Across the five schools in the ATN, a total of 180,000 students are taught, which amounts to 20 percent of Australia's student population. Additionally, a fourth of all international students choose to attend a university that is a part of the ATN, making the network of universities a fast-growing place for education.
The ATN was established in the late 1990s to help strategically align technical education with the evolving business needs of Australia's public and private technology sectors. Every capital mainland Australian city is home to an ATN university, which helps extend technical education to more residents in the country. All of the ATN universities were established at different times between the 1960s and 1980s.
When the ATN was first established, it set out to build a solid foundation of basic research and applied research in real-world scenarios. The ATN focuses on performing research that benefits the local communities of each college as well as the state of Australia's government and business interests.
The ATN has partnered with the International Strategic Technology Alliance of Chinese universities to create the Australia-China NanoNetwork initiative. This initiative supports research in nanotechnology and nanoengineering between the two countries. The collaborative initiative began in 2005 with the primary focus of facilitating technology transfer, which relates to transferring scientific research to commercial business applications.