Guidelines for implementing health promotion programmes within university settings outline key action areas for addressing health concerns. Further guidance is needed to help manage specific health promotion activities according to the needs and resources available to universities. Decisions about allocating resources to improve employee health…

A common theme in higher education research is the factors that affect university funding. Studies frequently examine how universities cope with funding cuts and the changes that have stemmed from operating in a neoliberal age, a period that now sees institutions commonly functioning on a cost/benefit basis. This paper offers an original…

The Australian Government provides basic operating grants to universities, which are used to teach domestic undergraduate students. It imposes a productivity offset on the grants to encourage improvements in university productivity. But it is not transparent and does not vary across universities. Thus, universities have little incentive to improve…

In Australia, the Doctorate of Business Administration (DBA) remains a popular program but considerable anguish persists within the university sector over just what it is offering students. In this article, we use the process of postgraduate socialisation to understand how candidates, supervisors and administrators navigate pathways to successful…

For fifteen years, Australian Higher Education has engaged with the openness agenda primarily through the lens of open-access research. Open educational practice (OEP), by contrast, has not been explicitly supported by federal government initiatives, funding, or policy. This has led to an environment that is disconnected, with isolated examples of…

The recent period can only be seen as one of rapid and substantial churn as UK governments have attempted to widen participation, strengthen the national system of innovation and control the direct public costs of higher education. Very similar issues have dominated the debate in Australia. This paper compares the current position of two higher…

Issues surrounding increasingly constrained resources and reducing levels of sector-based funding require consideration of a different Academic Work Allocation Model (AWAM) approach. Evidence from the literature indicates that an effective work allocation model is founded on the principles of equity and transparency in the distribution and…

This paper provides an overview of recent trends in the provision of general infrastructure funding by the Commonwealth for Australian universities (Table A providers) over the period 2004 to 2011. It specifically examines general infrastructure development and excludes funding for research infrastructure through the Australian Research Council or…

The demands on academic staff are increasing to the point where effective mechanisms for the allocation of their work are now necessary. Despite the inherent difficulties of categorising academic work, nearly all enterprise agreements at Australian universities include a clause designed to avoid work overload. Through a questionnaire, the…

Expenditures per student in Australian universities are examined by a university vice-chancellor. Focus is on cost indexes, real resources, and corrections for faculty costs. (LBH)

This paper describes resource allocation in Australian universities including the broader context of national restructuring and a case study of one university's attempt to restructure resource allocation within the university. The 1987 restructuring of the Australian system from a binary system to a unified national system and the associated…

This document reviews how performance indicators are currently being used in several Commonwealth countries the United Kingdom, Australia, and Canada, and identifies some of the issues associated with performance indicator development and application. It also examines whether there are any agreed upon "key", or common, indicators that…

Four forms of funding universities (capitation, categorical, initiative, inventive) in Australia are examined for their characteristics, advantages, and disadvantages. The option of using these funding mechanisms for allocating resources within individual universities, based on performance, is explored. Finally, use of the four kinds of funding…

A study compared outcomes of a 1993 rating of Australian universities by the Commission for Quality in Higher Education with government grants to institutions for achieving equity goals and for strategies used to meet them, suggesting that the two issues are completely disassociated in funding considerations. Analysis of the data is detailed. (MSE)

A government-commissioned study in Australia investigated the experiences of a number of countries with performance-based funding of universities and examined the potential for its application in Australian higher education. The study found various forms of performance-based funding in different countries (England, Scotland, Germany, Netherlands,…