Submissions to the Senate inquiry into the government’s student places capping bill – with the official but misleading title of the Universities Accord (Opening the Doors of Opportunity) Bill 2026 – were due last Friday. The submissions are not yet appearing on the Senate’s website but mine is here. [Update: Submissions are now available.]
It extracts the needed amendments to the bill from my series of explainer posts: on setting the number of Commonwealth supported places, on ATEC’s distributions of CSPs to public universities and to private universities and non-university providers, on capping over-enrolments, on effectively demand driven funding for equity students, on needs based funding, on allocating international student commencements, on ministerial conditions on student places funding, and on ATEC’s options for rewarding and punishing universities.
I will post again on the over-enrolment parts of the bill – in competition with Job-ready Graduates student contributions as the worst domestic student policy idea of the 2020s – but copy in my submission overview as a summary of its key themes:
The Universities Accord (Opening the Doors of Opportunity) Bill does not do what it says on the cover.
The bill’s sole mechanism for increasing enrolments in universities is more efficient use of existing funding.
The bill does not appropriate any new funding for additional student places. As under the current system, the minister will need to work through the government’s internal budget processes to secure that money.
By contrast, the bill has two new features that will reduce how many student places universities can offer.
The most important of these is caps on over-enrolments, on student contribution-only places delivered by universities above their allocated number of student places. If these laws had been in place in 2025, the maximum over-enrolments allowed would have permitted about half of the over-enrolments actually delivered, at the cost of more than 20,000 places across the system.
A planned default allocation of student places to public universities, while intended to reduce unused places, also threatens cuts. To use an example, a university’s default allocation of places for 2029 will be the lower of their places allocated for 2028 or the places actually delivered in 2027. If the university had received additional places for 2028 and respected their over-enrolment limit for 2027 the default position would wipe out some or all of their new 2028 places.
Due to problems with the bill’s drafting it will not achieve some of its other goals. The explanatory memorandum presents the default allocation described above as preventing a university’s allocation going backwards, but this is not what the bill itself guarantees.
The bill’s explanatory memorandum recognises problems with the current definition of low socioeconomic status, but the bill itself inserts a provision that will reduce how many low SES students attract needs based funding.
Another major issue with the bill is excessively broad ministerial discretion. The bill lets the minister impose conditions on receipt of Commonwealth Grant Scheme funds with no restrictions on how this power can be used. For allocations of international student commencements, the bill suspends an existing limit on the minister directing ATEC in respect of specific education providers.
The 2026 early implementation of enrolment restrictions, without statutory authority, shows that the government cannot just be trusted to do the right thing. Clear legal limits are required.
Ends
Andrew Norton 