‘Crisis’: Important reason uni should be free again

Aussie universities are facing a crisis, and the unlikely solution could be a benefit young Aussies have been missing out on for decades.

Delivering one of the greatest gifts to Boomers, the Whitlam Government brought in free university education in 1974.

It gave that generation a leg up that millions of young Aussies have missed out on since, but now a new report by Australia Institute’s Centre For Future Work suggests that it might be more important than ever to bring that kind of policy back.

“Covid has had a tremendous effect on universities,” National Tertiary Education Union (NTEU) national president Dr Alison Barnes told news.com.au.

“It plunged Australian universities into the biggest crisis that they’ve ever faced, from the minute they closed the borders to international students.”

'If you look at how Australia funds investment in tertiary education, we are so behind so many countries.'

While Covid may have exacerbating the problem, Dr Barnes says there were major problems with tertiary education funding long before the country went into lockdown.

“Pre-Covid, $10 million dollars had been pulled in funding from the sector, meaning universities had become reliant on international students for income,” she explained. “So when those borders were closed, it threw them into a financial crisis.”

With a financial crisis comes what Barnes describes as a “job apocalypse”, starting with losing casual workers and moving on to permanent staff.

“It has terrible ramifications for people who lose their work, but it also means that those who remain have massive workload pressures,” she said. “You can’t sustain that many job losses — the workload doesn’t go away.

'Students who don’t go to university, it really damages their employment prospects and social mobility.'

“It really undermines a universities ability to provide their core functions: teaching students and doing research.

“If there was ever a period that demonstrated the importance of research it was Covid.”

This is where access to free university-level education comes in

According to the report, the amount spent on university education in Australia dropped to 0.65 per cent of GDP by 2018/19. It’s a number well below the average 0.9 per cent spent by the 38 countries in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD).

“Our government essentially abandoned the sector,” Dr Barnes says. “It denied Australian public universities access to JobKeeper on three separate occasions, it introduced the Graduate Jobs repackage which saw costs for students in many degrees rise, and it provided no lifeline or rescue package.

“Staff and students bore the cost of the Covid crisis.

'By 2025, 52 per cent of jobs will need a degree. We don’t want to increase that gap between the rich and the poor.'

The answer? Making undergraduate level university education free. While it might seem like a wild idea, Dr Barnes says Australia is actually very behind a lot of the world.

“Free education might sound like a radical idea in Australia, but it’s not a radical idea globally,” she says.

“We are so behind so many countries — like Chile, Poland, Latvia, Estonia, New Zealand who provide the first year of uni for free, and Mexico. Let alone countries like Norway, Sweden and Germany where it’s all free.”

'I was talking to a friend of mine whose father had worked in a factory and realised he could go to university for free — this is when university education was free in this country — and he told me how much it changed his father’s life.'

Why is important?

With an already rapidly rising cost of living, raising the cost of university-level education could mean more and more Australians are priced out of university degrees.

“Education really transforms people’s lives,” says Dr Barnes.

“The price of a degree can’t be a barrier to access.

“Recent government estimates suggest that by 2025, 52 per cent of jobs will need a degree. We don’t want to increase that gap between the rich and the poor.”

Originally published as ‘Crisis’: Important reason uni should be free again