Where the Universities Accord Panel got it wrong…

When announcing the launch of the Universities Accord process, the Minister for Education stated that it was designed to “build a long-term plan for Australia’s higher education system” which would “drive lasting reform in Australia’s higher education system” and “support greater access and participation for students from underrepresented backgrounds”.

While those introductory remarks focussed on the ‘higher education system’, the process was labelled as a “Universities Accord”, which was unsurprising given 92% of domestic higher education students enrol in publicly-funded universities.

What was surprising was (a) the Universities Accord Panel’s apparent lack of understanding of some key features of Australia’s private universities and non-university higher education providers (NUHEPs), and (b) how even the very small number of references to private universities and NUHEPs that made it into the Panel’s interim report, had disappeared by the time of their final report.

While there have been ongoing philosophical debates in the Australian higher education sector about whether or not government funding should be provided to students studying at private universities and NUHEPs, these issues were not widely canvassed by the Accord Panel. Instead, they claimed in their interim report, that these providers “lack the scale to compete… against larger universities”.

In making that claim the Panel appeared to overlook the fact that two of the ‘public’ universities in Australia are private institutions (the Australian Catholic University and the University of Notre Dame Australia are described as public universities because their undergraduate students are publicly funded, but they are not publicly owned institutions), and that one private university, Torrens University Australia, is only a decade old and already enrols more students than 12 publicly-funded universities.

Despite this, by the time the Accord Panel delivered its final report there was almost no mention of private universities and NUHEPs in their recommendations.

Accord Panel recommends an increase in institutional diversity in Australian higher education… or does it?

The Accord Panel’s final report delivered a suite of recommendations designed to ensure the Australian higher education sector would support continuing growth in the country’s “productivity, innovation and standard of living”. The Accord Panel recommended that to meet Australia’s future skills needs, the following targets would need to be met:

The Panel also recommended the following participation targets to be achieved by 2035, for students from under-represented groups studying at universities:

The Accord Panel recommended, and the Australian government has agreed, that an Australian Tertiary Education Commission (ATEC) should be established to oversee the future funding of the higher education sector and that it should “aim for a stronger, more diverse, innovative, mission driven system, likely with more public providers and greater differentiation between those providers”.[1]

So greater differentiation is needed within the publicly-funded universities to meet national educational attainment targets, but apparently there is no further differentiation needed in the sector and no other role that private universities and NUHEPs can or should play…?

It is to be hoped that the ATEC, once it is established, will take another look at the capacity of NUHEPs and private universities to make a meaningful contribution to the new higher education participation targets. If they do, they might be surprised to see that while the Accord Panel found that these institutions “lack the scale to compete genuinely against larger universities or to access some of the opportunities arising from demographic and economic change”, the Panel’s analysis was superficial and therefore arrived at the wrong conclusions.

Composition of the Australian higher education sector

As at 26 November 2024, there were 212 registered higher education providers in Australia. Forty-three of these are universities (albeit only 42 are currently operating).[2]

Of these 43 universities:

• 37 are public institutions established by governments and in receipt of public funding (under Table A of the Higher Education Support Act 2003),
• 2 are privately owned, not-for-profits, in receipt of public funding (under Table A of the HESA Act)[3], and
• 4 universities are privately owned (3 are non-profits and the other is a for-profit institution). They are listed in Table B of the HESA Act, meaning their students are largely ineligible for public funding.[4]

There are also 160 Institutes of Higher Education and nine University Colleges in the Australian higher education sector, collectively referred to as NUHEPs. Most undergraduate students at NUHEPs are ineligible for Australian government funding, although there are some minor exceptions.

An examination of the National Register of higher education providers shows that in TEQSA’s first eight years of operation, to December 2019, it registered 38 new higher education providers.

In the period since (less than 5 years) it has registered a further 40 providers, demonstrating the growth and dynamism in Australia’s non-university higher education sector.

The last 12 years have not been solely about growth in providers entering the sector. In the same period 46 higher education providers have also exited the sector:

• 4 overseas universities (Carnegie Mellon University, University College London, Herriot-Watt University and Cranfield University)
• 8 providers whose registration was cancelled or not renewed, and
• the remaining 34 providers either withdrew their registration or allowed it to expire – often as a result of merger and acquisition activities, for example the expiry of Study Group Australia’s registration after it was acquired by Navitas.

