An analysis of student enrolment trends between 2009 and 2013, showed a 26.6 per cent increase in domestic undergraduate students, with large increases at some other universities.

Alternatively, there was evidence (from others) that universities are willing to provide supply at current funding rates, and very few universities are showing signs of financial stress in their accounts.

http://www.theaustralian.com.au/higher-education/demand-driven-enrolment-system-near-saturation/story-e6frgcjx-1227360610419

I'm already seeing the university advertisements encouraging students to sign up to their "accounts".

A rip off, or good value for money?

Are universities simply a new bank? judging by many graduates Yes

With unemployment set to increase in 2016. University may be a safe haven and gain extra knowledge for the long term future.
Employment has stagnated and will remain so until we have elections to clear the air. All of those university students are not classed as unemployed.
Blame Abbott for creating an atmosphere of uncertainty and not knowing what to believe.

Not a new bank - a very old one!

All those who go to see university trained professionals like vets, lawyers, or medical professionals need to be thankful for university educations, or else you are all hypocrites.

We need more affordable university courses so that all intelligent people can go there if they choose and they achieve the correct marks, and not just those with the money to afford the exorbitant fees now charged.

Nathan, forty years ago when I left school I could have gone to uni and studdied for free then get a job paying say $5K a year. A pensioner was a person retiring from work in their mid 60's and, there were somewhere in the order of twenty tax payers per pensioner.

Nowadays a pensioner is anyone of old age, a single mum, or someone with what can often be described as a fake disability, not to make il of genuine disabled persons. We also had few arriving, either invited or illegally who saw us for the easy target we are when it comes to scamming the system.

So here we are today, some forty years later, with an outdated tax system that is fighting a loosing battle trying to keep up with the hand out brigade yet it appears you still expect this mother pig, with ten tits and fifteen piglets to not only provide for the retirees, with more in the order of just two tax payers supporting each one, but you also expect free education right up to the day these graduates pull their five figure incomes.

Which part of 'we can't afford it all' are you having trouble understanding?

I hate to think where we will be placed forty years from today.

rehctub,

From Judith Sloan:

http://www.theaustralian.com.au/opinion/columnists/studied-lessons-in-career-suicide/story-fnbkvnk7-1226827599569

"I think the most revealing aspect of the conversation was about the incentives universities face that are not really connected to the job prospects of their graduates. This is particularly the case now we have demand-driven enrollments. Put on a course in which sufficient numbers of students will enroll; adjust the cut-off mark to achieve the required number of students; then count the money rolling in from Canberra."

"To be sure, universities are keen to boast about the employment outcomes of their graduates and the salaries they receive. But bums on seats is a far stronger incentive than adjusting student numbers in particular fields of study according to the job prospects that graduates face."

Also from Judith: Domestic student numbers at Australian universities rose by nearly 180,000 between 2007 and 2012, to reach 934,000. That’s an increase of more than 23 per cent.

Judith again: Armed with their postgraduate qualifications, many of graduates (she refers to) are now doing jobs that were once done by those with undergraduate degrees and, in some cases, school leavers.

I personally read online of one case involving a university trained nurse who ended up working behind a supermarket checkout, after she had completed study. The oversupply of university graduates needs to be addressed and the "sexy" advertising campaigns to get people into university need to be looked at.

Universities and life long learning? There is still some of that, somewhere, but money and a selling factor of "university = grand person" quite clearly has become big driving factor. It's clearly big business.

Doctors; vets; legal professions may have universities serving a good knowledge base. Philosophy; economics that have few economists agreeing with each other, are more learning for learning sake.
Universities are a good population control first baby delayer. education first child delaying reduces long term family sizes.

Where many people during the 1930s, left school in there mid teens, science; computers; technology has teenagers first employment opportunities away from force non paying labours delayed. the quality of societies' human behaviours are not improving was forced competitive mentally stressful education, which I believe contributes to high rates of suicide.

