture graduate."

Prof Able said one of the first steps was trying to define what people considered to be agriculture.

"On the face it seems fairly obvious but includes so many different components," she said.

"Agriculture is a multi-disciplinary area by its very nature. And we wanted to make sure we had some of that captured with what we want to see in our graduates."

Prof Able was a member of a team in a series of workshops held throughout the country with industry, academics and students.

She said feedback from these workshops, particularly in SA, showed that the industry wanted graduates with a wide range of skills beyond vocational knowledge.

It was important that students graduating with agricultural degrees had ''high standards''.

"Agriculture is one of the principal supporters of the Australian economy and it is important those working in it are highly skilled and for industry to be able to trust that,'' she said.

The project has developed a set of standards that are able to audited by the Tertiary Education Quality and Standards Agent.

Prof Able said the next step was for each of the four universities involved to do their own curriculum-mapping to ensure they met the thresholds. This could then be used as a case study for other institutions with agriculture-related degrees.

- ELIZABETH ANDERSON