Group of Eight Australia

The minor party is proposing caps on the number of international student places dropped from five hundred and ninety thousand to three hundred and fifty thousand, and the number of graduates who wish to remain in Australia to be slashed by two hundred and thirty thousand.

Vicki Thomson is CEO of the Group of eight of the nation's largest universities and says Australia is becoming far less attractive for international students.

And the biggest night of television is underway in Los Angeles, the seventy-eighth Emmy Award ceremony.

Noah Wyle has won Best Lead Actor in a Drama Series for The Pitt, while Jean Smart won her fifth Best Actress award in a comedy for the fifth and final season of Hacks.

So the...

The hearing kicked off with three key peak body representatives, Luke Shee from Universities Australia, Vicky Thompson from the Group of Eight, and Alec Webb from the Regional Universities Network.

Luke opened with an opening statement.

Oh, and I should have said, sorry, before we dig into what the various representatives said, Somewhat unusually for a piece of legislation, when this legislation was introduced into the House of Reps, the government almost immediately realised that there were problems with it and decided with the support of the crossbench, particularly Kate Cheney but other independent MPs, it self-legislated 17, made 17 changes to its legislation before it then passed into the Senate.

This is additional funding for certain equity cohorts and for equity students studying at regional universities.

This was highly contested depending on where you sit in the system as to where and how you thought this was working.

Vicki Thompson from the group of eight raised concerns about student choice under the bill, particularly students who might be turned away from their preferred university position.

Would they give up on study altogether? Would they find a place at another university? Would they defer their studies? Would they start at one university and then maybe transfer to another? This could give them much higher student debt.

I would say too, I think the different types of universities that I've worked in and private institutions, each have different strengths, I think, and advantages and different vulnerabilities.

So again, I think having, something I guess I appreciate is having had this perspective of seeing it from different angles The classic, I guess, being that the older GO8 established public universities, of course, have a great advantage in terms of their research capability and that flows through into things like international rankings and so on.

On the other hand, I guess as a useful comparison, I think if we look at some other kinds of metrics like the National Student Experience Surveys, then we can see that actually one could make an argument based on that sort of data that maybe some of the best teaching in this country is happening in the private sector.

And so I think, as I say, there are different areas of strength.