Editorial

Welcome to the May 2017 edition of The Institutional Researcher.

Front and centre this month was the May 9 Australian Federal Budget.  In terms of higher education, there was a lot of proposed changes to dissect and, as expected, mixed reactions.  When you consider that Australia’s higher education environment has been in a holding pattern policy-wise for some years now, the proposed reforms are not entirely unexpected.  For Newsletter readers we have summarised the key proposals from the reform package and included some media commentary on page 8.

And as Kathy mentioned in her President’s Update, the New Zealand Budget is due to be announced on 25 May 2017. It will be interesting to see how similar or dissimilar the two Budgets may be. Stay tuned for our update on the New Zealand Budget summary in the June Newsletter.

Here is a plug for our new ‘Ask Anything’ section (see page 12) where we post questions sent to us by our fellow institutional researchers / data specialists on an issue, dilemma, subject or request that they are working on and some pointers from the brain trust of the AAIR network is being sought. Help a colleague out if you can, and we will post the answers in the next issue. Because, you never know, someone out there just might be seeking the same answers!

Last but not least, Wayne Franklin from Charles Darwin University is in the Institutional Researcher’s Corner this month with his answers to our five quick questions. We have no doubt you will find his responses interesting and very relatable!

Happy reading!

Monica and Tracy

AAIR Newsletter Editors