Universities must meaningfully acknowledge they are sited on unceded First Nations land and Indigenous culture should be recognised in campus design. These steps are vital for reconciliation.
With 13 universities in the top 200 in the new aggregated ranking system known as ARTU, Australia ranks fourth in the world and is part of a rising new order in the global higher education sector.
Foreign students have become a huge source of income for Australia in general and the universities in particular, but critics are concerned about pressures on the institutions and on standards.
Richard Hil’s Selling Students Short: Why You Won’t Get the Education You Deserve is a timely exposé of the difficult conditions facing students at Australia’s increasingly corporatised universities.
While Four Corners shed some much-needed light on long-standing problems in higher education, these problems aren’t reserved for international students.
The recent furore about academic standards in Australian higher education – including Monday’s damning Four Corners expose – has the potential to bring not only desperately needed attention, but actual change, to the sector.
With the release of some universities’ annual reports over the last few weeks we’re able to see how the universities are really faring. Is the financial situation really as dire as vice-chancellors say, as rosy as their detractors say, or somewhere in between?
A new report from the NSW Independent Commission Against Corruption says Australian universities have become increasingly reliant on income from fee-paying international students, and is letting academic standards slide for the valuable income stream.