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 »