HE community fights ALTC closure

While universities stand to lose more than twice as much from cuts to capital funding, it’s the abolition of the ALTC that really has the higher education community up in arms.

Pensions as well as postcodes : new SES measure

Centrelink information, as well as postcodes, will determine student SES for the purposes of the new equity loading – but only as an interim measure.

Unis becoming more equitable, as applications rise

Unis are opening their doors – and particularly to low-SES students, new figures suggest.

Government under-planning for a student snowball : Go8

The government’s plans for higher education system will barely cope with growing demographics, let alone growing participation rates.

Calm before the storm?

Dwindling school enrolments in the years ahead will impede progress toward the Bradley attainment target, new modelling suggests.

Sector lobbies independents : don't wreck equity program

The Coalition’s plans could destroy new-found unity over equitable access to higher education, the rural independents have been warned.

Income support best way of fixing equity : Go8

The Go8 has broken ranks with other university groups in suggesting that base funding shouldn’t have an equity component.

Equity improvements queried

More disadvantaged students applied for university last year. But not enough, according to the experts.

Women doing OK but men lagging behind

Women have all but met the federal government's higher education attainment goals, but the overall population can't reach the target unless men's participation rates improve drastically, according to a Sydney higher education researcher.

Trevor Gale's departure comes at a crucial time

The founding director of the country's national research centre for student equity, Trevor Gale, has resigned to take up an academic and strategic advisory role at Deakin University in Victoria.

Trevor Gale raises equity fears as Bradley recommendations could concentrate disadvantage

Disadvantaged students could be further concentrated in younger and regional universities if Bradley review recommendations on entitlements are implemented without stringent controls, derailing a major objective of the review, according to National Centre for Student Equity in Higher Education director Trevor Gale.

"Rogue" figure skews attainment data

The ABS higher education attainment data has been skewed by a statistical blip that artificially inflated the 2009 figure, according to higher education researcher Alan Olsen.

William Wardell's 1859 St John's College - a rare realisation of Pugin's ideal Catholic College?

William Wardell’s St John’s College, Sydney, considered the grandest and architecturally most distinguished university college in New South Wales, is an exceptional example of 19th century Gothic Revival architecture.  The information board outside the college states that St John’s is ‘a rare realisation of Pugin’s ideal Catholic College’ and further that ‘it demonstrates [Pugin]’s profound influence on the work of Wardell’. This is but a small part of the story. The commission for St John’s College was far more complex.  The correspondence between the architects, William Wardell, Edmund Blacket and others, and St John’s Council indicates that right from the beginning there was a general lack of understanding of Wardell’s original design concept for the building. This has continued to the present day, as evidenced by the information on the board outside St John’s College, in which it is incorrectly assumed that Wardell’s proposal included a quadrangle as featured in Pugin’s ‘ideal College’. This paper, based largely on primary sources, investigates such claims about St John’s, considers William Wardell and the Gothic Revival, examines St John’s College within the University of Sydney – its design and its translation and posits a few conclusions leading to new understandings.