The outrage intensifies as university leaders and lobbies demand the Government reduces what students now pay for humanities degrees, but no one mentions they could do something about it themselves.
Luke Sheehy was on ABC RN the other day complaining that a three-year humanities degree costs students $50,000 plus. “It’s the Australian Government that sets the fees for Australian students in our universities, and we are on a campaign to get rid of this unfair system and replace it with something that is fair to access university,” he said. Law and business students get slugged as well but they rarely rate a mention, in what is universal outrage against the Job Ready Graduates funding model that the Coalition introduced to penalise students doing degrees it did not approve of.
JRG is still in place under Labor and there is no serious sign there will be funding to reduce what students pay in this year’s Budget. Last week, ATEC’s Interim ED David Turvey told Senate Estimates that work was being done on the “detailed mechanics” of JRG and there would be progress later this year. Education Minister Jason Clare never mentions a date.
That is because ending JRG will be harder than it looks. The Government would have to kick in $650m at least to abolish the top fee band and other students would likely end up paying as well as their fees rose to reduce the budget hit. It is why universities stick to culture-warring and rightly argue that JRG was created by the conservatives because they hate the humanities establishment.
But what university leaders never mention is that they do not have to charge top whack for humanities or come to that, any other course. They have not for 20 years, since Coalition Education Minister Brendan Nelson made the total amount students and government contribute to the cost of a course the maximum, not a mandatory, amount that could be that be charged for any degree. Nor do they ever argue that humanities and social sciences in general, (“Society and Culture” in Department of Education speak) are cheaper to teach than courses that require capital intensive kit – medicine, dentistry and are the astronomically expensive example
While individual universities know their own costs, no-one appears to have a clue what the system-wide figure is. A prominent research team had a go a few years back and was defeated by ambiguities and anomalies in the different ways universities deal with the data. But no one disputes it has always been lower than the huge price students pay plus the small government contribution under JRG. Informed guestimates put the average profit per “society and culture” EFT at $2,000-$4,000.
Whatever the surplus is, universities use it to subsidise more expensive courses – and presumably doesn’t start to address research funding issues, capital works, spiralling compliance costs etc.
However, university executives could decide to charge students a little less for humanities courses. It would send a signal to the community that universities back their rhetoric about the importance of humanities education with cash.