The release of the 1988-89 cabinet documents show that the Hawke government’s plans for Australian higher education were in some ways as radical as the policies that Education Minister Christopher Pyne…
While 2013 was all about schools and their funding (remember Gonski, anyone?), 2014 was the year of higher education reform. Or, at least, proposed higher education “reform”. With cuts to higher education…
The early admissions deadlines for universities across the country have come and gone, and acceptance letters are on their way. But with the cost of a four-year college education rising an average of 5…
Research assessment is only partly reliable as an indicator of the real quality of the work going on in higher education. It has a dual character. On one hand it is rooted in material facts and objective…
The dominance of a “golden triangle” of universities in the latest research assessment exercise has renewed concerns that other universities may get less government research funding in future. The results…
For the first time, the “impact” of academic research on the wider world has been included in a large-scale assessment of the quality of university research, which has just been published. One-fifth of…
The government will introduce amended legislation for higher education reform into the Senate next year for further debate. But how do we keep higher education sustainable if the package is torpedoed again…
Think of a researcher measuring the trajectory of a laser beam in a university physics lab or a history professor digging through a church’s long-lost archives and their work can often feel far removed…
Parents, government officials, and tuition-paying students are all seeking solutions to the skyrocketing costs of higher education and the burden of student debt. Currently, public universities in America…
The Senate has rejected the Coalition’s plans to deregulate university fees, cut university funding by 20% and extend government subsidies to private providers, despite a few modest measures offered at…
Education Minister Christopher Pyne’s scheme for the deregulation of university fees is dead or delayed. Either way it has been exposed as bad for Australia. This is because it will put universities in…
If there was doubt higher education was a political battleground for the Abbott government, the events of the last 24 hours have dispelled it. The vote on Tuesday night in the Senate stopped the current…
On Tuesday night, the Senate voted to block the government’s Higher Education Reform Bill. Despite last-minute negotiations, consensus could not be reached regarding its signature element – fee deregulation…
After the Senate sent his higher education bill packing, Education Minister Christopher Pyne dropped into a Universities Australia reception, which serendipitously happened to be in full swing at Parliament…
The Senate has voted down Education Minister Christopher Pyne’s higher education measures – one of the budget’s key reforms – in a major defeat for the Abbott government. But Pyne announced the government…
Palmer United Party Senate leader Glenn Lazarus has warned Education Minister Christopher Pyne to “stop harassing” him and other crossbenchers as the government tries desperately to get its higher education…
Had someone told me last summer that I would be defending public universities on the first day of next summer I would have ridiculed the idea. Somehow I believed what the Coalition wrote in early 2013…
The government’s proposed changes to higher education are a platform on which Labor can fight the next election. The strategy is simple: don’t try to modify the package, or offer new solutions. Just shoot…
As students take to the streets calling for free higher education, a spotlight is being shone again on the sustainability of England’s higher education system. While much of the debate centres around financial…
It is now as close to a consensus as makes no difference that the current regime for funding higher education in England through high fees paid by students – or repaid by some graduates – is bust. Lord…