Mark Warburton has had it with the Government over JRG fees, “choosing to continue a student contribution system designed to penalise some individuals purely based on their chosen field of study.”
The veteran policy analyst calls for keeping simple what graduates pay by setting a single course fee for all in a new paper for Uni Melbourne’s Centre for the Study of Higher Education.
Mr Warburton argues there are but two ways to run a student contribution scheme consistent with the original Australian objectives while striking a reasonable balance between private and public funding of university education and collecting revenue from former students who can afford to pay. One is a single rate of student contribution; the original idea of HECS. The other is in the Universities Accord, basing contributions on the lifetime benefit from working in their field of study.
He does not like the latter, “people move in and out of jobs all the time. Throughout their lives they adjust their working hours and patterns to suit their personal circumstances. Many change their occupations and professions.”
The student contribution system is to help fund higher education, not to play a significant role in the redistribution of income, he argues in a new paper for Uni Melbourne’s Centre for the Study of Higher Education.
“Most of the work in redistributing income in our society is done by the taxation and social security systems.
“They have regular and comprehensive assessment processes which are better able to take individual circumstances into account than the student contribution system.”
And so he present options for a what a single student contribution for all courses could be:
- Two-thirds of students now pay more than the present $10,847 annual average and one-third less. Making it universal would be revenue neutral for government and individual universities.
- Setting a single rate at $10,000 a year would have a net cost to government of $430m per annum
- Adopting the middle JRG cost to students ($9500) would amount to a $685m hit for the Feds.
As for varying contribution rates to assist students whose degrees are associated with lower income occupations, this is bad for both people and policy. “Any substantial reduction in student contribution for a field of study with a reasonable amount of student load is very expensive. Offsetting the cost requires everyone else to have higher rates or select groups to have very high rates,” Mr Warburton writes.
Which would lead a variation of where we are now. “The preferential treatment of some fields of study ends up penalising other groups (who) can legitimately claim the scheme is unfair and produces an outcome that is egregious for them. It rapidly descends into the mess of JRG.”
The answer, Warburton suggests, is to scrub “cost pressures, political considerations, stereotypical views about professions and personal prejudices,” from the model and set a single contribution level.
“There is no reason to believe that the student contribution system cannot continue to achieve its objectives,” he writes.
“It will do this primarily by sourcing contributions from graduates in the upper half of income earners. These are the people likely to be able to afford to contribute to the education they received. This is achieved primarily through the scheme’s repayment arrangements, not through the setting of student contribution rates.”