Education provider Kaplan Professional will offer 10 Women in Finance scholarships in 2022 following positive engagement and take-up with the initiative last year.
The Women in Finance Scholarships initiative was part of a $1.5 million grant that the Financial Planning Association of Australia (FPA) was awarded in 2021 by the Prime Minister and Cabinet Office for Women.
The 10 scholarships would cover the tuition fees of any two subjects in Kaplan Professional’s Master of Financial Planning or Master of Applied Finance.
The FPA would allocate $50,000 to Kaplan Professional to fund the 10 scholarships.
Kaplan Professional chief executive, Brian Knight, said he was delighted to again offer the Women in Finance Scholarships in 2022.
“We were incredibly proud of the take-up last year and the outstanding quality of applicants.
“Due to the fact there were so many deserving applicants, we made the decision to provide additional funding and award 11 scholarships.
“Seven other women who had compelling applications, but were not awarded a scholarship, were offered significantly reduced tuition fees,” he said.
Knight expressed Kaplan Professional’s continued commitment to promoting inclusion and diversity throughout the industry.
“Given some of the barriers to entry and the financial burden women may face, we believe it is incredibly important women of all backgrounds and circumstances are supported to achieve their education and career goals.
“We are pleased to include both the Master of Financial Planning and Master of Applied Finance to widen the scope of the scheme and provide more women with the opportunity to apply.
2021 Women in Finance Scholarship recipient and Precision Wealth Associate Adviser, Nicole Gardner, said the scholarship scheme had benefited her significantly in both a personal and professional sense.
“The scholarship has helped me financially, but it has also given me a sense of pride and a feeling of being encouraged and supported along the way.
“I would encourage other women to apply for the scholarship. As a mother of three young children who also works full-time, knowing I have the support of Kaplan Professional and the FPA through the scholarship has been motivating and has helped me to complete my study.”
Comments
my most hated platitude, the oxymoron " inclusion and diversity" really means at the exclusion of others. I would actually love to know what "the barriers to entry and the financial burden women may face" are specifically Brian? Like seriously mate, Fin services head offices are like 65% women, half foreign born. Is nursing and psychology, teaching offering scholarships to blokes to bring more diversity? What about a minister for blokes Brian, you scared?. Towing the woke line to keep your $$$. Im sure the women at home appreciate it.
This is identity politics and creates division rather than unity.
So, if there are not also 10 scholarships for males, then this is blatantly sexist.
For years the AFA ran the Female Adviser of the Year, but not Male Adviser of the Year and then the applicants for Female Adviser of the Year were also able to qualify for the Adviser of the Year award .
What is this really saying?
Is it saying that intelligent, independent and immensely capable females still need a " hand up " or a "special" award that men can't be involved in to make them feel like they are achieving ??
This is simply ridiculous and insulting to all those brilliant and capable females and does nothing to close the gap in gender equity whatsoever.
It actually creates division and segmentation.
Imagine if the AFA had run a Male Adviser of the Year Award for years and years without allowing females the opportunity to qualify and then the same male also won the overall Adviser of the Year Award !!
The upheaval and negativity would have been relentless.
This is demeaning to women, not only in financial services, but everywhere.
I was about to enrol in a Kaplan course, but since they are discriminating against me based on my gender, I will go for the other institution. Thanks for the warning MM.
I'm sure Kaplan will survive.
So the government issues a grant to the FPA to encourage Women in Finance and Kaplan gets $50,000 to be able to offer scholarships to 10 women and you get your nickers in a twist? No wonder women feel discriminated against in this industry. I hate to break it to you but I am pretty sure every Uni would have scholarships just for women.
Do women really feel discriminated against? Who and why? I think your talking out your you know what. fin services industry is 65% women, a majority in Head offices where income is on average higher for hours than advisers (anecdotally). Uni student numbers higher for women across all courses and increasing. It’s well know for years less and less boys go to uni. So untie your knickers and get some facts. If anyone needs a leg up to formal education it’s young men - but that doesn’t score woke points. You want to see do discrimination, go see the outcomes for fathers in the family court
I gather some women feel discriminated against. A few precious petals on this forum also feel discriminated against by the sound of it.
Kaplan is the Red Rooster of education providers. The quality of their units is far below those at universities and the delivery could hardly be lazier. Less than 1 hour of total lecture time for a unit, no workshops and no tutorials. I feel bad for any women who accept these Kaplan scholarships.
Credit to the FPA for funding this turgid institution.
