A Study On The Financing Of Higher Education In Australia

Compared with other western developed countries, the higher education of Australia is relatively young; its history just has more about 160 years. But it has own a number of first-class universities with a dozen of Nobel winners from having no ability to educating their own graduates, which is highly worthy of being our prototype. As an Up-and-Coming star in the developed capitalist countries, its developing of higher education invariably go with the constant adjustment of education policies including the fund raising reform like most countries in the world. Australia higher education financing problem gradually become more serious with the increasing of students and the growing of scales. In order to solve this problem, the Australian federal government has taken some measures to establish a diversified funding collecting system. In the first place, the most principal solution includes charging the tuition fees from students. Meanwhile, the federal government also provides students with a strong financing security measures to ensure the fairness and enrollment rate of higher education. Moreover, the Australian federal government stresses to strengthen the ability of financing by university itself. It contains that transforming the university research achievement to commercialized, enrolling a large number of overseas students, and exporting its higher education as the third largest export industry to generate revenue for universities. These measures taking by the Australian federal government effectively settling the financial difficulties of higher education, and putting less financial pressure on the government.This paper takes the fund raising of higher education in Australia as research object, combines with the background and motivation in different periods, and analyses the effects in the process of higher education diversified funding. The main body of this thesis includes three parts. The first parts is concentrate on the analysis, that is the whole condition of Australian higher education fund raising from a historical perspective, come to the conclusion is that the perfect revenue system consisted by government financial allocation, tuition and fees, the Higher Education Contribution Scheme and higher education institution’s own earnings. The second parts studies the four sources above mentioned individually from macroscopic perspective, attempts to sort out their characteristics and historical change of various financing sources. The final part of this paper sums up the mainly characteristics of Australian higher education fund raising, then present the revelation to higher education financial structure reform of China considering the difference between two countries in history and culture.