By Natassia Chrysanthos and Lucy Carroll
University students who fail half their subjects will no longer be stripped of their government subsidies and loans, with Labor to scrap the contentious Coalition policy in its first major changes to higher education.
The panel tasked with overhauling the university system has told the government that higher education in Australia is “too unequal” and the gap for Indigenous students’ tertiary outcomes is too wide, while long-held concerns about student safety and staff underpayments must be addressed.
The decision to cut off access to university loans and subsidies for students who fail half their subjects was made by former education minister Dan Tehan.Credit: Louise Kennerley
Its interim review, to be published on Wednesday, makes five short-term recommendations that Education Minister Jason Clare will enact while waiting for the panel’s final report due at the end of the year. The landmark review will make substantial interventions in long-term challenges facing the sector, such as funding, research and student debt.
One of the most vexed issues surrounds international student enrolments and funding streams. A range of options will be considered, including whether city institutions should pay a levy from their international student revenue that is redistributed to smaller universities.
The first raft of measures the government will announce on Wednesday includes guaranteeing all Indigenous students a Commonwealth-supported university place when they are accepted for study – expanding the measure to city students for the first time.
Local councils will bid for one of 34 new regional and suburban study hubs that will open around the country, while the government’s higher education funding arrangements will be extended from the end of the year until 2025 while the major reforms are finalised.
State and federal governments will also work together to change the make-up of university governance boards and install more people with higher education experience.
Clare will give a speech to the National Press Club on Wednesday to outline the case for change, making clear the government wants its higher education changes – slated to be the biggest in a generation – to increase enrolments and boost participation from students from disadvantaged backgrounds.
He will cite figures that say the number of university students will double from 900,000 today to 1.8 million in 2050 because most new jobs will need a TAFE qualification or university degree.
“Now that’s a rough estimate, but it gives you an idea of the skills challenge we face. And what this report says is the only way to really do this, is to significantly increase the number of university students from the outer suburbs and the regions,” an extract of his speech says.
‘When you drive around Western Sydney, you see a lot of McDonald’s logos and KFC logos, you don’t see a lot of university logos. If you can’t see it, you can’t be it.’
Education Minister Jason Clare
“Students from poor backgrounds. Students with a disability. Indigenous students. If we don’t, we won’t have the necessary skills and the economic firepower we need to make this country everything it can be in the years ahead.”
The decision to cut off access to university loans and subsidies for students who fail half their subjects was made by former education minister Dan Tehan as part of the Coalition’s controversial Job-ready Graduates laws, which also lifted fees for humanities subjects and slashed them for science subjects.
Peak body Universities Australia has called on the Albanese government to scrap the 50 per cent pass rule – which it described in its review submission as both “punitive” and “unnecessarily harsh” – because it was most likely to affect students from low-socioeconomic backgrounds.
The interim review said the rule had “disproportionately [disadvantaged] students from equity backgrounds” and should be replaced by more thorough reporting on student progress. It also flagged that other parts of the Coalition package should be reformed.
The universities accord panel, undertaking the first major review of the higher education sector since the Bradley Review in 2008, received a total of 312 submissions from stakeholders.
“The review believes that bold, long-term change is required to fulfil the mission of higher education in Australia. Change in the sector must be significant. Complacency cannot be tolerated,” its interim report said.
Clare said a focus would be ensuring more young people from outer suburbs “get a crack at university”.
“Growing up in Western Sydney, university felt like a place that was somewhere else for someone else. When you drive around Western Sydney, you see a lot of McDonald’s logos and KFC logos, you don’t see a lot of university logos. If you can’t see it, you can’t be it,” he said at a press conference on Tuesday.
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