An interesting article and a complex issue. Something that isn't mentioned though, and its something that all australian academics know is either already here or on the way, is the impact of student-assessments of lecturers on the academic career. It's becoming regular practice (which Craig would well know from his current institution) for end-of-semester assessments by students to heavily influence the review process for academics. Sure it can improve the teaching skills of academics but it shifts the status of the student from learner into consumer - esp. when they are now paying more for a degree. Without being specific, I'm aware of the practice to soft-mark students and treat them with cotton gloves in order to ensure that they remain satisfied customers and guarantee glowing reviews of their lecturers. And the student leaves the university with an overinflated sense of academic worth.

I'm not sure why you think Australia has a good world-wide reptutation for quality in undergraduate degrees. If that was true, then the fees that could be charged to non-citizens wouldn't be less than half of what they are in universities that do have a good reputation.

Australian universities reflect a society’s demand for real professionals, where inheriting the positions leads to "money-&-caste-belonging-buy-degrees" system intentionally leaving talented people on the bottom of a life. And schooling is a first step to practically push the inferior groups of populous out of the professional employment market-social achievements in the future.

Charles Dickens’ novels describe contemporary Australia perfectly where a top target of a higher education is competing with other leading industries, which are gambling and prostitution, in money-milking, providing a poor if any at all, shadow of input into a modern civilization.

I'm a student at a university in Sydney studying a degree that is prestigious and competitive and supposedly has quite rigourous admission and assessment standards (at least for HECS students!). I won't specify the degree or the Uni as it will just inflame opinion. There are international students doing my degree (and paying huge amounts of money for it) that literally can hardly string together a sentence in English when they speak up in class. I wonder what the papers they hand in look like. Yet come the following semester these people are somehow still there, seemingly having scraped through. I realise that the cash-strapped faculty has come to rely on their money but they are devaluing my degree in the esteem of firms, both in Australia and internationally!

If this article (due to its rather dry analysis) is fishing for other comment then here is mine.

I agree that there needs to be development of a bottom-up strategy of standards networks within and across disciplines.

However external professional bodies are also having a greater say about what graduate attributes should or should not look like and this has not been addressed in this article.

While professional bodies may know implicitly what types of professional attributes are seeking from undergraduates (from their understanding of practice) and know what what the university discipline that 'teaches their content' about their profession should be rolemodelling, they often know nothing about pedagogy and curriculum, (what teaching and learning means)

We need a much more comprehensive understanding between universities and professional bodies on what standards exist, how these should be measured and tracked. But we also need to look back toward secondary education as the primary incubator of our university students.

High entry scores are not an indicator of for short or long terms professional success. Clearly, a university education should not just be seen as a means to a professional vocation.

If our university students are to treat the world as their oyster, they need to have skills and attributes that allow them to navigate a broader set of social and cultural skills than they are currently being exposed to now in their chosen field of study.

So, in reality I feel the most important questions are "how will we measure such competencies and attributes with some accuracy"?
This is not just about creating simple benchmarks and measurements but how well we develop quality assurance methods that can qucikly respond to a rapidly globalising (and glocalising) higher education market.

These are questions of nationalism and regionalism as much as it relates to the teaching abilities of our academics.

Speaking language is not synonymous to writing something in this language and surely all this is not the same to a decision-making especially, if foreigners to work in their native countries.

Progress of society is not based on figures of imagination of administrators and layers, no practical understanding in particular processes, scribed into different Kioto-style papers, but on ability of society to create developments in areas of human activities –engineering, medicine, agriculture, applied science, generally speaking.

A tremendous lack of intellectual abilities is a world known colonial Australian feature.