| Abstract: | During 1975 a group of Monash University academics, who became nicknamed the “crystal ballgazers” began to meet with the aim of forecasting the future of higher education in Australia in the nineteen eighties and nineties. The predictions were published and by 1983 many of the forecasts had already proved remarkably accurate — and few, if any, of the pro‐active strategies that were suggested as a way of influencing the future had been adopted. This paper provides two retrospective analyses of that work. in the first we present some of the actual forecasts and their accord with reality, and then juxtapose the reasons for our forecasts upon the reasons being proposed now for the trends that have emerged. In the second analysis, we examine the failure of the work to influence the power brokers in Australian higher education to adopt a longer term and a more pro‐active planning role. |
