I believe in the user pays principal, that is: Who gains the benefit of well-educated employees? Employers. Therefore, if your business/organisation seeks to employ graduates over other candidates, you should pay for this privilege. I am sure there could be a mechanism to facilitate this based on how many and what type of graduates you seek to employ. Maybe the unseen hand will come into play and we may see lesser-qualified employees.
If we think education is expensive, we should try ignorance

“The funding review panel should interpret the terms of reference broadly, to ensure that fundamental questions are asked – and answered”

While at it, should you not formulate what you call ‘fundamental questions’ and help us understand what they are according to you, without tinkering with our curiosity?’

Sorry Alan, you got that all wrong mate.

What must happen is that the higher education sector must take a serious look at it self. For far too long those needing to use the system have been treated as useful idiots, getting very little bang for their buck, & the tax payer has been treated as the village idiot cash cow.

You have expanded way beyond the available talent, & your reputations are rapidly going down hill, as they deserve.

Fortunately our mining industry has a many times greater productivity than your sector, or we’d all be broke, you included.

So mate, get out of that chair, & get to work. You could start by hiring a few industry efficiency experts, god knows you need some changes. I know a good firm of removalists who can get all those feather beds out of there for you, to start with.

With things as bad as they are, a tippling of productivity should come pretty easily, the next doubling will take a bit of work. After that, with a real improvement in management the sector may be able to grow to be valued & respected, as it once was.

Tobor

You have your principle right, but I think your application is wrong. True, graduates are more valuable to employers than non-graduates, but in a competitive labour market this means employers have to pay more for graduates – it is the graduate who gains. Hence a real ”user pays” system would see graduates contributing more to their education costs in recognition of the greater earning power their education confers.

Not al of the benefits are captured by the graduates, however. There are also spin offs to the wider society from having a more educated workforce and citizenry. Hence there is a case for some government subsidy as well as user fees.

Anyone is free to correct me, but I gather that the heads of
our top universities, earn around 700k$ a year.

Given that taxpayers funds are involved here, can that sort of spending really be justified?

It seems to me that no matter how much we throw at education,
they will always spend it and always want even more.

"Since the Government wants more Australians - including more students from disadvantaged backgrounds – to go to university"

Why, what possible purpose is served by that when the trades in Australia are desperately short of suitable young men and women? What precisely is the point of thousands of students wasting their time and taxpayer money on soft degrees which only prepare them for a job in the public service or for a place in the Centrelink queue? That is not to oppose such study but merely to point out the obvious, it is study that could be better completed outside of a university degree and outside of a university, even by on-line learning or through a TAFE.

It is foolish to continue to put such strong emphasis on university as the next logical step from secondary school and disregarding the practical purposes to which the study might be put on graduation. Girls especially are poorly served in that regard by well-meaning but cocooned teachers who have little exposure to the world outside of education. Such pressure magnifies the stress many students suffer in secondary schooling.

Tobor makes sense: who benefits from education? Everyone!
So why not return to an education system run along the lines of Medicare?

After all, ignorance causes enough harm to a civilised society as it is, we all need as much education as the citizenry can bear.

Please consider.

You're right, Yabby. And all those fat cats running the Unis got their educations fully taxpayer funded.

Hasbeen, I agree, the tipping point is close to arriving as green labor’s higher education places & university placements for their own sake are at the end, and what is needed is not those who want to go straight on to the public teat (public service, encompassing dogma) but individuals who want to infuriate and further the productive, those who really want to make a real difference using their own drivers, enterprise, instincts, calculus in contributing at any age, not just wasting scarce taxpayer “funds” (money in everyday language) and time sorting out themselves or “stringing out” free time in collective political parlance to suite the social experiments of labor and their unions on compliance and non core impractical application to meet the their impractical challenges, to supply the local green vote in support of their state sponsored benefactors.

Cornflower and Hasbeen have a fair bit of truth on their side. What really started the rot was the Dawkins Reforms, which began in 1988 under the then federal Labor government. Before that time, there were a reasonable number of universities for the population plus a network of Colleges of Advanced Education (CAEs), which offered undergraduate degrees and tertiary diplomas, usually in more vocationally oriented areas. It was quite possible, though, for a student to work for an undergraduate degree at a CAE and then go on for an honours degree year and postgraduate study at a university. The CAEs were much cheaper to run than the universities because the academics were not expected or paid to do research. The Dawkins Reforms turned all the CAEs into universities, and a much higher proportion of the population were encouraged to attend.

Courses have been dumbed dowm because of the large numbers of students who either weren't paying attention in high school or have forgotten everything that they learned, as well as foreign students who are too profitable to be allowed to fail. Some students, domestic and foreign, simply lack the talent or the interest required for their courses, and the foreign ones may not understand English well enough to cope. Due to creeping credentialism, many people are effectively forced to waste their time in this way.

The government tolerates this expensive mess because universities make good holding tanks for the unemployed and defuse social unrest, especially since many apprenticeships have been eliminated due to privatisation, outsourcing, and an unending supply of skilled migrants already trained at someone else's expense.

I am wondering if student attrition has been written into the formula for universities wanting more blood extracted from the taxpayer and student.

"STUDENT attrition in Australia's universities comes at a cost of more than $1.4 billion a year, or an average of $36 million an institution."

http://www.theaustralian.com.au/higher-education/high-university-drop-out-rates-cost-14bn/story-e6frgcjx-1225940860074

The concept that universities are expensive because they carry out research is rather a weak excuse.

What research?

I frequently look at this website that presents research from Australia.

http://www.sciencealert.com.au/

It is possible to go for a week with no research from Australia on the website. As well, any research undertaken rarely seems to make it to the market place anyway.

The universities also import almost everything they use, which basically means their research over decades has not been sufficient to even run the universities.

Taxpayers are keeping the universities alive, not the other way around.