Tertiary education in Australia

This article needs additional citations for verification. Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. Find sources: "Tertiary education in Australia" – news · newspapers · books · scholar · JSTOR (May 2023) (Learn how and when to remove this template message)

The University of Melbourne, Melbourne.

Box Hill Institute, Melbourne.

Department of Education, Skills and Employment, Canberra.

The University of Sydney, Sydney.

Australian National University, Canberra.

Tertiary education in Australia is formal education beyond high school in Australia, consisting of both government and private institutions and divided into two sectors; Higher Education (provided by universities) and Vocational Education and Training (VET) provided by government-owned TAFEs & private Registered Training Organisations (RTO).^[1][2] Australian Qualifications Framework (AQF), the Australian national education policy, classifies tertiary qualification into 10 levels: level 1 to 4 vocational certificates (I - IV); level 5 & 6 undergraduate diploma and advanced diploma; level 6 associate degree; level 7 bachelor degree, level 8 bachelor honours degree & graduate certificates and graduate diplomas; level 9 for master's degree; and level 10 PhD. Most universities are government owned and mostly self-regulated. For other institutes (VETs, i.e. TAFE & RTO) there are two national regulators for tertiary education for registration, recognition and quality assurance of both the "provider institutes" as well as the "individual courses" provided by the providers. Tertiary Education Quality and Standards Agency (TEQSA) regulates institutes which provide education from level 5 or above. Australian Skills Quality Authority (ASQA) regulates institutes which provide education from level 1 to level 6.^[3]

For admission in Australian institutes, Australian & New Zealand citizens or Australian permanent residents, are considered the "domestic students" regardless of whether they did the prior schooling in Australia or overseas. All others are considered the "international students".^[4] Domestic students need to apply only once to the TACs (State-based unified Tertiary Admission Center) of the relevant state for admission to all the universities within that state, which grant admission based on the ATAR-based "Selection Rank" (SR). Those students with International Baccalaureate (IB), both domestic and international students, must apply to the "Australasian Conference of Tertiary Admission Centres" (ACTAC) which calculates an Australia-wide ATAR-like national rank called "Combined Rank" (CR).^[5] Domestic students usually pay lot less subsidised-fees compared to the International students. Additionally, the domestic students are entitled to publicly funded universal health care insurance scheme Medicare, Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme (PBS) and various social security welfare payments & benefits, e.g. Austudy Payment, Youth Allowance, etc., to meet the living expenses. The international students are not entitled to these benefits. All international students apply individually to each University, and most international students are self-financed non-subsidised full-fee paying students.

There are 43 universities registered in Australia (including 37 public universities, four private universities, and one international private university).^[6][7] Many Australian universities have formed several network groupings, such as Group of Eight (oldest 8 universities, which also receive two thirds of government research grant funding awarded to all universities), Australian Technology Network (ATN), Innovative Research Universities (IRU), Regional Universities Network (RUN), and more.^[8]

Australia is well known for high quality education, most of the universities are government owned, and they rank very highly on the global rankings. Australia is ranked 4th (with Germany) by OECD in international PhD students destination after US, UK and France.^[9] Australia has a comparatively high proportion of international students as a percentage of students enrolled, at 26.5% in 2018.^[10] Australia has the fifth-highest number of foreign students worldwide.^[11] The 56% of 462,033 international students in Australia are from top-5 nations; China (23%), India (16%), Nepal (10%), Colombia (4%) and Thailand (3%) with enrollment ratio of 50% in Higher Education (229,833), 35% VET (162,193), 11% ELICOS English language course (50,246), 2% Schools (19,704) and 2% Non-Award (8,057).^[12] In 2022, 69% of Australians aged 20–64 had a tertiary qualification, and 24% had multiple qualifications.^[1] Among all the ethnic groups in Australia, the Indian Australians are the highest educated group in Australia with 54.6% having a bachelor's or higher degree, more than three times Australia's national average of 17.2%.^[13]