Last year I wrote about payments to universities under the Higher Education Continuity Guarantee, a Morrison-era program to compensate universities for ‘under-enrolment’. I then had data up to 2022. This can now be updated to 2024. Total expenditure on the Guarantee and its 2020 predecessor, the Higher Education Relief Program, now exceeds $1 billion.
How the Higher Education Continuity Guarantee worked
In simplified terms, the Higher Education Continuity Guarantee offset reduced payments to universities from the Commonwealth Grant Scheme.
Under the funding legislation, universities are supposed to receive the lesser of 1) The value of Commonwealth supported places delivered, calculated on a full-time equivalent place multiplied by the relevant Commonwealth contribution amount, or 2) the maximum grant amount that universities were entitled to receive under their funding agreement (how this maximum was calculated varied in the life of the Guarantee).
For universities entitled to receive only the amount calculated in option (1), the Guarantee topped them up to the amount in (2).
This is called ‘under-enrolment’ because universities did not deliver sufficient Commonwealth supported places to receive their maximum grant amount.
The cost of the Higher Education Continuity Guarantee
Guarantee funding peaked in 2022, at $346 million, before dropping to $298 million in 2023 and $218 million in 2024. Total cost since 2020 is $1.056 billion.
Andrew Norton 