Unleashing student demand by ending number controls in Australia: An incomplete experiment?

At the end of 2013, George Osborne announced the end of student number caps. In future, higher education institutions will be free to recruit as many students as they want. But it remains unclear how the change will be implemented, how it will be paid for and what it will mean in practice.

In this report written by Andrew Norton, Programme Director in Higher Education at the Grattan Institute in Melbourne, HEPI considers how the same policy worked when it was rolled out in Australia.