Beyond the Cities: How Regional Universities Could Ease Australia’s Housing Pressure

In major Australian cities, a lot of our valuable urban land is taken up by enormous university campuses. Unlike comparable countries, Australia concentrates a large share of its students into a small number of very large institutions, meaning existing campuses face continual pressure to expand. When this growth occurs in urban areas, it competes with housing development and adds further demand to already constrained suburbs. Several universities have already established themselves successfully in regional Victoria, where land is abundant and there are unequal opportunities and demographic challenges. To ease housing pressure while revitalising regional economies, states should consider shifting future university growth beyond major cities, encouraging new institutions to emerge regionally and existing universities to establish larger campuses in regional cities.

Melbourne, for instance, has unusually concentrated mega-campuses, such as Monash University’s Clayton Campus, which uses over 100 hectares of land. While converting current campuses into residential land is unrealistic, we must understand that the conditions that led to the establishment of these original campuses no longer remain. Future campus growth like this risks limiting land for housing development and exacerbating demand pressures in the city. In the regions, land is far cheaper and more available, and establishing university campuses there will support long-term economic growth and opportunity.

Urban universities were mostly established in periods where metropolitan land was cheaper and more available, when circumstances were vastly different. Universities invest in new land wanting to maintain proximity to industry and their other campuses, and they lack strong reasons to forgo these advantages. To shift this reality, governments will likely need to step in to provide incentives and infrastructure to reduce the risks and costs associated with establishing new campuses in regional cities.

This policy shift would significantly benefit our regional cities and communities, some of which have struggled over recent decades with aging populations and lack of economic opportunity. This initiative would allow the government to increase economic activity in the regions, create reasons for people, particularly younger students and professionals, to stay or move there, and provide the economic circumstances necessary to make the significant investments needed to upgrade Australia’s regional public transport networks. As the universities grow, businesses set up nearby to service them, which creates further justification to develop local infrastructure.

Will students, lecturers and administrators be willing to relocate for their studies and work, even if the universities take the leap? The students and researchers attending these campuses would have reduced access to industry connections and research facilities, which are more concentrated in capital cities. While college towns and their universities are popular in countries like the United States and the United Kingdom, Australia’s culture is markedly different and it is hard to know how malleable our attitudes are.

Victoria already has several successful examples, such as Federation University in Ballarat and Deakin University in Geelong, which not only shows that this is possible but that the interest exists. Recently, universities have come under scrutiny for enrolling large numbers of international students and allowing the student experience to slip, particularly in the post-COVID world of remote learning. The Federal Government’s Quality Indicators in Learning and Teaching seem to indicate that as campuses grow, student satisfaction drops markedly, with universities with moderate-sized campuses like Deakin often outperforming those with larger campuses such as other large metropolitan institutions. Students are increasingly hungry for a more authentic and engaging university experience. And with six of Australia’s largest campuses catering to over 40,000 full-time students, a number considered extremely high by global standards, it is evident we need more appropriately sized and geographically distributed campuses.

By establishing new campuses in regional cities, we can reorient our educational model to better support students seeking a more traditional university experience, with residential communities, stronger student relationships, and greater campus identity. Universities can frame these expansions as prestigious institutions in their own right with infrastructure and offerings unique to that location. In this vein, being placed regionally may also better support certain types of study, such as healthcare, where proximity to in-need communities may be beneficial. When students are educated in the regions, there is a high chance that they continue their careers in the regions, where they are often most needed. Ideally, over the longer term, this could lead to better access to hospitals and student placements in these areas. This represents a strong opportunity for universities to carve out more specific niches and augment their identities as institutions.

Expanding the university sector, a major economic contributor, into the regions would be a risk, and it requires commitment from all sides: government, universities, industry, educators, and students. It’s also a long-term solution that needs time, patience and consistent investment. We have evidence that regional campuses can work, and we know how they can benefit students and communities. Many of our current solutions to the housing crisis focus on the short-term equation of supply and demand, which is necessary, but we should also look to longer term ways to ease the constraints of our current urban concentration. There is a persistent trend of unequal opportunity and rampant housing demand, which needs bold policy to properly address. Establishing more of our universities regionally would alleviate some pressure on metropolitan housing demand, create the foundations for real economic hubs outside of major cities, and reimagine the way tertiary education is viewed and delivered in Australia.