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A strategy for funding long-term excellence in Australian universities

By Alan Gilbert - posted Wednesday, 15 May 2002


The capping of university places should be abandoned. It currently excludes thousands of qualified students. Up-front fees and charges should be abolished, and all private costs and charges associated with higher education should become deferred liabilities re-payable (like HECS) on an income contingent basis. Scholarship support should be available for students genuinely requiring cost-of-living assistance to enable them to undertake university study.

There is no magic Antipodean formula for securing educational quality at a massive discount. The ‘bottom line’ is that Australians will get the universities that they pay for, whether as taxpayers or individual beneficiaries.

I would encourage the Commonwealth to consider increasing investment in research infrastructure substantially, and to consider introducing powerful tax incentives for industry to invest in university teaching and research.

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With issues of equity properly managed through targeted scholarships and discounts, universities should be given the power to set their own fees, with the Government’s liability capped and the students taking on an income contingent liability for the remainder. Without such initiatives there are simply no mechanisms through which even the best-funded Australian universities can attempt to match their international competitors.

This de-regulated system need not cost taxpayers much more in the long run, but it will be essentially dynamic, facilitating enrolment growth and encouraging individual universities to pursue international levels of quality and competitiveness.

The Commonwealth will need to retain funding and other mechanisms to protect rural and regional universities and to secure adequate enrolments into socially important professions such as early childhood education or nursing. But its main contribution to the competitiveness of Australian higher education will be to assume the temporary fiscal burden of extending the principle of income contingency to all student fees and charges, and thereby promoting student-centred, equitable, high quality universities.

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About the Author

Professor Alan Gilbert is Vice-Chancellor of the University of Melbourne.

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