industry & research these complaints as a ministerial adviser on higher education in the late 1990s. Whilst students in private higher education were eligible for Youth Allowance, they were rarely entitled to Commonwealth tuition subsidies. And they had to pay their fees up front, in contrast to the HECS loans available to students in public universities.
Higher education policy in the late 1990s was obviously an artefact of its history. It lacked clear principles and was struggling to adapt to changing needs in domestic undergraduate markets. This was recognised in the West Review, officially called Learning for Life: Review of Higher Education Funding and Policy, published in 1998. Amongst other things, it recommended bringing private institutions into a system that would have resembled our current demand-driven funding.
In late 1999, then-education minister, David Kemp, brought to Cabinet a proposal to begin re-making the higher education system based on clear public policy principles. The submission argued that higher education providers should be funded according to what they do, not according to when or by whom they were founded. Students would be supported based on objective characteristics. There would have been new quality assurance and information services for students.
The Kemp Cabinet submission was leaked, and in the ensuing political controversy, Cabinet rejected its key proposals. Despite this major setback, the issue of institutional diversity did not go away.
In 2002, yet another education minister, Brendan Nelson, issued a discussion paper on institutional diversity and specialisation. His eventual reform package did not extend Commonwealth tuition subsidies to all higher education providers. But from 2005, Nelson did include them in a new incomecontingent student loan scheme, FEE- HELP. Students at private universities and non-university higher education providers could then borrow to pay their fees.
FEE-HELP revealed demand for different types of higher education from people who could not afford to pay fees up front. Bond University doubled its domestic undergraduate numbers in the five years after the new loan scheme was introduced. It offered the small classes public universities could not guarantee, and pioneered year-round teaching so bachelor’ s degrees could be completed in two years.
Over time, FEE-HELP fostered growth in both higher education providers and student numbers. As of early 2014, there were 135 higher education providers outside the public university system. Not all of them report their student numbers, but in 2012 those that did had 86,000 students, including 26,000 from overseas. First semester 2013 numbers suggest that the non-university sector continues to grow.
So we’ ve already had significant higher education outside public universities, without the“ devastating consequences” for our international reputation that Universities Australia has predicted if funding is extended beyond its members.
Accreditation and quality control over most of this period were largely statebased, but national control increased. In 2000, the Commonwealth and states agreed on common guidelines for accrediting higher education providers. As a condition of access to FEE-HELP, private providers, along with the public universities, had to undergo Australian Universities Quality Agency audits. Additional national rules applied to providers taking international students.
In late 2008, the Review of Australian Higher Education, better known as the Bradley Review, proposed a demanddriven funding system, including the non-university providers. The review recognised that confidence in quality was important and recommended a new national regulator, what became the Tertiary Education Quality and Standards Agency. The government at the time did not implement the demand-driven system beyond the public universities, but this was for financial rather than quality reasons.
The 2014 Review of the Demand Driven Funding System: Final Report, which I coauthored with David Kemp, again proposed extending Commonwealth funding beyond the public universities. This should not have surprised anyone. No independent reviewer, whether appointed by a Labor or a Liberal government, has accepted the claim that public universities and their students alone should be entitled to public support.
There is no evidence that quality divides on a university / non-university or public / private line. Unsatisfactory teaching quality in public universities, as revealed by the first national student surveys in the 1990s, prompted some of the early calls for competition to encourage universities to improve teaching.
To this day, a key attraction of private higher education is small classes and personalised attention.
Given the inherent difficulties prospective students have in judging the quality of a course, some third-party scrutiny is necessary. That is why regulatory institutions have been developed and student surveys carried out with their results reported publicly. An improved website to help prospective students choose between their higher education options was announced on Budget night. These are more effective protections for students than the still maturing professional culture in higher education teaching, whether at universities or other providers.
Public funding entitlements outside the public universities will not be the“ radical change to the ecology of Australian higher education” claimed in an April Universities Australia media release. A long evolutionary process has brought the development of private universities and non-university higher education providers, along with the institutions needed to monitor all provision.
Universities Australia’ s own members have long shown by their actions that the distinctions between public and private higher education are too blurred to be the basis of policy. Public universities run highly commercial international student businesses, making large surpluses. Some public universities own private higher education companies, whilst others maintain close relationships with stock market-listed entities such as Navitas and SEEK.
Universities Australia has criticised Commonwealth-supported place eligibility for listed companies. But their inclusion in the system is important, because they have the financial capacity and expertise to run large-scale higher education provision. Lacking the status-orientation of many public universities, they take on education tasks such as lower-ATAR students. On the evidence submitted to the demand-driven review, Navitas and other pathway course providers provide good opportunities. Excluding non-university higher education providers from the demanddriven system contradicts equity goals. The education department’ s statistics show that low-SES students are nearly as large a share of full-fee students( 14 per cent) as they are of Commonwealth supported students( 17 per cent). The lower-SES students, who are over-represented amongst lower-ATAR school leavers, are particularly disadvantaged; the pathway colleges that are their best educational option can cost them twice as much as the student contribution in a Commonwealthsupported place.
The Senate fate of the higher education reform package is not clear. There are defensible arguments for and against the fee deregulation included in the reforms. But a universal demand-driven system is the logical culmination of a long process to restore the higher education institutional diversity lost in the Dawkins years, and avoid the inherent unfairness of similar students having very different levels of government support. ■
Andrew Norton is the co-author of Review of the Demand Driven Funding System: Final Report and co-editor of The Dawkins Revolution: 25 Years On.
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