In addition to the number of new higher education providers entering the sector and the level of M&A activity, what is often missed in any superficial count of NUHEPs is that some organisations own multiple providers and hence have a scale which compares favourably with many publicly-funded universities.

Navitas

Navitas owns, or is a partner in, 14 NUHEPs in Australia (including two university colleges) and three English language schools. It also has extensive operations internationally. Publicly available data shows that in 2023, in just 10 of its Australian NUHEPs, Navitas enrolled almost 21,000 higher education students.[5]

In addition to its Australian operations – Navitas operates higher education providers/pathways colleges in:

• the UK (11)
• Canada (6)
• Europe (5)
• New Zealand (4)
• Asia (3)
• the Middle East (1), and
• the US (1 college, and its creative media college, SAE Institute, operates across 5 US campuses).

This is clearly not a provider that lacks scale. Even on the basis of its publicly reported higher education enrolments in Australia it is already larger than eight publicly-funded universities, and Navitas is not alone in the higher education sector in having a larger scale of operations than might be apparent at first glance.

Other private universities and NUHEPs with scale

Torrens University Australia (TUA) enrolled 24,821 students in 2023 across eight campuses in Australia, and it has another campus in China. This makes it larger than 12 of Australia’s publicly-funded universities. TUA is now owned by the NASDAQ-listed Strategic Education Ltd, which reported annual revenues in 2023 of US $1.13 billion.

Strategic Education also owns Think Education (a dual sector Australian provider), a dual sector provider in New Zealand, two private US universities and a private US college. Collectively Strategic Education reports enrolling more than 100,000 students annually.

The Education Centre of Australia, established in 2006, is another organisation which owns multiple higher education providers in Australia, is a partner of Victoria University and Swinburne University,[6] has operations in India, and holds a majority stake in the ASX-listed online learning platform, OpenLearning.

A more recent addition to the Australian higher education landscape is UP Education which in Australia owns four NUHEPs, operates university pathways colleges for Charles Darwin University, Swinburne University and the University of Tasmania, owns a number of RTOs, an English language school, and delivers Swinburne University’s online vocational education and training programs through Swinburne Open Education. It also has extensive operations in New Zealand and reports a collective student enrolment of 39,000 students.

Changing student enrolment patterns in Australian higher education

When examining whether or not private universities and NUHEPs can support the Accord Panel’s targets for increased tertiary participation and attainment, it is also useful to examine enrolment trends over the past decade.

In the decade to 2023, there have been a number of changes impacting publicly-funded universities: the ‘demand driven’ system of funding undergraduate student places, the 2017 pause on the demand driven funding program, and its replacement in 2021 with the Job-ready Graduates funding package which changed the level of government subsidies for different undergraduate degrees and reduced average funding per domestic undergraduate student.

Publicly-funded universities navigated these changes differently. On average, domestic student enrolments in publicly-funded universities grew by 2% in the decade to 2023.

Some universities grew their domestic undergraduate student numbers, for example the University of the Sunshine Coast which increased domestic students by 57% in a decade, and UTS up 26% in the same period.

Seventeen publicly-funded universities saw their domestic enrolments decline in the last decade. For 10 of them the decline occurred between 2022 and 2023 as a result variously of the Job-ready Graduates funding changes, cost of living pressures, and the strong labour market.

The 17 publicly-funded universities to experience a drop in their domestic student numbers over the last decade are:

• Murdoch University -19%
• James Cook University -18%
• University of Southern Queensland -16%
• The University of Queensland -12%
• The University of Newcastle -11%
• Australian National University -10%
• The University of New England -8%
• The University of Sydney -8%
• The University of Notre Dame Australia -7%
• Western Sydney University -7%
• Edith Cowan University -6%
• The University of Western Australia -4%
• Charles Darwin University -3%
• Charles Sturt University -3%
• Flinders University -3%
• La Trobe University -3%
• University of Canberra -1%

Despite domestic students typically paying more for degrees at private universities and NUHEPs because of the lack of government subsidies, enrolments in NUHEPs grew by 25% in the decade to 2023 (albeit off a small base). Interestingly two-thirds of all NUHEP domestic students are enrolled in NSW institutions, and collectively NSW NUHEPs experienced a 45% increase in domestic enrolments in the last decade.

