For just a little while back in the sixties and seventies we almost achieved “Public Universities”. However as usual snobbery and money won out over the masses, where today universities are the same collection of self-serving and introverted wailers totally divorced from the general public, hunkered down in survival mode inside their tight and collective selfish and insulated world producing overlords bathed in bigotry and streamlined in the new speak of feminism intent on steering society on a collision course with the bombora of social catastrophe.

With a hyperbole of woe-betide comes the cry (again) for more money from the tax payer; the same little tax payer more frequently excluded from the gilded halls of tertiary education by the lack of it, is now beseeched by the lords of education for more of it. You certainly have a collective hide. Well it is time once more to put the university hide through the tannery of public gaze and let us, this time, produce something that is universally useful to ALL taxpaying Australians.

P.S. (from the little woman)
How about producing a few more doctors for the collective benefit of the public!

I am considering this topic from the point of view of a country girl who had to ride a horse 6 miles to school to get a primary State School education. There was no State High School within Cooee, so at considerable expense my parents sent me to boarding school until I was sixteen. I had to leave to make it possible for my parents to pay for the next daughter to go to boarding school for 2 years. Girls who left school at sixteen then had the option of becoming secretaries, nurses of telephonists. Only when it came to the fifth daughter in the family were our parents able to afford for her to remain at boarding school until she finished her high school years and could get a scholarship to train as a primary school teacher.

In that period of time 1950s-1960s if a girl did have parents willing to pay for her university education, she frequently had to give up her job if she married. Thus many fathers thought it a waste of their savings to pay for the education of girls.
Now perhaps with many university educated women working to add to the family income and with smaller families to educate, plus that women are no longer penalized for marrying or having children, it would not cause a gender preference on which child in a family should receive an university education.

Although government subsidies and income from foreign students has made it possible for universities to educate more Australians in recent years, I do not think it inappropriate for parents or students (with student loans)to pay for 'higher' education.

I'm worried about unis as they have no public profile and pollies ignore them. More and more kids will want to go to uni over the next 20 years and there needs to be some form of levy which ensures they aren't stuck with massive debts.

I know HECS is a levy but if international student numbers continue to fall, then how are they going to fund domestic places?

A HECs debt is nothing if you gain a degree which actually allows you to earn higher wages. Also most of my debt was paid by working in the >8 weeks per year holidays. The hardest financial times for me was living off my $20k/annum federal scholarship during my PhD, in which I had not time to work odue to the huge workload in the lab. I always wondered how the government expected PhD students to survive, either they expected us to work day and night, or that we could survive with an income much less that minimum wage.

I am in agreement with both Diver Dan and Country Girl on this.

University education should be inexpensive and readily available and mostly taxpayer funded, BUT NOT A CENT MORE should go to universities in their current form.

In their current form, they continually ask for more taxpayer funding, while at the same time employing feminists who consistently break the anti-discrimination policies of their universities, by consistently denigrating 50% of Australias population, by consistently denigrating the male gender.

In their current form, university academics consistently oppose trade tariffs, and then when they go into the international market and fail, they want the taxpayer to bail them out.

In their current form, they continually state that they are important centers for research, while almost all technology now in the country is imported, and the universities themselves are almost completely filled with imported textbooks and imported equipment.

Added to this is the inglorious results of the various surveys such as the Australasian Survey of Student Engagement survey rarelhttp://ausse.acer.edu.au/
that show a considerable number of students who spend very little time on campus, and rarely contact their lecturers (or want to).

Start and reform the universities, and the taxpayer might be more interested in funding the universities, but not in their current form.

Country Girl speaks of a time in the past history when sons and daughters of the land holder were subsidised to send their children to boarding school. Opposed to that hardship (apparently), were the sons and daughters of the non-landholders, the workers on the same farms in the same remote locations, whose children were not subsidised for such luxuries as a boarding school education: Whose sons were not given the option to stay home and tend the farm, while the workers sons went to war, all a beautiful view of social strata at work. What has changed?

Well, not a university education. No child will attend a university in Australia unless:

1. Wealthy enough to pay .
2. Is gifted with the IQ of Einstein and granted a scholarship.
3. Is a wealthy foreign student.
4. Is willing and able to starve and risk failure and bankruptcy to succeed.