Since 2021 – following the Morrison government’s Job-Ready Graduates changes to university funding – students doing degrees in law, accounting, economics, humanities, communications and business have paid perniciously high fees ($16,323 this year) through the HECS-HELP student loan system.
In comparison, students doing teaching, nursing, foreign languages, agriculture, English and maths pay way, way less (currently $4445).
This fee imbalance was criticised by Labor and reviewing it was explicitly part of the terms of reference of its Universities Accord. The accord’s final report points out its unfairness and recommends reducing the high fees paid for some subjects.
But there’s no sign that this will be immediately on the government’s agenda when it reveals, probably in or before next month’s budget, what it will do in response to the Universities Accord.
More likely for immediate action is changes to the HECS system to ease the impact of inflation on HECS repayments and HECS debt.
Currently a student’s HECS debt is indexed to the consumer price index and increased by 7.8 per cent this year (which was the 2022 inflation rate). The accord report proposes that debt should be indexed to whatever is the lower of the CPI and the wage price index to ensure that debt increases do not outpace wage growth.
It also proposes that the timing of indexation increases be changed so students are not seeing debt that is already repaid is not being increased by the inflation rate.
These HECS issues attracted a lot attention from graduates owing HECS bills and the government is very likely to make changes to ensure it does not become an election issue.
What is odd is that the indexation of university fees (which have also risen sharply due to high inflation) does not have the same level of political potency.
For example this year’s highest fee level of $16,323 is 7.8 per cent higher than the $15,142 paid for the top fee tier subjects last year.
This has a similar financial impact to HECS debt rising by 7.8 per cent this year yet has somehow not attracted the same level of public opprobrium.
Ideally the May budget should give students in the high fee-paying subjects some relief but, so far, there’s no sign that will happen.
It will be very expensive to entirely unravel the Job-Ready Graduates university fee structure and it’s highly likely that fee reform will occur down the track if, and when, the Albanese government introduces a new higher education funding system. Before doing that, it will set up its Australian Tertiary Education Commission to thoroughly review university funding. Real change could be years away.
If that’s the case then students in the subjects that attract high fees will go on paying more than other students for no justifiable reason. Gen Z should be making as loud a fuss about it as they did about HECS indexation rates.
Bleaching kills 90 per cent of corals in shallow zones of Great Barrier Reef
‘One of the highest coral mortality rates ever documented globally.’ Australian scientists have suggested diverse reasons for coral deaths on the Great Barrier Reef.
Warning to unis: AI is ‘poisoning research’
‘Data poisoning’ from AI is just one of many risks to research integrity identified by Australia’s university regulator, as institutions scramble to control its use.
It looks increasingly likely that one of the most glaring inequities in the university system – the fact some publicly funded degrees cost students nearly four times as much as others – will not get an immediate fix when federal Education Minister Jason Clare releases his response to the Universities Accord review.