Month: May 2026

Rule by email in higher education policy – over-enrolment and governance

Andrew Norton1 Comment

This post is about unlegislated higher education policies. The story starts last year with reports that the government was imposing caps on commencing Commonwealth supported places, which reached the media in November 2025. This sparked my interest, as the current funding legislation does not specifically authorise it.

By the end of the Universities Australia conference in February 2026 I was also hearing that governance conditions were being imposed on universities getting additional funds to reduce over-enrolment (taking students on the student contribution only). The policies were implemented via emails to vice-chancellors.

I decided to file a Freedom of Information request on the emails. I paid a $150 processing charge. This week the request was granted.

The minister’s letter

The FoI release shows that this process started with a letter from Jason Clare to the ‘interim ATEC’ dated 28 August 2025.

The letter reiterates the minister’s views on the impact of over-enrolments for the universities left with too few students. Its solution is to get over-enrolled universities to do three things:

  • ‘Agree’ to a plan to reduce or not further grow commencing Commonwealth supported students
  • Report on plans to support staff and students during this transition period (an implicit acknowledgement that fewer CSPs = fewer staff)
  • Early adoption of agreed actions from the Education Ministers’ consideration of recommendations from the Expert Council on University Governance

To do these things, universities were to be given two incentives and one threat.

  • A share of a $50 million over-enrolment fund for 2026, which would convert some over-enrolled places to fully-funded places (i.e. Commonwealth + student contribution)
  • A more attractive transition phase to a capped system, under which they could keep student contributions for over-enrolments while trending down to the caps (the ‘glidepath’)
  • And the threat that ‘actions they take now will be considered by ATEC when allocating growth places through mission based compacts for 2027’.

Emails to vice-chancellors of over-enrolled universities, dated 11 December 2025, mentioned that they had already agreed to ‘pursue a more modest growth strategy in 2026’ and told them that they had until 14 January 2026 to confirm student and staff support plans and agreement to governance actions.

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TEQSA’s response to the Australian National University’s governance issues

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Julie Bishop quit as ANU Chancellor last Friday, but not without a parting shot:

“Following unprecedented and co-ordinated interference, the ANU Council is no longer able to discharge its legal and ethical obligations,” she said. “The higher education sector is at a crossroads of regulatory overreach in the governance of our institutions or autonomy and academic freedom.”

The ANU needs to move on from the last few years of drama and disruption. The departure of controversial figures, including Julie Bishop, will help with that process. But her parting shot made a valid point. A TEQSA decision that Bishop is alluding to, while at least in part a by-product of weaknesses in TEQSA’s enforcement mechanisms, was an odd one. It was at most a partial solution to the ANU governance problems identified by TEQSA. Compared to other options it raised more serious legal compliance issues for members of the ANU Council.

The voluntary undertaking

The most prominent “unprecedented interference” is a voluntary undertaking the ANU made to TEQSA about the appointment of a new Chancellor. This was to happen in the lead up to Bishop’s term expiring on 31 December 2026, but will now be brought forward.

What the voluntary undertaking does is set a process by which the Council will accept or reject a recommendation for the new Chancellor.

The recommendation will come from a panel of TEQSA-approved members. The panel will have an independent chair nominated by TEQSA (announced as Peter Coaldrake), two TEQSA-nominated people with experience and expertise in higher education and university governance, an Indigenous person if neither of the earlier two nominees are Indigenous (who appoints this person is not stated, by inference TEQSA) and two members nominated by ANU Council who are “accepted by TEQSA in writing.”

So TEQSA will either appoint or have veto power over all five or six members of the panel.

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ATEC’s interim statement of strategic priorities

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Yesterday the Australian Tertiary Education Commission issued an interim statement of strategic priorities. This statement will guide university mission based compacts for 2027. This post covers the legal status of the statement, its apparent approach to management of the sector via compacts, and what it proposes in the areas of skills, First Nations, equity, teaching quality, VET-higher education relations, and research.

Decision-making under the ATEC system

When fully operational the ATEC decision-making process will operate in the sequence shown in the chart below.

Despite the ATEC Act 2026 officially coming into force on 29 April 2026, ATEC’s interim statement seems to be operating in the legal limbo the organisation has been in since being established as the ‘interim ATEC’ in July 2025.

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Treasury’s take on student debt repayment times under Job-ready Graduates

Andrew Norton1 Comment

Thanks to a Guardian story based on a FoI request we now know that Treasury has modelled changes to HELP debt repayment times under Job-ready Graduates. They are six years too late to influence the original policy, but better that than never as JRG remains a live issue.

Treasury used much more sophisticated methods than my own recent analysis of arts graduate repayment prospects. However, Treasury does not use the new student debt repayment system introduced in 2025-26, and so under-estimates current repayment times. I will return to this, but Treasury has produced a helpful conceptual and empirical guide to what the Morrison government should have considered prior to Job-ready Graduates being proposed, and the Albanese government should think about when redesigning the system.

Debt and income data

Instead of just using debt levels based on three years of the relevant student contributions for each course, Treasury put into their model actual subjects taken, with data from the Department of Education included in PLIDA. So the model captures extra debts caused by double degrees, changing courses or failing and repeating subjects. It also captures lower debts of people who never complete a course.

My analysis used Australian citizen median income by single year of age, as recorded using ATO and DSS income linked to Census records. For years 1 to 10 after university Treasury used a model based on actual debtor income in PLIDA (which also has ATO and DSS data). These are critical years for repayment for most debtors, so this is important. Treasury’s model uses Census data to estimate repayments after 10 years.

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