Interesting, you have compared each course? Are you a meerkat? Or an industry super fund?
Ive just completed first unit of a masters, ive also done a double major in econs and finance at uni, and ill tell you its not red rooster learning, I found it a very useful subject and quite challenging. Are you speaking from experience anon?
Hi Hang on, I think you meant to raise your query with New Entrant. I haven't compared the courses like he appears to have done and label them after fast food brands.
@Hang FPC001B for me was only 2 weeks of content covering economic theory (nowhere near enough for other people without finance/econ undergrad) and the rest was 5 weeks of mediocre coverage of the Australian legal system and corporations law. It wasn't challenging and there was little substance. Even if you assign a disproportionate amount of time to study for this subject, it still has only half the content (7 weeks vs 13 weeks) and a fraction of the delivery of a university equivalent. Compared to a university business law subject, it had 5 weeks of legal content with almost no delivery vs 13 weeks at a university.
FPC001B is a 12 week course with one hour pw lecture and one hour pw tutorial. Total study load with reading & exams & assignments 120-180 hours. Seems like you have missed large chunks of the course. Did you do the standard FPC001B or an abridged version offered as a conversion module?
An academic subject is supposed to be recognised as a 120-180 hour study load at a tertiary institution but when I completed the standard FPC001B (was not a financial adviser prior to studying for the Grad Dip/Master's in 2020), there were only 7 Topic Notes for 7 weeks of content, usually between 30-70 pages each.
My cohort did not have weekly lectures in FPC001B, or the 2nd, 3rd, or 4th subjects, and there were no tutorials. Nowhere close to the standard of 120-180 hours per subject and after transferring to a university the difference was stark.
We were looking for a provider to provide courses to 200 of our ARs. I think we will give Kaplan a swerve Brian seeing as you clearly discriminate against some students. Furthermore, your attitude that women are somehow have a barrier to success in fin services because they are women is troubling.
I'm sure you were "looking".
Yes we were looking.
Sure you were, and for only 200 AR. Any of those "200 AR" happen to be women?
I've done Grad Dip units at both Kaplan and a prominent uni, and found Kaplan much better. Both courses had one hour per week of lectures and one hour of tutorial. Course notes were similar. The big difference was quality of lecturer. The uni lecturer was a staff academic who basically regurgitated course notes and reference material, seemingly without much understanding of its real world application. The Kaplan lecturer was a practising financial planner who was able to provide lots of real world examples and application insights.
I suspect the Kaplan units you are disparaging are their lower level vocational units, not their higher standard Grad Dip units which are FASEA approved.
I successfully completed 4 Grad Dip units with Kaplan before transferring to a university. The course notes with the university were much better, the lecturer was much better, the university had more than 20 hours of lectures vs Kaplan with 40 minutes on a per subject basis. That doesn't include the university tutorials vs Kaplan which had no tutorials when I completed the Grad Dip subjects. Kaplan doesn't come anywhere close to the level of quality or delivery of a major university.
With respect to the "real world application" that's a popular talking point that's coming out of your behind. The "application" aspect within the Kaplan subjects was no better than the university and the mechanisms for feedback/iterative learning were worse than the university because there were no tutorials or workshops. Entertaining your stereotype for a moment, the Kaplan subject content could not be any more applied when there were no classes to apply the content in. For me it was a short recording, a PDF, assignments and exams. Half the Kaplan topic notes contained in the PDFs were bullet pointed lists; especially in FPC001B, shows the hallmark of laziness and lack of understanding of what teaching is supposed to be.
More recently I've seen Kaplan deliver bi-weekly webinars and while an improvement over when I took the subjects, these are also clearly inferior to university classes.
*fortnightly, not bi-weekly
For what it’s worth, I only had to do one course via Kaplan (mandatory ethics for advisers), and was also doing bachelor via Swinburne uni. While only one subject (don’t remember any lectures) the course notes were excellently written from Kaplan and made sense on a bit of psychology type subject. Doing some stats and psych subjects with Swinburne were a great mess and so hard to follow. So let’s home Kaplan so let HR run the company into the ground with unintelligent woke crap (sorry folks attendance at higher learning is much higher overall for women and just bc women prefer, on average ‘caring’ type roles doesn’t mean any discrimination. Societal intelligence has peaked and we are in a devolution stage.
Sounds to me like you are describing the ADFS at Kaplan, not the Grad Dip. I've done both, and your description is fairly close to my experience of the ADFS and a million miles from my experience of the Grad Dip.
Congratulations Kaplan - a great initiative.
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