Students ‘stuck with $100,000 debts’ for mostly worthless diplomas

$100k fees, the threat which sank plans to deregulate uni costs, have become common for ‘worthless’ diplomas.

Almost 100 students racked up taxpayer-funded loans of just under $100,000 each last year for bundles of mostly worthless ­diplomas.

Documentation obtained by The Australian reveals that $100,000 degrees — the threat that helped defeat the Coalition’s 2014 plans to deregulate univer­sity fees — have become commonplace for lower level diploma qualifications, which are far less lucrative than degrees and which many students struggle to finish.

The details, obtained under Freedom of Information laws, show that 95 students collectively borrowed more than $9.4 million under the VET FEE-HELP training loans scheme last year.

The students were allowed to incur huge debts despite government efforts to clean up the program, after the scale of the rorts wracking the scheme — and hoisting its accumulated cost to about $8 billion — had become common knowledge.

All but six of the students amassed the same debt — $99,389 — which is the limit of borrowings students were allowed to accrue last year. Three-quarters of them incurred debts for diplomas in multi­ple fields — often disparate disciplines such as creative arts, hospitality and commerce — and more than 80 per cent supposedly studied in between two and four states, suggesting most were undertaking online courses with interstate-based colleges.

A 2015 report card on the scheme found online completion rates averaged just 8 per cent.

Grattan Institute tertiary education expert Andrew Norton said the prospects of the loans being repaid, even by students who managed to complete some of the courses, were low.

His modelling, based on census income estimates, suggested typical male diploma holders would take about 26 years to repay debts of this magnitude, while female graduates would repay only one-third of them.

Vocational education consultant Claire Field said most of the students were unlikely to have completed their courses. “No one in the commonwealth has been held responsible. Providers have closed down businesses but have largely walked away with millions of dollars. The student’s left ­behind carrying the debt burden.”

Australian Education Union deputy secretary Pat Forward said the scheme had been a “massive” public policy failure. “But it’s young people who will pay the price for it, not the bureaucrats or politicians who turned their backs on what was going on.”