Why should an arts degree cost more than medicine?

‘Slugging arts students for higher fees than teaching or nursing degrees is unfair”. Picture: iStock

An arts degree will cost students just under $17,000 a year from January, repayable when they are working through the student loans system. It makes medicine and dentistry, at $13,000, bargains.

Humanities are not the only subjects slugged with high course costs. Law and business students are in the same category. But nobody complains much, their academic lobbies stay shtum – perhaps because they don’t want to be seen in the same grievance space as the humanities and pitch their degrees as an investment in high-paying careers.

But humanities academics are outraged. For a start if the cost of a course drives student demand down there will be fewer permanent teaching jobs. This might be beginning for what government statistics categorise as “society and culture” courses.

Last year there were 97,000 first year students, 11 per cent down on 2019, before Covid distorted enrolments. In contrast overall commencing undergraduate demand was down 3 per cent on 2019. Last year was also a 10 year low for first year humanities and related enrolments. There’s another reason why academics are upset – the present student loan system, created by the previous government but still in place under Labor, demonstrates less indifference than contempt for lives spent teaching and researching in the humanities and similar subjects. Such contempt that the government contributes next to nothing to the cost of teaching their courses – $1300 a year, compared to nearly $45,000 per annum for medicine, dentistry and vet science.

The Coalition pitched the present loan categories as economy-growing and employment-creating – “Job Ready Graduates” is the title. It’s a command economy approach that assumes government can predict market demand for skilled workers in the future and ignores the way students think for themselves, balancing what interests them against what will get them a job. Enrolments in teaching degrees for example, bounce around ­depending on the employment market.

JRG also assumes that people should do a degree the government decrees the economy needs and then build a career in the field. They don’t, never have. There has long been a big push to increase women working in science and technology; the problem is that graduates change jobs to suit themselves. Back in 2016 just 10 per cent of women with STEM qualifications were in jobs related to their degree. But it isn’t this Brezhnevite workforce planning that affronts arts academics; it is the underlying assumption that what they teach, and especially what they research, is outright irrelevant.

Former education minister Dan Tehan was always careful to avoid culture war rhetoric when he set up Job Ready Graduates – he just ignored the humanities. There was a signal in his silence that appealed to people who think everything colloquially called “cultural studies” is wasted student time and public money.

It also resonated with conservatives who believe universities have abandoned the old arts subjects, like English literature and especially narrative history, demonstrating how Western democracies make the world way better than socialism could.

For evidence they can point to the way the Paul Ramsay Foundation struggled to give away millions of dollars in scholarships and course funding for the study of Western civilisation. Academics at ANU would not have a bar of it. At the University of Sydney, critics called the proposal “a triumphalist and selective vision of European and Anglo-American history and culture” and defeated management attempts to take the money and teach.

The arts establishment has also made a big mistake in making the case against JRG – arguing humanities degrees are important to the economy. The line is that humanities graduates get good jobs all over society because they learn important skills, such as “critical thinking”, whatever that actually means. And boosters point to people who did media studies and now run banks. The problem with these arguments is the examples are always individuals who are so smart they would have done well whatever they did at university. Plus they conflate subject knowledge for skills.

The Deans of Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities group gets this. “We are very confident in our disciplines’ leading role in producing many of the most valuable ‘21st century skills’, but we have work to do to demonstrate that claim in terms that are accessible and agreed across the nation,” the lobby writes.

Which leaves the equity card, that slugging arts students for higher fees than teaching or nursing degrees is unfair. The Innovative Research Universities lobby makes the case that degree costs should be aligned to graduates lifelong learning and “there is no credible evidence to suggest humanities and related fields should be in the top-charging band”.

Plus charging top-whack for arts degree is socially regressive, “disproportionately increasing the costs of education for low SES, female and Indigenous students, due to the course choices they make.”

There are ways to address this if Education Minister Jason Clare is inclined, just not politically easy ones.

The government could reduce fees for arts undergrads to a lower payment band. If business and law students were left paying the highest price this would cut the cost to Canberra by $445m. But that would likely mean a hit to another part of the education budget, say research, to pay for it. This would not be much of a blow to arts academics – they don’t win that many competitive research grants – but engineering and STEM would complain loud and long.

Alternatively the government could increase fees for low cost student degrees, say nursing and teaching (both $4600 a year). The government now contributes $19,000 per annum to teach each. And imagine how increasing what students pay to become teachers and nurses to subsidise humanities courses would go down in the electorate. The present course funding model creates a question for Clare: who does he want to offend, humanities academics and graduates, or everybody else?