Bill opens door to putting private and public universities on same footing

By Emmaline Bexley. There’s a devil lurking in the detail of the higher education reform bill presented to parliament. As expected, the bill, introduced yesterday, proposes to open Commonwealth subsidies for undergraduate teaching to private higher education providers. These will have access to 70% of the per-student rate that universities receive.
But commentators and universities seem to have missed one crucial aspect of the bill: if passed, any higher education provider “registered under the TEQSA (Tertiary Education Quality Standards Agency) Act in a category that allows the provider to use the word ‘university’” in its name will be able to access 100% of the Commonwealth subsidy. What that means is that the whole idea of a “public university” in Australia just disappeared. More...