Job Ready program is ‘holding the country back’

Some of Australia’s top universities say the federal government’s Job Ready program, created to steer students towards courses with good employment prospects, is in practice doing the opposite.

Some of Australia’s top universities say the federal government’s Job Ready program, intended to steer students towards courses with good employment prospects, is doing the opposite by creating financial disincentives for universities in the fields the government says are national priorities.

The Job Ready Graduates package program was a major university fee restructure legislated last year, cutting the cost of studying science, technology and engineering, but more than doubling those for the humanities.

As the student contributions were reduced for STEM degrees, so was the government funding contribution, meaning universities received less funding for ­degrees that are actually much more costly to run.

Australian National University vice-chancellor Brian Schmidt said the worst-affected degrees at his institution were science and engineering, and the university has been forced to deny students from studying those courses because it was unaffordable.

After the cap is reached on the total amount of commonwealth funding, any additional student has to be paid for by the univer­sity’s existing funds, creating a disincentive to enrol them, and an incentive to over-enrol students in courses that attract a higher student contribution amount.

“Because of the caps the government has placed on student funding, we are effectively taking extra students at no charge to the commonwealth and way below what it costs us to teach students,” Mr Schmidt said. “The worst-­affected degrees, quite bizarrely, are science and engineering.”

“Given the state of our finances, we simply cannot afford to carry the can for the government for another year in the vital area of STEM, where we provide some of the world’s most advanced and prestigious degrees.

“The current policy settings around student fees are not consistent with the government’s ­aspirations and are holding us and the country back. They will also keep some of Australia’s brightest young STEM students from the degree they want and deserve.”

The University of Sydney said it was very concerned about the impact of the fee restructure for fear it entrenches perverse incentives for education providers.

Internal analysis found that providers received a net funding cut per student of between 6 per cent and 32 per cent in medical sciences, maths, engineering, sciences and agriculture.

“We were very clear about our concerns as this legislation was being developed, including the potential for it to create financial disincentives for universities to enrol students in the fields the government says are national priorities,” a University of Sydney spokesman said.

“Without the three-year transition funding in place, we’d be down around $27 million a year as a result of the cuts to science, engineering and health disciplines.”

In a speech last year, former Sydney University vice-chancellor Michael Spence said the changes have the effect of undermining research capacity at a time “when we need it most”.

Merlin Crossley, the deputy vice-chancellor at the University of NSW, said the university was closely monitoring the impacts of the restructure but was yet to make strategic changes in response. “We are mindful of the changes that they could have an impact on our budget,” he said.

“In the future, paradoxically, the scheme makes more of a fin­ancial incentive to expand in exactly the areas the government is less supportive of.”

Andrew Norton, a higher education policy analyst at the Centre for Social Research and Methods, said changes to fees had little impact on how students decided what courses to study, as the main drivers of course choices were students’ interests and job prospects based on labour market trends.

“Psychologically, students won’t do something they are not interested in, and economically they are concerned with where they are going to get a job,”he said.

“An advertising campaign to draw in students’ attention would be more effective than fiddling with the student contribution.”