Australia has remained stable in tenth position in a global ranking of university systems illustrating the strength and health of the overall system.
Ross Williams, project leader of the U21 Ranking of National Systems of Higher Education, said Australia's position was pulled down by the low ranking (37th out of 50 nations) for government expenditure. 
However, with high private contributions, Australia ranked 20th for overall expenditure and 15th for per-student spending.
Australia was ranked 10th on spending on R&D, 21st on knowledge transfer and 31st for joint publications with industry.
And while it ranked first on publications per academic, it ranked 12th on average impact.
Professor Williams said that while the top 10 countries stayed the same as last year, there had been some volatility with the UK rising four places to eighth and Canada dropping three places to ninth. The US topped the ranking for the fifth year in a row, followed by Switzerland, Denmark and the UK.
Six of the top 10 are European nations, including three Nordic countries. Singapore is the only Asian system in the top 10. Indonesia was ranked last.
"What can governments learn from this? We know what doesn't work, and that is considerable government intervention in the operations of universities combined with little money," said Professor Williams.
"We can see from the Nordic systems there is very close co-operation between government, universities and business. And while government has a lot of influence it also contributes a lot of money."The US system of high institutional autonomy but lower government funding also worked. Professor Williams said a new and similar ranking on university systems by QS released last week simply crunched data on its top 700 universities but didn't factor in a range of attributes that influenced an overall higher education system.