Colleges in the USA allow education competition for employment to consume un-wanted workers, charging students for consuming their time away from paying employment, delaying the birth of their first child. Competition for future employment has high school leavers being paid far less wage rewards for unskilled work.
US College graduates after 20 years of employment, losing their employment, may have new employers state that their 20 years ago college education is out of date.

After university is complete, many graduates may only find employment that barely uses subjects studied at universities. Employment was allowed because students went through a natural selection stress testing process without dropping out of university.
An example: university road engineer graduates may find themselves filling out reports working at councils, never needing to inspect roads.

Education for education's sake...

steve101, I'd expect a road engineer to have a degree in civil engineering, and some of what they learn it that would be of great value writing reports for the council.

Inspecting roads is a small part of the road engineering process, but I'd be surprised if any council road engineers never needed to do it.

Keep in mind that Australia has the Vocational Education and Training (VET) sector, as a low cost complement to universities. I have been a student of, and teach courses both at, university and in the vocational sector, and they both have their place. If you want a job, then VET is a good place to start. If you want to advance in a career, then university is an option. How we get affordable on-line education is something I discussed at Cambridge University last week: http://osc.cam.ac.uk/roundtable-discussion-quickly-developing-online-versions-learning-materials-graduate-students

I am a BSc, mechanical engineering.

When I was involved in supplying, installing & commissioning medium industrial machinery, I actually used a bit of my training to work out the footings required for this equipment. Great. I could not do it any better however than the concreting contractor, who'd had only a couple of years of a plumbing apprenticeship.

When I went motor racing, it was an amateur, an accountant sales tax expert, who taught me how to run & maintain a racing engine. My university training was useless, in that context.

When he & I built the most successful & reliable racing engine in Oz at that time, it was his knowledge & amateur experience, not my training that was most important in our success.

When I met one of my old professors, [my favourite] & excitedly told him what & how we did it, he told me our ideas would never work. I guess he missed the fact they had & were.

Universities are now too full of ivory tower sitters to be worth even a quarter of what they cost the taxpayer.

My BSc did gave me some math, & taught me how to think logically, but a one year course could have done that, & more, a lot less expensively.

Universities are expected to be centres of learning, both learning about the material universe obtained through academic research and the individual learning of students based on the world store of knowledge revealed by research. The basic knowledge generated by research underpins Western culture and technology. Neglecting basic research leads to stagnation.

To be worthy of graduate certification a student needs to be able to demonstrate mastery of a substantial body of knowledge organised in courses or units characterised by coherence, rigour and depth. Serious standards of labelling of the universities' educational product mean assigning degrees only to those students who have individually demonstrated this. Standards that fall short of this are slipshod and essentially false labelling of a university's educational product.

In the postwar years some 90% of the education dollar went into teaching and research. In the years since the "reforms" attributed to John Dawkins, a neoliberal member of Paul Keating’s Cabinet, a ballooning managerial albatross has fastened itself to the universities, reducing the proportion of the tertiary education dollar spent on research and teaching to about 30%. The salary paid too a vice-chancellor for running a smallish Australian university has rocketed to more than twice the salary paid to presidents for running the United States of America. Coherence, rigour and depth in the standards of certification of graduates have greatly declined to avert unacceptably high failure rates. An excellent account of this process by neuroscientist Dr Donald Meyers can be downloaded free at http://www.australianuniversities.id.au/.

Not one brass cent of taxpayers’ money should go to universities, whose managements’ attacks on educational standards have far exceeded anything Mrs Bishop could do to parliamentary standards, until they get management costs down to the postwar 10% of the tertiary education dollar.

Suseonline
What are more affordable university courses?
HEX makes them free and nobody pays the fees back.
Look at Ian Thorpe for example. We made him a hero and a millionaire and an ambassador for
gay pride and he never paid a cent back.

I believe in their original intention, but things always different from what they should be. It is true that some of universities just do it for profits. CD Genomics: http://www.cd-genomics.com