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The Tertiary Education Landscape in Australia

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Entrepreneurs Creating Educational Innovation

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Abstract

In an increasingly competitive global knowledge economy driven by the speeding up of worldwide interconnectedness, new organisations, including those in the educational and training sector, are being formed and reshaped at a rapid rate, in response to evolving demands for knowledge-intensive production.

This chapter presents an overview of the changing tertiary education landscape in Australia, where an active and entrepreneurial independent sector has gradually been moving into areas of education traditionally offered by the public sector, or into new areas where a gap has been identified, in response to student demand for greater choice.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Tuition fees at university and technical colleges (pre-TAFEs) had been abolished in Australia by the Whitlam Labour Government in 1974. It also established the Commonwealth’s full responsibility for university funding. In 1989, the Hawke Labour Government reintroduced the fees, and established the Higher Education Contributions Scheme (HECS), a new system to defer payment of student fees. This became known as the ‘Dawkins Revolution’.

  2. 2.

    Founded as the Melbourne College of Divinity in 1910, it was awarded university status in 2012, becoming known as the University of Divinity.

  3. 3.

    Some states still regulate their single jurisdiction RTOs, notably Victoria and Western Australia.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Study Connections, Melbourne, VIC, Australia

    Laura Hougaz

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  1. Laura Hougaz
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Hougaz, L. (2020). The Tertiary Education Landscape in Australia. In: Entrepreneurs Creating Educational Innovation. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-28655-2_1

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