Australia's education system, a mixture of public and private schools
and institutions, has amongst the highest participation rates in the
world, with 31 per cent of the adult population completing tertiary
education.
Distance and external educational programs are available at pre-school, primary and secondary levels, as well as vocational courses and university degrees.
Australian universities spent about $AUD2.8 billion on research and development in 2000, which represents around a third of all Australian spending in those areas.
The last 20 years has also seen a big increase in the number of international students studying in Australia.
Fitting in
However adapting to a new culture and a different education system isn't easy, particularly for teenagers or students who've never been away from home before. This is how a student from southeast Asia describes her early experience at the University of Melbourne.
"Adjustment problems to the climate, the culture and the workload,
adjusting to a new way of teaching. Making new friends too, creates
a lot of stress."
Tim Penhall, Centre for International Students and Scholars, RMIT University
However, she says she feels she has adapted and is now enjoying herself.
"It's a very multicultural place, a very cosmopolitan city , and that's really what I was seeking when I came here. I love the fact that it's a very open society, it's rather non-judgemental in comparison to the place where I come from. "
The commerce of learning
Not everyone is happy with the "internationalisation of education" though. Sociologist Bob Connell has taught in universities throughout Australia, the United States and Europe, and is currently Professor of Education at the University of Sydney. He'd like to see Australia putting more emphasis on "education as aid" rather than "education as trade".
"If we've set it up as a commercial transaction, we're not centering it on communication between cultures. There are certainly many people open to a more generous approach to the developing world, if we can find the institutional ways for those attitudes to be expressed."
Education is now Australia's eighth largest export industry and on some campuses, fees from international students provide more than half the student revenue.
A battle for some
Universities were first allowed to set market fees for international students in 1985. Leading educational researchers like Professor Simon Marginson don't believe it's a coincidence that universities have become more reliant on income from overseas students, as government funding of higher education has declined.
"The universities moved from earning money from only about 12,000 students in 1990 to about 100,000 students now, and to a situation where they now get about one dollar in every 10 from international students. Of course, that allowed governments to cut public funding further."
Those cuts have led to a gradual squeeze on public education, one
that's felt most keenly in Australia's vast hinterlands.
If you live in the country, being able to move to a city to pursue
higher education is as much a battle as getting a place in a course.
Bill Jaboor is Chief Executive Officer of the City of Shepparton in Victoria's Goulburn Valley, a region of intensive agriculture and horticulture.
"It's a very, very costly exercise; very difficult for families to be able to maintain their children as students 200 kilometres away in Melbourne. There's no public transport on a regular basis. There's a train service, a two-and-a-half hour train trip, but you just can't do that there and back in a day and attend a university course."
Even those who do will find that the jobs they need or want at the end of their courses are also in the cities.
A high-tech economy
The 1990s were a period of strong economic growth in Australia. Output per head of population rose faster than that of other developed countries in general, while inflation and interest rates were at their lowest levels for 30 years.
At the same time, the economy's shift away from agriculture, mining and manufacturing towards high technology accelerated.
Computer-related industries that characterise the "new economy" are springing up on the residential fringes of Sydney and Melbourne.
Typical of the well-educated, digital generation employee is Alex Khun, who works for a Melbourne-based company that produces high-speed optical networking equipment.
"At the moment, the company is concentrating on promoting their product in the Asian market. The work that I've been doing is helping them to test their products before they're released, and looking after their internal networking."
Unlike many of his contemporaries, Alex didn't grow up with computers. He was born in Cambodia and migrated to Australia as a child with his family.
"For my parents, the work choices were either factory or farm, whereas for us young kids, we are able to go to university, so hopefully that will lead to a better future. This is the information age, anything is possible."
Unequal opportunity
While computer and managerial jobs have increased by over thirty per cent since the mid-1980s, the full-time factory jobs that were numerous in the years following World War II are more difficult to find.
Furthermore much of the growth in employment in recent years has been in part-time rather than full-time, and casual, rather than permanent, work.
This makes it much harder for today's workers to borrow the money needed to share in the Australian dream of buying the family home. Kevin O'Connor, a geographer from the University of Melbourne, says the current growth in jobs is very uneven.
"What we're seeing is almost an equivalent of the 1950s and 1960s conditions, when poor-quality manufacturing jobs went to country towns or small cities, and the really good jobs stayed in the biggest cities."
Outside the big cities, people in regional and rural Australia have been left wondering what they can do to generate new jobs for their areas.
Over time, they've watched prices for Australia's traditional exports (minerals, wool, wheat and beef) shrink relative to that of imports like computers and televisions.
The comparison is stark. Today, one tonne of coal will buy you two compact discs, and two tonnes of wheat will get you a mobile phone.
