This week marks the 40th anniversary since I settled permanently in Australia under the refugee and humanitarian program. I landed in Melbourne the day before the 1985 Hawthorn-Essendon VFL grand final.
Over the past four decades, higher education (HE) has played a crucial role in the transformation of society. Australia's universities have thrived, fuelled by the prosperity brought by more than 30 years of sustained economic growth. However, the past six years or so have seen universities face significant challenges.
Let me start by setting the scene with some observations and reflections on the road travelled, and then I will focus on the agency of mass higher education. In doing so I also posit this question: how can we overcome some of the challenges that we currently face, considering turbulence and increased uncertainty both domestically and internationally?
Setting the scene
In 1985, the Australian economy continued its path of recovery following the 1982-83 recession. The labour market was strong; inflation was at its lowest level for more than a decade, and personal consumption was up.
Australia was in the process of its second wave of economic reforms to drive efficiencies across industry sectors; these reforms focused on tariff reduction, a shift to a more decentralised wage bargaining system, and promoting competition and raising productivity across markets.
Australia’s HE was also at the forefront of significant change. The emphasis was on expanding the system to improve participation. A critical question was how to fund the expansion of the system to make Australian HE more competitive and of a higher quality.
Policy developments during 1985 laid the groundwork for the Dawkins reforms, which amalgamated institutions and introduced the Higher Education Contribution Scheme (HECS), and a series of policy changes, all of which still resonate to this day.
A life of learning
I am very fortunate that I benefited from these policies which accelerated the massification of Australia HE. The financial assistance I received from the government through the Tertiary Education Assistance Scheme (now AUSTUDY) was sufficient for me to have a roof over my head, covering my living and studying expenses until I completed my Bachelor's degree.
During the first 15 months living in Australia, I spent most of my time learning local language by enrolling in successive English as a Second Language courses. I did this because I wanted to have a degree.
When I first enrolled at Swinburne Institute of Technology in 1987, there was an annual charge of $250. Luckily, I was granted one year credit for prior studies in journalism overseas, so it only took me two years to complete a Bachelor's degree. I enrolled at Monash University in 1989 to start a Master’s degree, with an annual HECS charge of $1,800. By the time I completed the master’s degree, the annual charge was $2,250, which I did not mind that much as I was in full-time employment.
In 1989, I started working as a research planning assistant at Footscray Institute of Technology (now Victoria University). Being in the planning office, I was abreast of the discussions about institutional mergers and prepared reports on what it all meant.
Indeed, I feel privileged I have spent most of my career working in education planning, policy, governance, and strategy, here in Australia and abroad.
Mass higher education
As I reflect on the significant transformation brought about by the massification of HE, there has been exponential growth in the number and size of providers; increased enrolments, resulting in greater diversity among students ; and increased capacity for research endeavours.
In 1985, there were 370,016 students enrolled across 19 universities and 73 other HE institutions. By 2023, there were over 1.6 million students enrolled across 43 universities and hundreds of other providers.
Australian universities are large compared to those in other liberal economies. Australian universities have on average 37,222 enrolments, compared to 19,363 in the United Kingdom and 7,162 in the United States.
Globally, the number of enrolments in HE has gone from 60.3 million in 1985 to over 263 million in 2023. Back then, Europe and North America had 52% of the global share of enrolments. This has reduced to 19.2%. Now, more than 60% of global enrolments are in Asian countries.
Australia’s provision of HE remains largely in the hands of public institutions. Australian universities operate in a quasi-market and fiercely compete for international students. Globally, the private provision of HE has been on the rise for the past few decades.
Although Australian government expenditure on tertiary education as a proportion of all expenditure is down from 4.1% in 1985-86 to 2.3% in 2023-24, Australia has done very well internationally, as reflected in global rankings.
In fact, income from international students has bolstered Australia’s knowledge production and citation impact, both of which drive global rankings. Australia produced fewer than 20,000 scholarly outputs in the 1980s compared with more than 125,000 in 2024, when we became one of the top 15 countries in the world for knowledge production.
