The anxiety-soaked issue of US student loans has been in the spotlight recently. Earlier this year, in a stunning act of altruism, US billionaire Robert Smith eliminated the debt of a 2019 graduating class. In March, Democratic runner Bernie Sanders ...

Amongst a mini-blizzard of reports and opinions on reforms to the nation’s tertiary education system, both in higher education (HE) and especially the VET sector, the KPMG report Reimagining tertiary education: from binary system to ecosystem is commendable by going ...

MYEFO delivered a blow to universities - a lesser one than May's budget - but nonetheless, an affront. Alongside freezing per-student funding for two years, the government intends to cap student loans and demand repayment of them earlier. From 2020, it also ...

What does it take to get higher education cuts through parliament? The government thinks its latest measures – released as part of their Mid-Year Economic and Fiscal Outlook (MYEFO) – might do it. But universities aren't so sure. A summary of ...

Today, in UTS' 'brown paper bag', a symposium on advancing the public benefit of universities took place. Resisting commercialisation The need for universities to focus on research and education – not marketing – was a major topic. Professor Raewyn Connell of USYD ...

Introducing a 15 per cent fee for HELP loans is preferable to the federal government choosing to cripple the demand-driven system, the Grattan Institute has said. Andrew Norton, Grattan's higher-education program director, recently completed a report that argues for a ...

Education Minister Christopher Pyne has left the door open for alternatives to the government’s plan to charge students a higher interest rate on HECS-HELP repayments. In an address to the National Press Club yesterday in which he spruiked the virtues ...