Australian higher education is again in transition. This is not unusual. The sector has long been shaped by reform, with each phase altering the relationship between government, universities and students. Since the late twentieth century, however, the dominant policy frame has been marked by student choice, performance measurement and quasi-market arrangements. Universities remained public institutions, yet were increasingly expected to position themselves, compete for students and operate in neoliberal ways.
What we are witnessing appears to be more than a comprehensive suite of policy reforms; it signals post-neoliberalism. Put simply, neoliberalism assumed that marketisation could do much of the organising work in higher education, whereby students would choose, universities would compete, performance would be measured and the system would improve through these pressures. While post-neoliberalism does not mean that markets have disappeared, it signals that governments are becoming less willing to leave the sector to market settings alone. The shift is from asking whether universities can compete effectively to asking whether the system itself is organised well enough to deliver wider participation, completion, capability and public value.
The Australian Universities Accord is one visible marker of this shift toward post-neoliberalism. The Accord does not remove marketisation from Australian higher education; rather, it appears to recalibrate the sector’s policy frame by giving greater weight to system design, public value, participation, student support and long-term national capability. At a sector level, the movement appears to be toward more deliberate system stewardship.
The move toward post-neoliberalism can be seen in policy vocabulary such as ‘managed growth funding’, ‘mission-based compacts’, ‘benchmarking’ and ‘responsive skills system’. These phrases matter because they shift attention from institutional competition to the active management of the whole tertiary system. By way of explanation, ‘managed growth’ implies that expansion will be steered, ‘mission-based compacts’ infer institutional compliance with agreed system purposes, ‘benchmarking’ introduces comparison as a tool of coordination, and a ‘responsive skills system’ links higher education more directly to national capability in a tertiary system. The Australian Tertiary Education Commission gives institutional form to this post-neoliberal shift, with a stronger oversight for how the system is organised and governed.
Australia is not alone in this movement. Across comparable systems, higher education policy is being pulled back toward questions of coordination, equity and social license. The United Kingdom’s 2024 comparative briefing on higher education notes the continuing importance of intermediary public bodies in steering system management, while the OECD’s Education at a Glance places renewed attention on tertiary attainment, completion, financing and labour-market outcomes. These international patterns suggest that Australia’s post-neoliberal turn is part of a wider recalibration in which governments are taking a more active role in shaping what higher education systems are for and how they should be organised.
What is the expectation now of universities?
The emerging post-neoliberal policy frame changes what is expected of universities. Institutional autonomy is more firmly tethered to sovereign capability, with universities positioned as part of the national infrastructure for skills, research, equity and regional development. In this frame, widening participation becomes a central measure of public value, which makes the definition and measurement of public value more consequential. System stewardship may sharpen priorities and funding, but it may also narrow institutional purpose if public value is defined mainly through workforce demand, benchmarking or short-term performance. For widening participation practitioners, this means they should expect equity to be drawn further into the workflows through which universities plan, fund, approve, deliver and evaluate their work. The emerging task for practitioners will be to ensure those workflows materially change what equity students actually experience. That is, they will need to resist the pull to translate equity rhetoric into plans, targets, reports and institutional claims that leave everyday conditions largely untouched.
What is emerging, then, is not the end of the marketised university but a more assertive public claim over its purposes and obligations. Post-neoliberalism is a useful frame for the present-day sector shifts in which governments are asking universities to validate their social license through their contribution to public value, national capability and the conditions students actually encounter. For widening participation, the test is whether this substantively changes the educational conditions students move through, or simply recasts equity in the ‘feel-good’ language of targets, benchmarks and reporting.
