Universities and the block

To the axe of regulation federal education minister Christopher Pyne bravely has cried 'Freedom!' Under the proposals announced in last week's budget, the cost of degrees will no longer be determined by some government agency's arbitrary notion of its value, but according to the level of demand. As the details included in the budget papers amount to little more than copying and pasting proposals from the Kemp-Norton review, at the moment we have little concrete sense of how this might reshape higher education institutions in Australia (though Gavin Moodie writing on the wonkhe website and Simon Marginson on the Conversation have tried their hands at reading the tea-leaves). One thing we do know is that we do not know what will happen. There is no international precedent for this scale of deregulation. It is an enormous gamble with our public system, seeking to secure the trajectory of privatisation which would expose the entire thing into the open market.