Paul Williams: Arts degree price hike has failed, and now is the time to recognise critical thinking

Two years after the Morrison Government’s roundly condemned plan to slash the cost of vocational degrees while increasing the cost of arts and humanities degrees by an unjustifiable 113 per cent, it appears to have failed.

Two years ago, I wrote how the then-Liberal federal education minister Dan Tehan was shortsighted for punishing arts and humanities students.

I was later attacked by the usual suspects who wrote – in poorly spelled and punctuated diatribes – that arts degrees are a waste of time, never lead to jobs and merely indoctrinate youngsters in Marxist propaganda. If that were true why aren’t there millions of communists in Australia, and millions more graduates unemployed?

Tehan’s plan was to soak up looming unemployment by slashing the cost of vocational degrees, such as engineering and teaching by between 20 and 62 per cent. Tehan said the changes would “incentivise students to make more job-relevant choices”.

To pay for his plan, Tehan raised the cost of law and commerce degrees by 28 per cent, and of arts and humanities degrees by an unjustifiable 113 per cent.

Tehan’s plan was roundly condemned and now appears to have failed. To attract students, some universities this year lowered their ATAR admission scores for vocational degrees to below 50 per cent – the bottom half of all school graduates – with engineering and teaching degrees among falling benchmarks.

But the higher cost of arts degrees is indeed biting. This week, Federation University in Victoria announced the abolition of its own arts degree, due to too few enrolments, it said.

Former federal education minister Dan Tehan Picture: NCA NewsWire / Luis Enrique Ascui

But I don’t blame Federation University. I blame decades of both Labor and Coalition governments for allowing the university sector to languish like the poor third cousin at a wedding – an industry that was (pre-pandemic) Australia’s third-biggest export earner and contributing $40bn annually to the national economy. While major corporations were gifted tens of millions in stimulus money, despite making record profits, at the height of the pandemic (and not having to repay it), universities – employing a quarter of a million ­Australians – received no relief at all.

Sadly, this is what happens when governments subject essential nation-building infrastructure to the vagaries of market forces. How can a government rationally “cost” the price of knowledge? How can a knowledge of history – of how dictators undermine democracy – be valued less than the knowledge of building a road? If we follow market forces to their logical end, universities would teach only what students want to pay for, not what they need learn. If left unaddressed, by 2030 we’ll have degrees in TikToking.

The arts degree is – and always has been – the cornerstone of higher education. At the turn of the last century, many Australian universities offered just four programs – medicine, law, theology and arts. The arts were good enough for our first prime minister Edmund Barton, who helped frame our Constitution and build the Australian Settlement of a fair and equitable Australia. It’s also been good enough for numerous other PMs, including John Gorton, Gough Whitlam, Malcolm Fraser, Bob Hawke, Kevin Rudd, Tony Abbott and Malcolm Turnbull.

The power of an arts degree lies not just in the teaching of facts and formula – as in physics – but also in the power of critical thinking skills that teaches students to ask why and how the world works the way it does. In a social media age of deliberate misinformation and political and commercial chicanery, it has never been more important for people to know when they are being fed BS from politicians, business or even their mate down the pub. In teaching students to find information and test outrageous claims for themselves, the arts degree creates in the graduate a lifelong learner and teacher.

Framing higher education policy around vocational outcomes is dangerous. With, according to Dell Technologies, 85 per cent of the jobs held in 2030 yet to be invented, how can any university “train” instead of “educate”?

The answer is to hire arts graduates whose critical analytical skills are future-proof. That’s why arts graduates are sought after even in traditional business worlds, such as banking.

With a 2020 survey revealing a 90.9 per cent employment rate for science graduates and a 93.6 per cent rate for arts graduates, arts students clearly enjoy a bright future.

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has promised a new “accord” with universities that recognises them as the wealth producers they are. For the sake of an independent-thinking Australia, let’s hope he delivers.

Paul Williams is an Associate Professor at Griffith University, Nathan campus