Tag: Australia

Higher Ed at the Ballot Box: Australia’s Election and the Accord with Andrew Norton

It’s been about eighteen months since this podcast last visited Australia. The story at the time was about something called “the Universities Accord”, an oddly-named expert panel report which was supposed to give the Labor government a roadmap for re-structuring a higher education system widely believed to be under enormous stress.  Since then, lots has happened. There’s been an international student visa controversy, a whole ton of cutbacks at institutions (including a quite wild polycrisis at Australian National Universities) and

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Opening January 2026: Inside One of the Biggest University Mergers in Australia

There’s a huge story going on right now in Australian higher education, one that hasn’t made many ripples outside the country yet, but really should have. In January of 2026, two of the country’s major universities will be merging. The old research intensive University of Adelaide, one of the country’s so-called sandstone — meaning prestigious — universities, will be joining with the newer post Dawkins i.e., created in the early 1990s, University of South Australia, which began its life as

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Are We Out of Ideas?

I was prepping yesterday for my podcast interview with Australian higher education expert Andrew Norton on the subject of the Australian Universities’ Accord (watch for it a week tomorrow) and while reading the report—which is a competent one, as these things go—it occurred to me: my God, this is boring. Used to be you could count on the Australians to come up with at least one or two cool ideas that would make you think” “really? We can do that?”

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The World of Higher Education Podcast

Episode 1.1: The Australian Universities Accord Guest: Andrew Norton, Professor in the Practice of Higher Education at the Centre for Social Research and Methods at the Australian National University Producers: Tiffany MacLennan and Samantha Pufek Hi everyone.  This is the very first episode of The World of Higher Education. This podcast is dedicated to telling you about higher education around the world. Every Thursday, we will have guests from different countries discussing trends, developments, and news from their neck of the woods. (For

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Budgets, Control, Incentives, Rankings

Hi everyone.  Just a quick one today, an incomplete follow-up to Tuesday’s blog on rankings. One of the points I made on Tuesday was that several universities – and specifically, nearly all of the Australian ones apart from ANU – have made enormous strides in the rankings over the past 20 years, and this had been done largely in the absence of any funding boost.  A few of you were quick to point out that in fact there has been

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