Jason Clare must find a way to pay for his university reforms

Education Minister Jason Clare. Picture: Brendan Read

You can’t fault Jason Clare for his vision.

The Albanese government’s education minister has laid out a plan for the biggest overhaul to tertiary education since the Dawkins reforms in the 1980s.

He aims to expand the university system and vocational education, with the goal that nine out of 10 young Australians get post-school qualification.

He proposes that students from disadvantaged groups – such as Indigenous people and low SES – should get a place in university if they are qualified.

The interim report of Clare’s higher education review proposes many measures to help needy students get to university, such as the possibility of directing more funding to such students to allow universities to give them extra academic help if they require it.

It also calls for change to the current university fee system with its $15,000 fees for humanities, law and business degrees.

Crucially, the report doesn’t stop with its call for increasing the number of students in universities. It also says that courses must be overhauled so that they give students the skills the modern economy requires. It proposes a major exercise to match degrees to skill requirements so that students, and taxpayers, don’t pay for degrees that don’t deliver.

Clare’s plan for tertiary education is very much in Labor’s tradition of visionary social policy, right back to the aged pension in 1908 and more recently Medicare, the superannuation guarantee, HECS, and the NDIS. If he can pull this off, it will be a reform that stands with those achievements, although the NDIS, as we know, needs adjustment to ensure its sustainability.

But what Clare has refused, so far, to address is how much this will cost and how it will be paid for.

The only extra source of revenue mooted in the report is a tax on universities’ international student fee income, which could be redistributed around the higher education sector. It would take from the rich universities – such is Sydney with its notorious billion-dollar surplus in 2021 – and give to the poorer ones, which don’t have many lucrative international students.

But this is just sharing money around, which the higher education sector already has. Where are the new sources of revenue to fund an expansion of student numbers? And will the calls from universities for more research money be met?

None of that is clear, although there is the interesting suggestion that employers should foot part of the bill for the “lifelong learning” of their workers.

You have to have sympathy for Clare, trying to steer a reform as large as this as at a time when the government faces the prospect of huge budget deficits and is putting clamps on new spending.

Clare told the National Press Club on Wednesday that the outcomes need not be delivered all at once. It could come about sequentially to ease pressure on the budget. That’s why, I think, he has given the reforms the unusual name of an Accord. He wants to secure agreement from all parties to a plan for rolling out change, and if enough people sign on, there is a greater chance it will stick over several political cycles. We should hope he succeeds.