[4] The college offered undergraduate and postgraduate degrees and diploma courses in visual arts and various specialties of education.
[8] The college faced ongoing problems incorporating predecessor institutions with differing approaches, philosophies and aims into a coherent overarching organisation.
Institutes tended to keep their own identity and resist many top-down initiatives, and attempts to build an overarching college ethos were of limited success.
[1][2][14][15] In the late 1980s, the Dawkins Revolution moved to convert all Colleges of Advanced Education into universities, which brought another round of forced amalgamations.
The Sydney CAE was seen as not large enough to become a university in its own right, and in November 1988 the college council reluctantly agreed to disestablish itself and divest the various institutes.