Month: January 2025

Update on Accord student funding policies

Andrew Norton7 Comments

With a break between jobs and other things going on I did not comment in December on the Accord-related MYEFO student funding announcements. Compared to last year’s consultation papers, the announcements included a policy change on over-enrolments, more detail on how under-enrolments will be handled, and funding amounts.

Over-enrolments

One of the worst ideas in the June 2024 managed growth consultation paper was a hard cap on Commonwealth supported places. Currently the main CSP category has a soft cap – once a university enrols CSPs valued at its maximum basic grant amount it gets only the student contribution for additional students. These student contribution-only places are known as ‘over-enrolments’. Under a hard capped system over-enrolments would receive zero funding. I explained why hard caps are a bad idea in this post.

In its MYEFO summary the government backed off a little from the hard cap idea. Now universities ‘will continue to receive student contribution amounts for a small proportion of additional students’. The reason given was the practical difficulty of hitting a precise enrolment target. [Update: At a Senate estimates hearing on 27/2/25 the Department said that ‘the overenrolment buffer will be between two per cent and five per cent’.]

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Robert Menzies and the Murray review of universities

Andrew Norton5 Comments

An earlier post looked at Robert Menzies and higher education, first as Opposition leader and then as Prime Minister, from 1945 to 1956. Despite important structural changes in the early 1950s, with the Commonwealth commencing grants to universities via the states and directly financing Commonwealth scholarships, the university sector remained small and financially weak.

In March 1956, Menzies agreed to a university policy review, what became the Murray report. This post draws on my chapter on the Murray report in The Menzies Ascendancy: Fortune, Stability, Progress 1954–1961, edited by Zachary Gorman and published last month.

The appointment of Keith Murray to review universities

By the time Menzies agreed to the review he had already decided that major changes to university policy were needed.

In his book The Measure of the Years, Menzies says that prior to his trip to England in 1956, where he first met Keith Murray in person, he told Treasurer Artie Fadden that he was initiating an enterprise that could not fail to be ‘vastly expensive’.

In December 1956 Murray was appointed as chairman. The four other members included CSIRO Chairman Ian Clunies-Ross, believed to be the subsequent report’s main author.

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Robert Menzies and higher education, 1945 to 1956

Andrew Norton3 Comments

I’m not an historian, but decided to accept a Robert Menzies Institute suggestion that I give a paper on the 1957 Murray report on universities for their 2023 conference on Menzies, which covered the years from 1954 to 1961. The book chapter version of that paper came out in December 2024.

As well as describing events surrounding the Murray report I tried some counter-factual history, in an attempt to understand the distinctive contribution of Menzies to Australian higher education policy. The post-WW2 period saw higher education expand in all the countries with which Australia compared itself. With or without Menzies, Australia’s pre-WW2 model of one impoverished, low-enrolment university in each capital city was not a plausible long-term system.

But what would have happened if Labor had remained in power after 1949, or won the close 1954 election? What would have happened if someone other than Menzies had led the Liberal Party (or the main non-Labor party, given Menzies’ role in creating the Liberal Party)?

This post looks at what happened up to 1956. A subsequent post examines the Murray report and its consequences.

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