Written by Patricia Hill
Coming off the back of a financially turbulent 2025 for the ANU, one may find themselves wondering where the university gets all this money from. How does it work? How does ANU’s financial position differ from that of other universities?
In the 2023-2024 financial year, the ANU’s consolidated income (not surplus) of $1.636 billion came from an array of sources: course fees, consultancy, donations, the Commonwealth Grant Scheme, and Higher Education Loan Programmes, amongst many others.
However, unlike other universities, the ANU is a recipient of the ‘National Institutes Grant’. This $237,556,000 (2024 allocation) grant is from the Australian Government and looks to “recognise the role the University plays as a national institute in facilitating key activities that are of national significance”. Of the ANU’s operating income, this represents about 17.8 per cent.
This is different from the ‘Commonwealth Grant Scheme’ (CGS), which is the largest source of funding for Australian universities. The CGS is based on the number of full-time students on Commonwealth Supported Places, and is available for all ‘Table A’ Australian universities. However, only the ANU receives the ‘National Institutes Grant’.
Under the grant, the ANU considers government policy to determine “areas of national importance” and directs the funding to research, projects, partnerships, education, and scholarship on these topics. The ANU states that these investments assist in “enhancing Australian prosperity,” “social cohesion in the 21st century,” “impactful public policy for Australia and the region,” and “upskilling Australia”.
In the 2024 allocations of the grant, $193.5 million went to “maintaining long-term nationally important concentrations of research and education”. Most of this takes the form of investments directly into the different ANU Schools, with $16.1 million going to the Social Sciences (the biggest receiver), and $300 thousand going to Biological Data Science (the smallest receiver).
Most of the remaining grant money went to “Annual Strategic National Capability Investments” – the total being $28.2 million. “Other Strategic Investments” totalling to $10.5 million were the largest allocation within this. “Indigenous Australia Research” received the smallest allocation of just $500,000. The Observer asked about the “Other Strategic Investments” and was directed back to the 2024 Annual Report.
In its 2024 Annual Report, the ANU featured many of the projects facilitated by the grant, beginning with the ANU’s partnership with the ‘Rio Tinto Centre for Future Minerals’. The mining company committed $240 million to this Centre, with the aim of it being used to “transform the way materials are sourced, processed, used and recycled, to make them more environmentally, economically and socially sustainable”.
“Supported by the National Institutes Grant, ANU has developed and maintained critical research infrastructure… [with] an estimated replacement value of more than $2 billion,” states the 2024 Annual Report.
Other projects mentioned include: The ANU Agrifood Innovation Institute, ‘Science Circus,’ and election observation in the Solomon Islands.
However, questions have been raised as to the merit of the grant being the “best use of public research funding”.
Critics have pointed out that other highly ranked Australian universities would also be “competitive” in achieving the goals of the National Institutes Grant. It has also been raised that the contributions of the grant were “largely ignored” during discussions of ANU’s “state of its finances”.
Others have argued that “meaningful innovation” will come from alignment “between regional need and national responsibility,” and that regional universities need relief from systemic cuts to the sector more than “city-based institutions”. They claim that the scheme should be reimagined.
No cuts to the National Institutes Grant have been reported.
2025 information on, and allocations of the grant will be released with the ANU’s 2025 Annual Report to be tabled in Parliament mid-year. Whether the grant will be expanded to other institutions remains to be seen.
More to come.
Graphics by Saffron Geyle
ANU Observer 