A distinguished scholar has advised the Australian government against giving the country’s 38 public universities more money to expand the number of places and instead suggested that improving the management of universities’ funding would be a “cost-effective” way to tackle the problem. Salvatore Babones, an Adjunct Scholar at the Centre for Independent Studies (CIS) and Associate Professor at the University of Sydney has raised concerns about the ramifications of the government’s decision not to limit the number of undergraduate degrees a student can take with Commonwealth support. In his new paper published by the CIS on March 28, Babones said this funding model “incentivises” universities to keep students enrolled for “as long as they can” in multiple- undergraduate degree programs that can take up to seven years to complete rather than encourage them to progress to postgraduate study. It would also allow the schools to increase the proportion of high-performing …