Opinion
Whilst the Government made early progress in implementing the HE Accord review, rather than fast dumping the Job Ready Graduates (JRG) funding model it inherited, it chose a slower process route. This was to first legislate the Australian Tertiary Education Commission (ATEC) and to then get ATEC’s ‘advice’ on any new student funding models. The relevant Bills to enact ATEC are to be advanced late this February, following public submissions and committee scrutiny.
Whilst the HE Accord’s verdict on the JRG experiment was blunt: “needs urgent remediation”, and its attempt to influence student choice through price signals “has failed” (pp.12), ATEC will now need comprehensive evidence – well beyond sectoral emoting that it’s profoundly unfair – to suitably persuade Government, plus the tougher ask of convincing Treasury, of funding reform.
Assuming ATEC eventually gets either direct legally authority or is commissioned to tackle this specific issue, given the Bill at present lacks direct reference to ‘student contributions’, this article explores policy evidence for dumping JRG and uses this to explore alternate funding principles.
Generalist degrees have produced positive labour‑market outcomes
The Jobs and Skills Australia (JSA) publication Higher Education Outcomes – Exploring Administrative Data breaks new ground in using linked administrative data to track how higher education graduates move into the workforce and progress over time.
Whilst novel, its graphics of graduate pathways are mostly unsurprising, reinforcing long held intuitively understood labour market experience of HE graduates entering and progressing in the labour market.
One JSA-written headline catches the eye. That graduate outcomes in “Management, Commerce, and Society and Culture unlock broad career pathways – graduates entered over 70 distinct occupational groups, highlighting strong employment versatility” [1].
The research shows some graduates have discernible ‘line of sight’ pathways; education graduates overwhelmingly become teachers; engineers largely become engineers. It also shows clearly broad adaptability: Humanities and Society & Culture graduates disperse across more than 70 occupational groups, demonstrating resilience and versatility. It also shows ‘post-graduate’ income growth across all disciplines, mostly in Business.
The caveat is timing: the JSA dataset spans 2010-11 to 2022-23. It includes cohorts who graduated before 2021, the start date of the JRG reforms. So future datasets that span up to at least 2030 are needed to assess pre-and post JRG reforms.
Nevertheless, the data decisively contradicts the ideological logic of JRG. This is not a picture of “unemployable” humanities graduates. It is evidence of adaptability, mobility, and the ability to navigate multiple roles and industries, valued capabilities in a dynamic labour market.
JRG attempted to reduce generalist degrees through punitive pricing, when in fact these fields were producing graduates with broad, resilient and economically valuable career trajectories.
Other than in name, the funding clusters for 2026 are retained and so extend the JRG distortion[2]. JRG’s pricing still won’t shift demand; it will only increase debt for some while it’s still in place.
JRG model adversely impacts equity groups
The inequity of JRG’s punitive pricing of humanities and society‑and‑culture degrees is argued as socially regressive, and risks disproportionately impacting equity groups, who are more debt‑averse and who face longer repayment periods and thus financial burden.
The HE Accord review reaffirmed the JRG model creates affordability barriers, particularly in disciplines where equity students are disproportionately enrolled (Humanities, Society & Culture, Law, Commerce). But the final Accord report did not give extensive quantitative evidence.
Most past commentary has been based on policy design analysis, modelling, and pre‑existing equity patterns, not post‑reform longitudinal data. Longitudinal analysis (as per JSA’s above) is needed to dissect each category of equity student by way of enrolment, graduation and job outcomes, as impacts for e.g. low SES, 1st Nations, or regional students will not be uniform.
More equity-related funding does not change JRG model inequity
Leaving the JRG model in place undermines positive benefits of new equity-related supports, both at a student level e.g. more FEE FREE places, practicum placements, hubs, disability supports, 1st nations ‘demand driven’ funding, and also at institutional levels e.g. Needs-based funding. Such initiatives might support participation and completion but have no impact on student debt burden.
JRG model has contributed to institutional disruption
JRG has also distorted institutional planning and incentives, penalising universities with strong Humanities and Society & Culture profiles – including institutions serving low‑SES, regional and Indigenous students. Institutions have had to resolve complex funding clusters given reduced funding per place, contributing to institutional restructuring and department/course closures.
Past – Coalition’s flawed ‘course-to-job’ alignment
The underlying false pitch was that the value of a qualification can be measured by its “line of sight” to a specific job. The crude premise was that if government made job‑aligned degrees cheaper and less job‑aligned degrees more expensive, students would dutifully follow the price signals into areas of national need. The policy also ‘priced up’ student contributions for courses and areas of study that they philosophically opposed, a general prejudice that likely remains.
The word ‘alignment’ was not prominent. Rather political framing was “job‑ready”, “jobs of the future”, “better aligned tertiary sector”, “industry engagement”, “national priority courses”, “industry needs”, “price signals”, “steering students”, “meeting workforce demand”. The Coalition model was behavioural, market‑driven and set false incentives to steer and ‘align the student’.
Present – Equity frames all reform actions
The now Government’s political framing for HE reforms is strident rhetoric of “equity, access, and participation”, based on the Accords “growth through equity”. This is underpinned by e.g. “system reform”, “school completions”, and “the 80% tertiary attainment target”. It is then bewildering the JRG model still stands; leaving it in place makes growth through equity and 80% targets untenable.
Future – Underlying ‘system architecture’ alignment
Sitting beneath the ‘growth through equity’ headline banner, the Government is pursuing its own and different alignment agenda. It sees tertiary education as a system architecture problem, with its core purpose being economic and social benefits and its outputs being workforce skills.
The ATEC Objectives include that a higher education system that ‘has the capacity and capability required to meet Australia’s current and future student, skills and workforce demand’.
