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Tag: Australia

Another Australian De-regulation Update

So the last time we tuned into antics in Canberra, the government was trying to pass a fairly ambitious piece of legislation that would completely de-regulate tuition fees while (more or less) maintaining the HECS system, which means post-graduate contributions are always tied to income, and thus do not become too onerous.  The government was also going to cut institutional grants by about 20%, but keep the “demand-driven” system in which government dollars follow students no matter how many students attend.

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January 28, 2015 No Comments

An Update from Australia

Back in our spring (their fall), the Government of Australia announced a new university funding policy, which consisted of: Cutting per-student public funding by about 20%; but, Subsequently allowing funding to rise along with enrolments (this is known in Australia as “demand-driven funding”); Simultaneously de-regulating all tuition; and, Allowing the interest rate on student loans to rise from equal to inflation to equal to the government’s 10-year bond rate (i.e. actually placing a real interest rate on the loan). Understandably, students

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November 12, 2014 No Comments

Osgoode’s Income-Contingent Experiment

There’s an interesting experiment developing at Osgoode law school involving the creation of (what is being called) an income-contingent loan system.  Dean Lorne Sossin outlines the plan a little bit in his blog, here.  There are some fairly big details missing from this description, for the quite good reason that the Dean is leaving a number of design features open, pending discussions with the faculty’s students.  But one crucial thing about this program is being obscured by the term “loan”:

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October 16, 2014 1 Comment

A Miracle in Melbourne

Today, I want to tell you about one of the most amazing stories in recent higher education history.  It happened at the University of Melbourne about eight years ago, and it involved having the country’s leading university completely up-end its entire curriculum – every single degree program – in the space of about 24 months.  Ladies and Gentlemen, I give you: the Melbourne Model. The basic story is this: A decade ago, Melbourne – like all Australian universities – had a

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October 10, 2014 1 Comment

Predicting the Effects of Australian Fee De-regulation

If the Australian government’s plan on fee-deregulation comes to pass, what follows will be one of the greatest experiments ever in higher education.  Institutions will have the right to set fees exactly as they want, which begs two questions: what will they do with that power, and what will the effects be? Let’s start with the first question.  When institutions in England were given the freedom to set tuition fees up to a maximum of £9,000, nearly all of them immediately

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August 29, 2014 2 Comments

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One Thought to Start Your Day is our founder and CEO Alex Usher’s popular daily blog, brimming with up-to-the-minute insights and informed opinions on today’s higher education industry.

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