Abolishing the temporary graduate visa would deliver a large additional blow to international education.

As foreshadowed in Tony Burke’s September 2026 National Press Club speech, the government has now implemented a range of policy changes for onshore student visa applications. There is a new g…

Explore the changing landscape of points-tested visas for former international students, including demand, success rates, and future trends.

Jason Clare’s student places capping bill appeared in the Senate several times last week, but there were no votes on substantive amendments. Parliament does not sit again until 12 October. It…

The Australian government is trying, without much success to date, to reduce the number of long-term temporary migrants. For student-related visa holders – people with student visas, temporary grad…

Australian higher education policy uses a geographic proxy to measure socioeconomic status. People living in the lowest 25% of areas by the ABS Index of Education and Occupation are deemed ‘low SES…

Last week The Australian reported on apparent forthcoming limits on student secondary visa holders, the partners and children of the primary visa holder students. This has been rumoured for months.…

Last week the government made two substantive amendments to its student places capping bill, officially named the Universities Accord (Opening the Doors of Opportunity) Bill 2026. One amendmen…

At the AFR higher education conference this week Jason Clare was open to amending his capping student places bill. He subsequently inserted amendments on ministerial conditions and floor numbers of…

The government has grand hopes for additional higher education participation, on the way to 80% tertiary attainment by 2050. But how they will fund enrolment growth is much less clear. The governme…

I don’t currently have the capacity for a new edition of Mapping Australian higher education 2023 but I am still updating the data behind the tables and charts. The latest spreadsheet is here…

Submissions to the Senate inquiry into the government’s student place capping bill – with the official but misleading title of the Universities Accord (Opening the Doors of Opportunity) Bill …

The funding system I have described parts 1 to 5 of this series of posts applies in full to the higher education providers listed on ‘Table A’ of the Higher Education Support Act 2003. …

Job-ready Graduates created cheaper postgraduate education – especially for nursing students – but this may not last.

This post in an overview of rewards and penalties available to ATEC as it enforces mission based compact terms and student places allocations. By the standards of recent higher education regulation…

Occasional Paper Series

In his second reading speech for the Universities Accord (Opening the Doors of Opportunity) Bill 2026 education minister Jason Clare said that it will ‘help more people from poor families and…

The idea behind needs based funding is that universities should be paid according to student characteristics, not just the disciplines of the subjects students take. While agreeing with the broad c…

In presentations earlier this year I told audiences that the government will try again to impose provider-level caps on international students. Its 2024 attempt failed due to a surprise Coalition-G…

The Universities Accord (Opening the Doors of Opportunity) Bill 2026, in itself, does not do what it says in the cover. Although the minister’s promotional material focuses on new Commonwealt…

In the previous post, I outlined how the minister would set total numbers of Commonwealth supported student places if the Universities Accord (Opening the Doors of Opportunity) Bill 2026 is passed.…

This post is the first in a series of explainers on how the new Commonwealth supported student funding system will operate if the Universities Accord (Opening the Doors of Opportunity) Bill 2026 is…

Federal Education Minister Jason Clare has introduced a bill under which universities face new caps on their domestic student numbers.

I have a paper coming out soon, co-authored with Ren-Hao Xu, on the rise of Commonwealth supported places in postgraduate coursework degrees. It is another in our series on university decision-maki…

Funding incentives are widely used to steer universities towards meeting policy objectives, but they do not always produce the expected outcomes. The headline policy of Australia’s Job-ready Graduates...

It’s common to hear concern about the ‘status’ of vocational education. An article yesterday in The Conversation reported a ‘stigma’ associated with school leavers cho…

This post is about unlegislated higher education policies. The story starts last year with reports that the government was imposing caps on commencing Commonwealth supported places, which reached t…

Julie Bishop quit as ANU Chancellor last Friday, but not without a parting shot: “Following unprecedented and co-ordinated interference, the ANU Council is no longer able to discharge its legal and…

Yesterday the Australian Tertiary Education Commission issued an interim statement of strategic priorities. This statement will guide university mission based compacts for 2027. This post covers th…

Thanks to a Guardian story based on a FoI request we now know that Treasury has modelled changes to HELP debt repayment times under Job-ready Graduates. They are six years too late to influence the…

Only the federal government can fix the problems created by the Job-ready Graduates scheme. Ahead of the budget on May 12, it shows no interest in doing that.

Last year I wrote about payments to universities under the Higher Education Continuity Guarantee, a Morrison-era program to compensate universities for ‘under-enrolment’. I then had dat…

Late last year the Greens introduced the Higher Education Support Amendment (Reverse Job-Ready Graduates Fee Hikes and End 50k Arts Degrees) Bill  into the Senate. Submissions for the Senate inquir…

The ATEC legislation passed the Senate yesterday, after the government accepted amendments from the Greens and David Pocock. It now needs to be rubber-stamped by the House of Representatives and th…

Last month I wrote about the new equity and regional needs based funding programs. Back then I had the funding formulas but not total funding amounts. The Department’s funding determinations …

In his speech to the Universities Australia conference last month Jason Clare complained that the low SES share of enrolments ‘hasn’t changed that much in the last 30 years.’ He is over…

This post examines the regional campus component of needs based funding, which starts this year. I looked at the low SES and Indigenous component last week. The regional component funds students at…

Directing some university funding based on student, rather than just course, characteristics was one good idea coming from the Universities Accord. Students arrive in higher education with varying …

This post looks at estimated 2026 funding for Commonwealth supported students in public universities. Compared to my earlier post on block grants it adds public funding for medical students, demand…

In the 2026 university funding agreements the rules on closing courses have changed and now require universities to follow additional processes. These changes are presumably a response to course an…

The 2026 higher education funding agreements, the legal basis of Commonwealth Grant Scheme funding, were published recently. This post examines public university funding for ‘higher education…

Financing higher education, institutional and student perspectives

Submissions for the ATEC bills Senate inquiry are appearing on the inquiry’s website. My submission turned into a detailed analysis of the two bills, the main one setting up ATEC and another …

Under the bill to create the Australian Tertiary Education Commission there will be three ATEC commissioners: a Chief Commissioner, a First Nations Commissioner, and a Commissioner. The commissione…

Under legislation to establish the Australian Tertiary Education Commission, introduced into Parliament in November 2025, a function of ATEC is to ‘allocate a maximum number of international studen…

To prolong the life of Mapping Australian higher education 2023 I have been updating a spreadsheet which contains the data behind the charts and tables. The December 2025 Mapping data update is her…

Under the legislation to establish the Australian Tertiary Education Commission, introduced into Parliament late last month, ATEC would advise the minister on the Higher Education Threshold Standar…

The Universities Accord Final Report recommended that ATEC be an ‘independent statutory authority … to enable it to provide robust advice and support evidence-based decision making and …