TUA was the standout amongst the private universities. It enrolled its first cohort of students in 2014 (just 325 domestic students) and by 2023 had grown its domestic enrolments to 13,483 – an increase of more than 4,000%.

The picture was more subdued for the other private universities. Bond University’s domestic student growth of 2% echoed the overall growth in the publicly-funded university sector, while the University of Divinity (-18%) and Avondale University (-26%) both experienced a sharp drop in domestic student enrolments.

Clearly there is the potential for both scale and growth in domestic student enrolments in parts of the private university sector and amongst some NUHEPs.

If ATEC chooses to examine the capacity of private universities and NUHEPs to contribute to increasing domestic student enrolments and diversity in the higher education sector, it will need to look beyond just a simple count of NUHEPs and private universities and their individual student enrolment figures to understand their current scale and their capacity for further growth.

Student diversity and satisfaction

The Universities Accord Panel, and the Minister for Education, have rightly been praised for their emphasis on increasing higher education participation and attainment amongst students from under-represented groups.

Since the Accord Panel issued their final report, the Australian government has been consulting on a new needs-based funding model for publicly-funded universities to lift participation and attainment levels of under-represented groups. The government has also announced new funding to publicly-funded universities to support more students to enter university through an enabling pathway, known as FEE-Free Uni Ready courses.

Limiting this funding to publicly-funded universities though ignores the current level of diversity in the student populations of many NUHEPs and private universities, and the high levels of satisfaction their students have with the quality of their overall educational experience.

Table 1 shows that despite the lack of government funding available to subsidise the cost of study for their students, private universities and NUHEPs have diverse domestic student populations, enrolling students from identified equity groups in similar proportions to publicly-funded universities (with the exception of students with disability).

Table 1: Higher education participation by domestic students from under-represented groups (2023)

Table 2 shows the level of satisfaction students expressed with the quality of their overall educational experience in different institutions in 2023. The strong performance of both the private universities and NUHEPs is evident.

Table 2: Quality of entire education experience among undergraduate and postgraduate students (2023)

Conclusion

When the ATEC commences and turns its mind (or that of its staff) to the question of how the higher education sector can achieve the higher levels of educational participation recommended by the Accord Panel, including for students from under-represented groups, the Commission should start with a full appreciation of the diversity and scale that exists across the higher education sector as a whole.

While publicly-funded universities collectively dominate domestic student enrolments, the scale of some private universities and NUHEPs are much larger than they might initially appear. And some of these institutions have been able to successfully scale their student enrolments over the past decade, despite a lack of government funding, and while enrolling a diverse student population which is highly satisfied with its educational experience.

Depending on the government of the day and the views of the sector, there will of course be debates to be had about whether or not government funding should be allocated to students choosing to study at a private university or NUHEP.

But there should not be any debate about the capacity of these institutions to play a meaningful part in delivering on Australia’s future educational attainment goals. In fact there is probably much that leaders within government and across the publicly-funded university sector (especially those institutions who have seen their enrolments decline in the last decade) could learn from these organisations which have successfully scaled and grown.

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Claire is a graduate of three public universities (The University of Auckland, The University of Queensland and The University of Sydney). She is currently undertaking a PhD at Torrens University Australia examining the university’s first ten years of operations.

[1] Interestingly, despite their support for greater diversity the Accord Panel also noted their support for “institutional restructuring” such as the merger of the universities of Adelaide and South Australia (which will reduce institutional diversity in the sector) where “there are demonstrable benefits for students, staff and the wider community”.

[2] Adelaide University was registered by TEQSA in May 2024 and is preparing to commence operations in 2026 following the completion of the merger of The University of Adelaide and the University of South Australia.

[3] Table A universities are referred to in this analysis as publicly-funded universities.

[4] It is of course open to the Australian government at any time to move a university from Table B to Table A status (ie their undergraduate students are all fully government-funded), as it did with the University of Notre Dame Australia in 2021.

[5] Excluded from this student count are the students enrolled in pathways colleges where Navitas is a partner with Charles Sturt University, the University of Canberra, the University of Sydney and Western Sydney University. Data on these students is reported within each of the respective university’s enrolments statistics. Data on the students enrolled in Navitas’ English language schools is also not reported publicly.

[6] Swinburne University and ECA have recently announced they are winding up their partnership to deliver Swinburne degrees in Sydney.