Month: April 2014

Higher education spending in the 1970s compared to now

Andrew Norton4 Comments

According to former PM Malcolm Fraser,

Education is the best and most important investment that this country can make. I am not sure that our governments understand this message adequately. Over the last 20 years, governments have actually withdrawn from the funding of education and much of that has been replaced by dependence upon full fee paying students from overseas.

That might have been true for a while in the 1990s and the first half of the least decade. But not in more recent years, as the slide below shows. Some expansion under the previous planned higher education system, and then a surge from the demand driven system, has seen public funding expand very significantly.

subsidies last 10 years

And what happened when Mr Fraser was Prime Minister, from 1975 to 1983? Spending did go up for a while, but was then reduced. It was a period of stagnation in higher education attainment. Fraser faced significant budgetary constraints, as have most of his successors as PM. Read More »

The case for including for-profit higher education providers in the demand driven system

Andrew Norton6 Comments

Reaction to the report of the demand driven review, which I co-authored with David Kemp, has been pretty positive overall. But our proposal to extend Commonwealth supported places to non-university higher education providers, especially those operated on a for-profit basis, is attracting some negative comment.

Professor Greg Craven, vice-chancellor of Australian Catholic University, said:

There is a basic psychological difference between a statutory body (university) ploughing money back into the enterprise and a private college whose modus operandi is to make a profit.”

Whether or not that is true, a higher education system needs to be robust to the weaknesses and variability of human motivations. Indeed, the public universities themselves are a case study in the limitations of a ‘just trust us’ model in higher education.

As the report discusses (pages 9-10 especially) the universities were for a long time, and still are to a lesser extent, able to get away with poor practices in teaching. This showed in the abysmal results of the first national student surveys conducted in the mid-1990s. Things have improved since through a combination of public information, government programs and incentives, market competition, and more recently regulation.

The report recommends that all these measures apply to the non-university providers as well. Indeed, they have another layer of scrutiny that the universities lack, which is that their courses need to be individually approved by the Tertiary Education Quality and Standards Agency. It also recommends extending the University Experience Survey to the non-university providers, and publishing the results on a replacement for the MyUniversity website to make it easier for potential students to compare courses. Read More »