Barilaro, speaking yesterday at a Committee for the Economic Development of Australia (CEDA) forum in Sydney, said NSW should have been building its skills workforce a decade ago. “We’re playing catch-up,” he said. A recent CEDA report deemed VET to be the “forgotten middle child” of education, arguing for the sector to be reviewed and overhauled.

Barilaro agreed. He said the prestige attached to a university degree has led to the sector being neglected for far too long.

“I’m the son of migrant parents who wanted all their children to go to university,” he told the forum. “I recall my parents always talking about university, and we know of prime ministers, parents and career advisers telling kids that the only way for a great job, a great career, and a great lifestyle, is the university pathway – and today we’re paying the price.”

NSW VET enrolment numbers plummeted by 86,300 last year. National Centre for Vocational Education Research figures show the number of people enroled in government-funded VET crashed by 10.7 per cent last year from 2014, down to 1.6 million people. The current VET funding agreement between the Commonwealth and the states expires next year.

Along with fixing up the scandal-ridden VET FEE-HELP scheme, weeding out dodgy providers, and renewing the funding agreement, Barilaro said VET needs an image change. “We need to showcase what VET actually delivers in careers, and in lifestyles,” he said.

Christina Scaife, principal and chief executive of Sydney-based private VET provider Bedford College, said NSW universities compound the problem via slip-back offers. These occur when the Universities Admissions Centre (UAC) offers students who failed to qualify for the course of their choice enrolment into alternative pathway courses.

"It makes no sense for UAC, and the universities, to make offers to students who have effectively failed to gain entry through normal means," Scaife said in a submission to the federal government's Higher Education Standards Panel.

Scaife also recounted that during a meeting earlier in the year with then-federal VET minister Scott Ryan, a TAFE representative stood up and advised it's "not the shonky training providers that are destroying TAFE, it's the universities, with their unethical offers to students who are absolutely incapable of satisfactorily completing a degree."