Huge disparities in how much students pay for courses mean graduates of high-fee disciplines will take longer to repay their debts or might never do so. That will ultimately add to government debt.
Reports of big university budget surpluses appear to undermine calls for their federal funding to increase. But a closer look at how the surpluses were achieved reveals why change is needed.
While the official figures are lower than earlier estimates of job losses, they also show certain types of employees – casual, non-academic and younger staff – bore the brunt of the staff cuts.
Scott Morrison will continue to tip out large dollops of money when he addresses the National Press Club on Tuesday, with his theme “building national resilience”.
At the last election, Labor and the Coalition offered very different policies on university funding. Not so this time round, but the current flawed funding system could be improved further.
Anthony Albanese on Sunday will unveil its “Future Made in Australia Skills Plan” which will deliver up to 20,000 extra university places and fund 465,000 free TAFE places
The subsidies for student places up to 2024 fall about $1.1 billion short of the level needed to create the extra places the government promised its Job-ready Graduates policy would deliver.
A capital funding squeeze led universities to seek new ways of developing their campuses. It now appears city CBDs and developers might do better out of those deals than universities.
The sameness of the way in which universities present themselves is based on a shared view of what they think stakeholders want. Behind the official facade it’s more like ‘organised anarchy’.
Facing protests by students and academics over its Liberal Party links and generous funding by the Morrison government, the centre’s most important test will be whether it respects academic freedom.
The Job-Ready Graduates policy aims to remove ‘the misalignment between the cost of teaching a degree and the revenue that a university receives to teach it’. But new research challenges its costings.
The budget splashed out extra money for almost every sector deemed important to economic recovery (or politically sensitive). But with universities in a state of financial crisis, they missed out.
Strategic planning experts say public universities in developed countries can no longer depend on government funding, and must restructure to reduce costs and increase revenue or face failure.
South Africa’s economic challenges and the high number of students from poor and working class families call for a funding model that doesn’t create an affordability crisis for students and the state.
Not everyone needs to be on campus to learn. Governments, which subsidize higher education, need to change their funding models to support affordable remote learning.