In the 2017-18 Budget, the Australian Government announced that it would work with the higher education sector to establish a more transparent framework for the collection of financial data from higher education providers to enable regular reporting on the cost of teaching and research by field of education. In 2018 the Department of Education, Skills and Employment engaged Deloitte Access Economics to conduct a study from 2018 to 2020 guided by two overarching objectives:

• the accurate measurement of the costs of teaching and scholarship by field and level of education
• supporting the continued transition to a more comprehensive, systematic and streamlined data collection process over time.

Based on this data, the department has prepared charts from 2018 onwards to show how much universities spend on teaching and scholarship at the bachelor level relative to the base funding* per EFTSL (equivalent full-time student load) they received in 2017 across the following categories:

• geographic classification (metro or regional)
• university size (less than 15,000 domestic bachelor enrolments, between 15,000 and 25,000 domestic bachelor enrolments and greater than 25,000 domestic bachelor enrolments)
• field of education.

*Base funding is defined as the sum of the student contribution amount and the Commonwealth Grant Scheme subsidy payable in respect of a unit of study

2018 Charts

The 2018 transparency in higher education expenditure charts are based on 2017 data on teaching and scholarship costs collected from 25 universities.

2018 Transparency in higher education charts
2018 Transparency Charts By FoE
2018 Transparency Charts Region - State - Campus Size

2019 Charts

The 2019 transparency in higher education expenditure charts are based on 2018 data on teaching and scholarship costs collected from 32 universities.

2019 Transparency in higher education charts
2019 Transparency Charts By FoE
2019 Transparency Charts By Region - State - Campus Size