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