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In roughly a decade, university rankings gained the foreground in the policy arena for higher education and their influence is not going to decrease. However, several methodological shortcomings and warnings about the unintended consequences for national higher education systems have been raised. Against this background, this paper stresses that the individual recipients of information contained in university rankings are currently overlooked. Indeed, university rankings are addressed to a generic recipient, but actually, there are multiple audiences for rankings, and each of these audiences has different needs and each one attributes a different value to information attached to rankings. Referring to a theoretical tool borrowed from bioethics, this paper highlights that the ranking game involves a variety of recipients and that the current setting of the ranking panorama leaves room for gaps to emerge. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Complaints made to external agencies about Australian universities are rising in both number and complexity. Recent debate has therefore focused upon how to improve grievance handling in the Australian higher education sector. One suggested 'solution' is the creation of a national Australian university ombudsman. The UK has recently introduced such a national student complaint body - the Office of the Independent Adjudicator for Higher Education (OIA), a 'world first'. This paper examines the structure and operation of the OIA and highlights the advantages and pitfalls of introducing an equivalent office into the Australian higher education sector. It argues that, on balance, there are advantages in a national university ombudsman. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper populations of students returning to tertiary study in the period 1997-2005 have been compared with the population of non-returning students who had the same opportunity to return. Such comparisons were conducted for students who returned after a break of 1-7 years (seven comparison groups). Students with the highest likelihood of returning were found to be: (i) students who had an outstanding student loan prior to their return that had been borrowed for previous tertiary studies; (ii) students who did not complete the qualification studied previously; (iii) degree-level university students; and (iv) students who had studied towards qualifications in health, education, society and culture rather than in management and commerce fields. The major finding reported in this paper is that a student loan debt does not discourage students from future study. The findings also suggest that policy decisions were likely to trigger short-term increases in returning behaviour and that the populations most affected were likely to be those who left tertiary education in the year in which the policy decisions were announced. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]