VC’ s corner
Private options are public’ s gain
The system requires greater institutional diversity to remain competitive and serve its students. By Tim Brailsford
The recent federal Budget foreshadows major reform of the Australian higher education sector. If the proposed measures are passed into legislation, more students will receive federal subsidies to help defray the cost of their tertiary education, albeit in lower amounts. There will be a greater number of providers offering a more diverse selection of programs at different levels and with different approaches, but with uniform access to government funding. More students will be able to access HELP loans and all eligible parties will access them on equal terms.
The removal of price caps in the public university sector will result in many students seeing the price of their selected program go up, although some programs should become more affordable, in theory at least. Also, new indexation arrangements will increase the lifetime borrowing costs of HELP loans for public university students and erode the benefit that fee-paying domestic undergraduates in private universities receive from the removal of the 25 per cent loan fee.
In short, the playing field will be levelled but it will also be set at a different altitude.
We are in a period of change that is being driven by the opportunities new technology has created, the increasingly inter-connected global community and changes to our national policy settings. More importantly, but arguably less directly, we are changing because the needs of our students are changing. That said, most of us would agree that a university’ s core mission is no different: producing knowledgeable and wellequipped graduates who will make positive contributions to our society; undertaking research that advances our stock of knowledge and tackles global challenges; and advancing the interests of our local communities and wider society.
By some analyses, the Australian university sector already provides students with a diverse choice of high-quality providers. We have more universities per capita than most countries; only Switzerland, Israel, Denmark, and Sweden have more. We have a strong global reputation, evidenced by performance in global league tables and a high demand from international students. We have selforganised into groups such as the Go8, Innovative Research Universities( IRU), Australian Technology Network( ATN) and the Regional Universities Network( RUN), which all promote points of differentiation. Indeed, there is a sound argument that our sector has grown to meet the diverse needs of a diverse student population. We have a good system that has served us well, but can it be better?
I submit that common funding arrangements and regulatory requirements have held back the entrepreneurial spirit of Australian public universities and made the sector less responsive to the changing requirements of our students. Our system has encouraged conformity and uniformity over diversity and difference.
Our sector is dominated by large, comprehensive, public universities that
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