Across the country, Australian students are living in poverty, struggling to finish their degrees. The marathon parliamentary sitting to pass 32 pieces of legislation would barely have registered in their universe.
One thing to be applauded is the federal government’s changes granting university graduates relief from crippling levels of debt. It must now address the unfair and broken fee structure that gives rise to these liabilities in the first place and ease the pressure on students.
Fixing student fees is part of the response needed to the cost-of-living pressures forcing many students into poverty or to give up their studies. The Youth Allowance rate of $46 a day for students living away from home is woefully inadequate to address this.
Unsurprisingly, official data shows that financial pressures are a growing factor for students who are considering dropping out, doubling from 20 per cent in 2021 to 42.5 per cent last year.
Our own data confirms this. Last year, half of our students at Western Sydney University said they were food insecure, with many forced to choose between studying and eating. As these figures show, government needs to do to more to support our students by setting fair fees and by keeping them in study.
Fortunately, there is a solution. Just as the federal government sets fees for domestic students, so too can it change those fees. Fairness can be restored at a much lower cost than the billions already committed to support graduates.
The government has set an ambitious target for the nation’s universities. Over the next quarter-century the nation’s workforce must go from six in 10 workers with a university degree or TAFE qualification to eight in 10. This is vital to maintaining Australia’s international competitiveness and our high living standards.
Yet the number of students finishing high school is declining, including a disturbing 10 per cent fall at public schools over the last eight years to a 73 per cent completion rate. There has been a similar decline in the number of Australians enrolling in undergraduate programs.
Higher education must be made accessible to Australians from poor families, including from the outer suburbs and regions. We cannot leave them behind. The government has promised further support, including a new needs-based funding system for universities. However, a key driver of greater numbers of students into higher education remains unaddressed – the underlying cost of degrees.
The government has begun to talk more about this, but today’s students cannot wait for a new body to be created. We need immediate action, starting with reducing the $50,000 cost of Arts degrees that price students out of their dreams. Very often this is the degree of choice of Australians who are the first in their families to go to university and who come from disadvantaged backgrounds.
The amount a student contributes each year to a typical three-year university degree is based on where a course falls in four funding bands. In 2025, the top band will cost $16,992 a year.
Skyrocketing fees were a product of the Morrison government’s Job-ready Graduates Package in 2021. The distortions mean that food and hospitality, tourism, history, communications, sociology and other humanities all fall into the top funding band along with law, accounting and business. Today, students from poorer backgrounds studying degrees that produce the lowest graduate incomes can pay the highest fees.
The Innovative Research Universities (IRU) have proposed a workable and practical solution which would remove the top band. Courses would fall into the three remaining bands, based on how much graduates can expect to earn. Humanities degrees would move to the new mid band with students incurring a debt of $28,000 (as opposed to more than $50,000) for their three-year degree.
The IRU also proposes restoring government funding to universities for science, technology, engineering and mathematics subjects, which are crucial to Australia’s ability to be a smart, innovative nation. Overall, the cost would be $1.77 billion a year, as opposed to the $20 billion the government has committed to cut 20 per cent of existing student debt and reduce the indexation of that debt.
It’s a simple, fairer and a more cost effective way forward.
George Williams is vice-chancellor of Western Sydney University.
