Advances in digital technology make it possible to rethink higher education around equity rather than geography, cost and institutional prestige, with a distributed university model offering broader access to learning and research.

The benefits from access to higher education, as well as from research and its publication, are unequally distributed both within and among countries. This inequality is viewed as an undesirable feature of contemporary society by those who advocate that equity (overcoming unfair inequality) is an important dynamic in ethical social development.

One of us (RH) has recently published an open access book Distributing knowledge: Openness, equity and higher education transformation arguing that opportunities for distributing educational opportunities have opened as a result of recent rapid innovation in information technology.

Australia’s program of recruitment of fee-paying international students serves many interests. Indisputably it has enabled study from neighbouring countries to acquire knowledge and skills for application back home. However, it ignores the inherent inequity as international students mostly do not come from countries which have a need for extra higher education, rather from families rich enough to pay the fees. Fees from international students subsidise mainstream university education and research – raising other questions that we do not address here.

What arrangements commend........

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