ALMOST one-quarter of undergraduate students at Swinburne University of Technology and the University of Western Sydney are TAFE graduates who articulated into their degree programs.

Those two institutions lead the country with the biggest intakes of TAFE students into higher education, more than doubling their numbers since 2000.

Recent figures from the federal Department of Education, Science and Training show that regional, new-generation and technology-based universities take more TAFE graduates than the Group of Eight.

The University of Western Australia accepted no students on the basis of prior TAFE studies in 2005 and the universities of Sydney and Adelaide had 1 per cent of degree students with TAFE qualifications.

Swinburne's vice-chancellor Ian Young has called on the federal Government to switch some funding from universities to TAFE colleges to help pay for the preparation of students who do not achieve sector-wide cut-off scores for university entry.

Professor Young proposed that school-leavers who did not get an equivalent national tertiary entrance rank score above 65 start a TAFE associate degree rather than go directly to university.

"The scheme would be funded by transferring a proportion of the present government funding for each student from the university sector to TAFE," he said in a paper delivered to the TAFE Directors Australia forum in Melbourne last week. "A proportion of the funding would remain with the university sector, thus resulting in a smaller but better funded university sector."

Charles Sturt University's acting vice-chancellor Ross Chambers said: "We are certainly not adverse to that role of TAFE being strengthened; we find that for some students, that TAFE prepares them very well for university."

Professor Chambers said CSU had new joint enrolment programs in which students did TAFE and degree courses at the same time.

University of Western Sydney vice-chancellor Janice Reid said UWS was about to appoint someone to pursue closer links between academic programs in the two sectors.

She said TAFE students had always been an integral part of the university. "They have become an accepted part of the fabric of the student body," she said.

Murdoch University deputy vice-chancellor (enterprise and international) Gary Martin said Murdoch had recently introduced "education combos" where some TAFE courses included university subjects.

"Students then gain confidence by doing those Murdoch subjects to go into a university setting. For these courses, they also get guaranteed admission into a Murdoch degree."

Deakin University's vice-chancellor Sally Walker said the university was pursuing closer links with TAFE as a way to integrate itself within its regional communities and to provide scale.

A four-way partnership between Box Hill TAFE, the Gordon Institute, South Western TAFE and Deakin was in negotiation: "It will give us bulk so we can do some strategic things together", including strategic research into TAFE-university partnership arrangements.