It’s now virtually certain that the South Australian Legislative Council, the state’s upper house, will initiate a parliamentary inquiry into the planned merger of the state’s two largest universities.
For several years economist Keith Houghton, a former business and economics dean at the Australian National University, has been gathering data on the productivity performance of Australian universities to give a picture of the efficiency of their research and the efficiency of their teaching.
One can be forgiven for thinking that the pandemic has resulted in universities being thrown into a quagmire of seemingly unfathomable challenges.
Australia has 37 public universities; Victoria has eight of these. A range of insights about our universities come from recently released statistics.
Shortly after the pandemic’s onset, there was a view that Australia’s universities were facing a ‘perfect storm’ of negative events. With more limited international student tuition income and no access to JobKeeper funding offered to others, the public universities faced the daunting task of navigating through seemingly inevitable financial challenges.
South Australia’s new Premier, Peter Malinauskas, has proposed creating a commission to investigate merging the state’s public universities.
Last month, university data for 2020 was released by Acting Education Minister Stuart Robert. This first official data reveals the effects of the pandemic on Australia’s universities.
The Covid-19 pandemic provides an opportunity to reflect deeply on what has gone before and how we should do things differently. In the article below, Stephen Parker presents his personal vision to rebuild Australia’s tertiary education system, improving its sustainability, fairness and productivity.
The appointment of Professor Attila Brungs as vice-chancellor of the University of New South Wales is a strong one, and no doubt will be welcomed by the UNSW community.
Students at research-intensive business schools receive about 75 per cent of the academic attention enjoyed by their peers at teaching-focused colleges, a new study suggests.