• The investment in the education sector by the Australian government has steeply increased over the years. The dataset used in this project has the expenditure data for different universities, from the year 1992 to 2018.
• We will analyze this data based on the kind of expenditure and the state the universities belong to.
• Finally, we will look into specific patterns present in the expenditure in scholarships in the top 3 states in Australia. This will give us an idea of which states prioritized the intake of students in comparison to others.

• The plot below shows the number of universities present in Australia from the year 1992 to 2018.
• We can see that there is a steady increase in the number of universities present in Australia.
• There are some plateaus that can be identified between the years 1994-1998 and 2006-2010. However, besides these years, there have been new universities established every consecutive year.

Expenditures by category for all universities in Australia:
The following graph tries to analyze the change in different kinds of expenditures for all universities in Australia.
We can see that ‘Other current expenditure’ and ‘Labour costs’ have gone up significantly over the years. This could be because of the categorization provided by the universities for the census, while there could have been other categories incurring expenditure actually.
We can see that ‘Scholarships’ is the only sub-category for which data is present throughout the series and has a steady increase over the years.

Expenditure in education by states:
This graph tries to visualize the change in educational expenditure over the years by every state in Australia.
We can see that ‘NSW’ (New South Wales) is the state that has maintained the highest education expenditure over the years.
‘NSW’ is followed by ‘VIC’ (Victoria) and ‘QLD’ (Queensland) in terms of expenditure, in that order.
We can see the ‘NT’ (Northern Territory) and ‘TAS’ (Tasmania) don’t have that significant a change in expenditure over the years. They have maintained a low expenditure in the education sector in comparison to the states mentioned earlier.

• This graph tries to visualize the scholarship expenditure of universities belonging to the top 3 states with highest overall expenditures in education - New South Wales, Queensland and Victoria.
• We can see that in the more recent years, the scholarship expenditures have been highest for New South Wales followed by Victoria, and then by Queensland.
• There have been a sudden drop in the scholarships awarded for the years 2012 and 2017 in NSW. However, it still maintains the status of being the state to award the highest scholarships overall.
• No such sudden drops in scholarship expenditures can be seen in Victoria and Queensland universities.

- We can see that New South Wales, Victoria and Queensland prioritized developing their education sector more than other states. Their expenditure in scholarships and other avenues as well has contributed to australia becoming a globally recognized hub for higher education.
- Among the type of expenditures, we can see that ‘Labour costs’ and ‘other current expenditure’ have been recorded the most by the universities. This could be a mislabeling incurred during the census collection amongst the universities.
- We also discovered that the number of universities in Australia steadily increased over the years. There were few years between 1992-2018 when there was a plateau in the number of universities, however the overall number of universities had an upward trajectory.

References:

- AglsAgent; corporateName=Department of Education, Skills and Employment; address=50 Marcus Clarke St. “Higher Education Expenditure on R&D (HERD) by University.” Department of Education, Skills and Employment, 9 May 2022, www.dese.gov.au/research-block-grants/resources/higher-education-expenditure-rd-herd-university. Accessed 7 June 2022.
- StackOverFlow. “Stack Overflow - Where Developers Learn, Share, & Build Careers.” Stack Overflow, 2019, stackoverflow.com.
- “STHDA - Home.” Www.sthda.com, www.sthda.com/english/.