ELEANOR HALL: It's a scheme that until now has been operating only on a very small scale but more Indigenous students will soon be given the opportunity to get a top education at boarding schools in the big cities.

The Prime Minister has announced a grant of $20-million to help about 2,000 children attend boarding schools and the Government is encouraging business leaders to join the project and fund even more places.

Simon Santow has our report.

SOME of the biggest universities in NSW have been hiding the salaries of their vice-chancellors by deliberately writing their employment contracts to make them exempt from the Freedom of Information Act, the NSW Ombudsman has found.

The Ombudsman has accused some universities of effectively "contracting out" of the FoI law by including a clause in the contracts that said disclosing their contents would be a breach of confidence.

INTERNATIONAL postgraduate research student numbers in Australia have increased more rapidly than those in other programs, suggesting the country is finding traction in the global talent wars, new research has shown.

The number of overseas research students in Australia has grown by 67per cent from 2002 to 2007, while the number of international students in higher education has increased 52per cent, an IDP conference heard last week.

THE looming shortage of academic staff will mean falling standards, even larger classes, heavy reliance on part-time and imported lecturers and a loss of courses, experts say.

THE Government's higher education review will be pointless unless the sector starts to confront the crisis in academic staffing, recruitment expert Rohan Carr has warned.

Dr Carr, who was at the Sydney conference where Education Minister Julia Gillard announced the review last month, said an increase in funding would do little if universities could not find enough good academics to teach.

And the timetable of the review was too leisurely, given the acute shortage of academic talent in an ageing sector.

A SHARP increase in the age of academic staff and a looming rush to retire will create a shortage of university teachers just as two waves of school-leavers engulf post-secondary education.

The percentage of the academic workforce aged over 50 increased from 26 per cent in 1991 to 39.8 per cent in 2006, according to University of Adelaide research fellow Graeme Hugo.

The oldest baby boomers would pass 65 in 2011, so the exodus of baby boomer retirees would gather momentum during the second and third decades of the century, Professor Hugo said.

The dollar value of PhD scholarships is "in freefall" and projected to drop below the poverty line later this year, the Council of Australian Postgraduate Associations says.

The election campaign has overlooked university research and teaching, writes Alexander Symonds....

UNIVERSITIES, innovation and science were notably absent from John Howard's centrepiece speech on Monday.

The Prime Minister announced another $9.2 billion in promises, including tax rebates on schooling expenses and $4000 bursaries to help up to 1000 isolated students' transition to universities, but did not otherwise refer to universities' role in national innovation or in educating the country's almost one million students.

In an aggressive pre-election push, universities are calling on the incoming government to boost PhD funding through scholarships, more HECS exempt places, and an inaugural industry placement program - or risk stifling economic growth and business innovation....

Strong employer demand for workers in short supply has helped boost the salaries of newly qualified postgraduate students in the workforce. Figures released by Graduate Careers Australia show the median salary for postgraduates in full-time work was $60,000 in 2006, up by $1900 on the previous year....

AUSTRALIAN universities "still have a way to go" in improving the intellectual climate for postgraduate researchers, an annual Graduate Careers Australia survey has found.

While postgraduates thought departments had improved efforts to integrate them into the academic community during past year, only 63 per cent felt that the intellectual climate was good overall.