Affirmative Action from a New Super-Regulator

On December 16 last year the opinion page editor of the Australian Financial Review phoned to enquire whether I could read an embargoed copy of the Review of Higher Education—the Bradley Report—and write up a 500-word piece before 4 p.m. that same day. The major recommendations of the Bradley Report had been widely leaked and I was able to get the promised 500 words to the editor, who promptly published them the next day. To the best of my knowledge mine was the first adverse opinion of the Bradley Report. Others have followed.

In brief my argument was that the Bradley Report did not treat students as individuals, but rather as cogs in a machine. I also argued that the kind of student-centred demand-driven system that Bradley envisaged did not require the kind of super-regulator that Bradley recommended. My review wasn’t all negative; I did agree that a student voucher system in which universities could enrol as many students as they pleased was an improvement on the current…