industry & research
Subsidising fairness
Commonwealth tuition assistance is no longer limited to universities – a step towards a more equitable system. By Andrew Norton
Australian higher education is dominated by public universities, but this is an accidental policy outcome. The current system’ s architects did not intend it, and policymakers since have been slowly undoing it. Extending Commonwealth tuition subsidies beyond the public universities, as announced in the 2014 Budget, will correct historical anomalies and give Australia a fairer and more diverse higher education system.
The diversity story starts in the late 1980s. Australia then had a range of colleges of advanced education, institutes of technology and other higher education providers. About 70 of them received some government support, and their combined enrolments slightly outnumbered that of the 19 universities that were active at the time.
This system was under pressure. Some institutions struggled with low student numbers, whilst others believed they should be universities. An ambitious education minister, John Dawkins, planned to significantly increase student numbers whilst keeping costs down. He proposed institutional mergers to achieve economies of scale.
In calling for mergers, Dawkins’ aim was not an entirely university-based system. He thought that higher-education colleges and institutes should seriously consider keeping their names and roles in a diverse system. But the policy incentives he put in place led to almost all publicly funded colleges and institutes merging with, or converting into, public universities by the early 1990s.
This situation has always had its critics, and over time alternatives to public universities have developed. As long ago as 1999, according to research published at the time, there were two private universities – Bond and Notre Dame – and 78 private nonuniversity higher education providers. Together with a few small publicly owned providers, they enrolled more than 30,000.
As student numbers grew outside the public university sector, so did objections to their exclusion from government support. I heard
16 | campusreview. com. au