The HE Accord report defined a system to include ‘collaborative and purposeful work between all governments, tertiary education providers, industry, employers and unions to flexibly align local skills supply with demand’ and ‘delivery of graduates with the creativity and technical skills to meet future workforce and societal need’ (pp16), words near repeated in the ATEC Objectives.
This alignment push, underlying equity headlines, is deliberate tertiary system coordination. It’s structural, institutional and data‑driven. It anticipates wider adoption of JSA’s advise on skills and workforce planning, ideally hard‑wired to linked qualifications. Training linked to a job is the norm in VET Qualifications and within Jobs and Skills Councils’ (JSCs) Guidelines, working in partnership with JSA, to establish “alignment of qualifications with job roles and industry workforce needs”.
Future alignment is also to be pursued via ‘tertiary harmonisation’, improved interoperability between HE and VET sectors, with emphasises on knowledge, skills, and qualifications, tertiary architecture (AQF, National Skills Taxonomy) and labour‑market needs and workforce planning.
Positive – but this system alignment philosophy carries its own risks. A critic of ATEC advises the Bills to be rejected, the first of many reasons being they ‘narrow the purposes of universities, with no acknowledgement of intrinsic intellectual interest or courses without tight links to occupations’.
The nub of the wider apparent revolt against the ATEC Bill by universities is the risk of their receding autonomy and agency, where national ‘compacts, funding models and harmonisation’ become underwritten script for a centralised control system, with ATEC being little more than ‘shopfront’.
Institutions must acknowledge however that Government as prime funder/financer will always strive for best use of public monies to optimise the nation’s human capital. JRG has proven a dumb way of doing it, so institutions need to build trust is proposing better future facing solutions.
A labour market defined by change, not certainty
JRG concepts and policy might have made sense in the mid‑20th century, when professions and trades were more tightly bounded and labour markets were relatively predictable. It absolutely does not make sense now.
Today’s labour market is defined by churn, hybridity and rapid technological augmentation. Jobs are being reconfigured, not simply replaced. Tasks are being redistributed between humans and machines. Entire occupational clusters are being reshaped by generative AI. In this environment, the premium is not on narrow occupational alignment but on adaptability, versatility and the capacity to learn, unlearn and relearn across a career.
The fields that JRG treated as “less job‑ready” are, by the evidence, among the more adaptable. They produce graduates who can communicate across contexts, solve ambiguous problems, integrate knowledge and work in complex, human‑centred environments, all capabilities that AI amplifies rather than replaces. Reimagination of courses and past academic silos is also needed.
An adaptation‑ready funding model should recognise that most workers who will need to reskill for AI‑shaped roles are already in the workforce, making lifelong learning and mid‑career transitions central to the public value of higher education. This is all in accord with employers increasingly valuing transferable skills (critical thinking, communication, adaptability etc).
Global evidence converges on this point. JSA’s own AI transition analysis shows that most exposure to generative AI is about augmentation, not replacement. The WEF’s Four Futures for Jobs in the New Economy AI and Talent in 2030 highlights that labour‑market resilience depends on workers’ ability to adapt to changing task mixes and ability to orchestrate AI systems rather than compete with them. PwC’s AI Jobs Barometer finds that industries most exposed to AI have seen productivity growth nearly quadruple since 2022, and that workers with AI‑complementary skills enjoy significant wage premiums.
So, adaptability is not just a personal asset; it is a national productivity strategy.
A funding model for the economy we’re actually entering
In other words: versatility is a core economic asset. The policy implication is clear. Australia needs to shift from a funding model that excessively rewards narrow occupational alignment to one that also and equally values adaptability, versatility and transferability as valued public/private good.
The Accord opened debate on a new funding model (pp. 284) where principles like future earnings and estimated costs of teaching should reflect student and government contributions respectively. The future should be to better align funding with public benefit, private benefit, cost of delivery and equity – not outdated assumptions about job pipelines.
So, what might an adaptation-ready funding model look like? It may seek to optimise and balance:
- Anchor base funding to delivery costs, not presumed employability.
- Take account of graduate earnings, recognising course-to-job links are massively variable
- Target supply interventions only where occupational bottlenecks are factually proven
- Public funding should support lifelong learning, not one‑shot occupational alignment
- Equity groups should not be penalised for choosing broad fields. Punitive pricing of humanities is a policy misstep that undermines both equity and national productivity
- Recognise versatile degrees are economically valuable and generalist capability is a resilience asset
- In an AI impacted economy, adaptability and transferable skills is a public good
- Expand work‑integrated learning and employer partnerships across generalist fields.
The future of work is not “job‑ready graduates”, it’s more “adaptation‑ready graduates”. What is needed now is the political will to move beyond the line‑of‑sight logic that shaped JRG and toward a funding system that prepares graduates for the labour market they will actually face – one defined by change, complexity and opportunity. Harder to model, but closer to reality.
The prospects for near-term legislation
Assuming the conservative opposition parties continue to oppose establishing ATEC, it appears more likely than not the passage of the ATEC Bills through the Senate will require other minority party support. The Greens introduced the HE Support Amendment (Reverse Job‑Ready Graduates Fee Hikes & End $50k Arts Degrees) Bill in Nov. 2025. The Greens described JRG as “cruel, unfair, and downright absurd”.
It is yet possible the ‘ATEC advisory cart’ put before the ‘loathed JRG horse’ stumbles, if it comes to pass changing JRG becomes a condition, not a consequence, of ATEC’s legislative success.
[1] Examine the data shown in Fig. 3 and Fig. 4 of the JSA publication, pp 7 & 8 respectively.
[2] Compare funding clusters for 2026, Cluster 1 (covering Law, Accounting, Administration, Economics, Commerce, Communications, and Society and Culture, vs all other Funding Clusters 2-4