With a looming federal election tipped to go Labor's way, the party is releasing policy specifics. Having birthed the demand-driven system, Labor has explained how it will revive it: with $10 billion dollars, which it says will boost student numbers by ...

It’s spotlight time for the lengthily-named higher education regulators and advisors, TESQA (Tertiary Education Quality and Standards Agency) and HESP (Higher Education Standards Panel). First, TEQSA released first-year university attrition statistics. Now, HESP is commenting on them, as well as ...

To help students from low socio-economic backgrounds do their best universities need to engage with them and their teachers rather than act when it is too late, writes Marcia Devlin. Students from low socio-economic status (LSES) backgrounds are entering Australian ...

If society is ready to subsidise contraception for young mums it should also help with their education, writes Stuart Middleton. The New Zealand government is to introduce a program whereby young mothers, teen mums, can get long-lasting but reversible contraception ...

Suggestions that lowering university entry scores will result in a reduction in academic standards are wrong, say the vice-chancellors of the two universities that have seen the greatest increase in students from low socio-economic backgrounds in the past three years. ...

Throwing open the gates to thousands more university students is an historic moment in higher education, but as always, the devil is in the detail. Almost a century ago a breathless editorial in The Sydney Morning Herald reported that universities ...

Almost all the UK’s Russell Group universities have failed to reach independently set levels for admitting pupils from state schools and poorer backgrounds, new figures show.  Of the 20 large research-intensive universities, only the universities of Sheffield and Liverpool reached ...

Australia’s regional and newer universities have been put at risk of extinction by the recently introduced demand driven funding system, a conference in Sydney has been told. Dr Jamie Doughney, a senior lecturer at Victoria University’s school of applied economics, told ...

A study casts doubt on the belief that students from disadvantaged backgrounds use up more resources at university. Recent research at La Trobe University’s Equity and Student Services Division questions whether the current costs of educating low socio-economic status (SES) students are higher than for their peers.  Over ...

It was with some pride that the University of Western Sydney celebrated its first group of graduates from its school of medicine, which opened in 2007. Ninety-two students – 86 Bachelors of Medicine and Bachelors of Surgery, two Bachelors of Medical ...