Why your $50k arts degree won’t get cheaper any time soon

Student fees set by the last ­Coalition government in its Job Ready Graduates model are a plot to prevent universities teaching the humanities and social sciences and their advocates want it stopped. Some of them hope it is about to be, with imminent changes in the way higher education is funded.

However, advocates for ending $50,000 student loans are going to have to come up with way better arguments than the current crop which are, in essence, that the existing arrangement is not fair.

And they will need to resign themselves to the reality that when it comes to the education budget, it is not all about them.

The liberal arts lobbyists are right about what the previous government was up to. Former education minister Dan Tehan wanted to price their subjects out of the market and the Job Ready Graduates student fee system he started in 2020 is still in place and cannot be stopped to 2027.

It has not worked; humanities and social science student numbers were trending down years before the scheme started but they have not collapsed.

Yet what arts advocates avoid is that Tehan was not keen on law and business courses either – students in them also pay top whack.

Or that vice-chancellors use the huge margins they make teaching relatively low-cost humanities subjects to subsidise other courses – which is exactly what the then government wanted. At the top-cost end it was, still is, to help with funding courses that are super-expensive to teach, medicine and veterinary science for example. At the other it is about incentivising studying for professions where government always want more graduates, notably nursing and teaching.

Advocates of ending high-fee humanities courses also argue they are discriminatory because they attract students with dis­advantaged backgrounds. The problem with this is it sets up a comparison with another commonwealth program, Fee Free TAFE, which offers training certificates for occupations where there are skilled-labour shortages, from construction to childcare. The evidence is not in on whether it works, but a WA government pitch for free TAFE is way better targeted than the case for an arts degree: “Good jobs and good money. Whatever you want, you can make it at TAFE.”

And what the humanities establishment rarely raises is that if there are fewer students to teach, academics will lose their jobs and for those who stay employed there is less money to fund research – which is what academic culture values most. Even this is mostly a metaphor for why humanities are so aggrieved by JRG. Tehan’s policy is a calculated insult to their lives’ work – that they are a burden on the public purse.

Ever since Labor won the 2022 election, they have demanded Education Minister Jason Clare stump up the cash to end it. The Innovative Research Universities’ policy team estimated on 2024 figures reducing humanities and social science fees to the now second JRG fee band would cost $324m. Yet it is hard to see why these students should be helped out while leaving business and law paying the highest rate – if discriminatory course pricing is wrong for some students, it is wrong for everybody And including them plus increasing funding for STEM courses that would lose their cross-subsidy would cost the commonwealth $1.77bn

There is way more than the need to find that sort of funding why JRG will not be abolished fast. For a start, Clare has long announced it was an issue for the Australian Tertiary Education Commission once in business. Short of the Greens and opposition combining in a macabre Senate alliance to block the ATEC bill, that will be passed in the first half of next year. But work is said to be informally under way deep in the bureaucracy on the off-chance that a plan to end JRG might come in handy. Plus, the interim ATEC is on to it, with an expert group chaired by Stephen Duckett, perhaps the world-leading expert on hospital cost systems, applying his expertise to the surprisingly similar issues in the way student places are funded.

And the way the government works out course cost now has to be sorted. As Mary O’Kane, lead author of the plan for ATEC says, “Without knowing the true (read ‘reasonable’) costs of offering various courses and carrying out other university activities, we cannot determine what is optimal support for them; we cannot provide a price for the commonwealth contribution to a student place with confidence; and cannot disentangle the cross subsidies, let alone start to tackle the JRG scheme.”

These are all known unknowns which the funding model for present course costs, outsourced to consultants, was supposed to answer but did not. They need to be known before JRG can be amended, let alone ended.

There is a bigger problem for the humanities lobby – Clare is a great believer in the life-improving, economy-building benefits of a university degree. And he wants government to be involved, really involved, in making sure that universities offer the right ones. His new ATEC will get involved with each university in the county in establishing what the feds will fund them to teach. And whatever that is must conform with the government’s “strategic priorities”.

This will mean whatever a minister wants it to mean. A government that wanted to cut university spending but thought the economy needed more IT and engineering graduates, for example, and had polling that showed voters do not much care about sociology and film-studies would leave it to ATEC to tell universities which enrolments to cut. And guess where the savings would be found.