It seems likely the Australian Tertiary Education Commission will become a reality within 18 months.
If so, we will enter a phase of higher education policy and funding unlike anything seen in 30 years.
ATEC will have an explicit mandate to develop a long-term plan for the sector, to evolve funding models, and make mission-based compacts with individual institutions. It will be charged with creating a more diverse and differentiated system, and with ushering in new provider types.
Some in the sector are already forecasting that ATEC will become an intrusive and coercive bureaucracy, forcing individual institutions to conform grimly to a sector wide grand plan.
I would like to suggest a different and more positive view – that ATEC's mandate will create genuine strategic choices for universities for the first time since the Dawkins reforms in the early 90's; and that fortune (and ATEC) will favour institutions with a clear idea of how they want to respond to those choices.
