Australia had "no truly outstanding universities" and the tertiary education system ranked well below the world's best, the vice-chancellor of one of the nation's top- ranked universities said on Wednesday.

Australian National University vice-chancellor Ian Young told the National Press Club in Canberra that if Australia was a student, its report card for education would be a "B minus, can do better" and he said the lowering of university standards puts Australia's lucrative international student market at risk.

Young said universities in Australia are largely funded by volume of students, rather than by quality for both education and research and this process "is not good for education and is not good for research".

He said the CWTS Leiden Ranking, which measures the proportion of publications in the top 10 percent by citations in other research, showed Australia does not even have one university in the top 100.

Young said fee deregulation would create competition in the university sector, and said if the Australian Senate did not support deregulation, universities could lose international students.

"That outcome would mean ever bigger universities, ever bigger classes, more casual staff, less internationally important research. It will mean decay of our system and the potential loss of one of our most successful export industries, international students," he said.

The vice-chancellor also criticized Federal Government budget cuts to research funding, which forced universities to enroll more students to fill the funding gap.

"The result is that we have universities that enroll large numbers of students, teach them as cheaply as possible, and then use the income to cover both education costs and meet the shortfall in research funding," he said.

Young said Australia's major research universities typically had about 40,000 students, in comparison to overseas institutions like Stanford in the U.S. with 15,000 students, Cambridge in the UK with 18,000 and the University of Tokyo in Japan with 28,000.

"Our universities are huge by world standards. This is bad for the quality of the education we provide to our young people and bad for the quality of research," he said.

"If we continue down this path, we won't be brilliant." Endi

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