University resourcing: Australia in an international context
Research report
Research report
This report was released on 11 February 2003. An erratum to the report was issued on 15 May 2003.
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University Resourcing: Australia in an International Context (ZIP 1.5 MB)There is great diversity in the financial resourcing of Australian as well as overseas universities, the Productivity Commission has found.
Its report, University Resourcing: Australia in an International Context, was commissioned by the Government as part of the review of higher education in Australia. (Preliminary results were released in October last year.)
Unlike a number of overseas institutions, Australian universities generally received the largest share of their revenue from government. Also, a greater share of their revenue was from students (accounting for HECS). Full-fee-paying international students contributed up to 50 per cent of total student revenue in the Australian sample.
For over a third of the overseas universities studied, revenue from other (private) sources — such as, donations, investments and commercial activities — accounted for a greater proportion of revenue than revenue from either government or students.
Major differences in the approach to funding among the countries studied include Australia’s system of future income contingent student loans (HECS) to meet tuition fees, the use of independent funding allocation agencies in some other countries and the performance-based allocation of research grants in the United Kingdom.
In 1999 (the latest year reported by the OECD), expenditure on tertiary education as a proportion of GDP was higher in Australia than in the United Kingdom and some other European countries, but was lower than in Canada, the United States and Sweden.