Agency of mass higher education
The massification of HE has given agency to people who were previously denied opportunity to be fully active participants in society. Access to HE has meant that more women and people from different social, ethnic, and cultural backgrounds are graduating with higher degrees and are actively contributing to the knowledge economy.
In Australia, women represented 56.7% of total enrolments in HE in 2023, compared to 47.6% in 1985, or 21.4% in 1949. The labour market has also been transformed. As of August 2025, women represented 63.5% of the workforce, compared to around 30% in 1996.
Access to university is no longer seen as a privilege or a right only available to the elite. Access, participation, and success have expanded to the overall population. The composition of the student cohort is drawn from a range of social, cultural, and linguistic backgrounds. In fact, equity initiatives developed in the 1980s laid the foundation for the national equity policy (A Fair Chance for All) of 1990 which identified six groups as being significantly underrepresented in HE.
Indeed, the process of massification of HE has played a critical role in the shift towards gender equality and the celebration of multicultural diversity in Australian society.
Universities have become very diverse and open multicultural institutions, contributing to Australia’s social cohesiveness. Unfortunately, social cohesiveness is weakening here as it is elsewhere. Universities and civil society must do more to mitigate further deterioration of social cohesion by better supporting students from disadvantaged backgrounds to achieve their desired goals and meaningfully contribute to society.
Challenges galore
There is a vivid sense that universities are facing a crisis. I believe we all have played a part in it, and we must decide if we adopt an active or passive role in making our voices heard. As I have previously argued, the underlying position financial position for our universities will continue to be challenging for some years. In more recent times, there is focus on institutional governance.
My view is that we can overcome these challenging times by working collaboratively, acknowledging that turning the clock backwards is not feasible. By trying to turn the clock, we deny ourselves of the agency we have collectively benefited from through mass higher education.
We have conducted extensive reviews at system, institutional, and discipline levels over the past few years to understand the causes of the many issues we face. We have developed roadmaps and action plans but often failed in execution, in part due to lack of enthusiasm, short term vision, and having no skin in the game.
We need to keep in perspective our care of duty for the 1.6 million learners who enrol in our universities and equip them with the abilities and competences to succeed beyond academia. We also need to keep in perspective that, on average, more than 380,000 students are completing their degrees each year. . Students are continuing to participate in the system.
Turning challenges into opportunities
Instead of dwelling on the past, let us focus on how we can leverage the resources and capabilities to remain competitive and relevant over the next few decades. Below are some possibilities that can make a difference.
Reshaping the university landscape
- Dehegemonise universities by establishing specialist institutions. Diversify the range of institutions by allowing large faculties (or disciplines) and large campuses to become standalone institutions. This allows universities to be more connected to community.
- Provide financial certainty beyond the electoral cycle. Five-year funding certainty will greatly help our universities to plan and deliver and assure the highest quality of what they set out to achieve, in line with government policy and institutional mission.
- Increase flexibility for students to study across a wide range of disciplines. Universities with a strong focus on interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary teaching and research endeavours are likely to be more appealing to students and civil society.
- Increase rates of financial assistance to students so they can live above the poverty line.
Making the university student centric
- Appoint student success advisors to ensure students maintain engagement during the first year of study
- Campus open places for the community – library, arts, sports grounds, cinemas, and theatre spaces accessible on weekends and weeknights
- Modernise teaching periods. Rescind semester cycles and instead have ongoing cycles
- University leaders should maintain a fractional teaching load – teaching at least one subject
- Open monthly forums for the community / civil society, industry, and partners to interact with university leaders and students
System wide support
- Increase sharing resources to full institutional vision and ensure financial sustainability instead of having separate student systems
- Develop unified systems such as human resources, research management, financial management, facilities and campus operations
- Empower leaders to be more effective and efficient in tackling turbulence and uncertainty. For so long, we have relied on management textbooks focused on growth and stability. Leaders must be empowered to deal with more frequent and overlapping crises and conflicting externalities in uncertain circumstances.
Angel Calderon is a higher education global expert.