Australia's Experiment: Tuition Fees, Student Loans, and University Income Generation

Over the last three decades, Australian higher education has shown considerable capacity for policy experimentation, as it has coped with substantial expansion in student numbers, opportunities for major recruitment of international fee-paying students, the increased application of information and communications technology to higher education, and demands of new international trade patterns and the knowledge economy. This has included major mergers of institutions to reduce the number of public higher education institutions from about 65 universities and colleges of advanced education (CAEs) to 36 universities, abolition of the binary divide between universities and CAEs, a more selective approach to public research funding, and encouragement of private higher education. However, some of the most dramatic experimentation has occurred in the areas of student tuition fees, student loans, and incentives for universities to generate increasing proportions of their own revenue.