UCL closure kills Uni City dream in Adelaide

In 2011Kaplan planned to accredit its courses in partnership with the University of Adelaide but the deal crumbled. In 2010, Cranfield University closed in Adelaide. It had focused on a student cohort that was supposed to emerge from South Australia's 'booming' defence industries. It never happened.

Carnegie Mellon is still operating. One of its core missions was to train local mid level public servants how to research, create and implement cutting edge public policy. Unfortunately, graduates ran in to the same executive management regression when these young 'upstarts' started generating new models and ideas. Weep for my beloved Adelaide.

The year 2017 is turning out to be a date with destiny for SA as that's the year Holden closes and the AWD project terminates, throwing thousands of manufacturing workers out of a job. South Australia's currently exports just 4.3 per cent of Australia's goods and services. State GDP growth is languishing at 1.3 per cent per annum. About half that of Australia's. The economy is regressing and is in deep, deep trouble.

While its true that Adelaide may never be a new Oxford or Cambridge, these true international universities who have fled our shores may have played an important role in rectifying SA's dire lack of economic diversity and intellectual rigour. We'll never know now.

Adelaide is the most conservative city in Australia and it's lumbering in to a period of deep economic chaos. All that is now solid will melt. It has so far sought to ameliorate the effects of globalisation, a lack of diverse industries and the decline of manufacturing and construction, with typically old world remedies such as pump priming companies who in five years time, will go the way of the dinosaur. It praises bricks and mortar in a Google world. School kids know what happens to species who fail to adapt.

The fall of UCL will bring some relief to the local 'Big Three' universities who feared its global reputation while at the same time they desperately trying to fill their undergraduate programs from a dwindling number of young domestic applicants.