Job-ready Graduates fee hikes for humanities courses ‘fixable’

Australia’s “unfair” tuition fee regime can be fixed without putting pressure on government coffers or inflicting politically unpalatable price hikes on future nurses and teachers, a policy specialist insists.

Max Yong’s “pragmatic” proposals to wind back the 2021 fee changes, imposed under the Covid-era Job-ready Graduates (JRG) reforms, would cut the cost of the most expensive degrees without slashing universities’ earnings or expending many – or any – extra taxpayer dollars.

JRG’s most unpopular measure has been its massive increase to student contributions for humanities subjects, which now cost A$17,399 (£9,040) a year in many fields. Critics say it in effect closes the door to disadvantaged people who are drawn to arts degrees but cannot countenance amassing debts of over A$52,000.

The government has done nothing to ease humanities fees, despite branding JRG a failure. Analysts say it would be politically perilous for Labor to offset a reduction in the fees by reversing JRG fee cuts in other disciplines – notably teaching and nursing – and that compensating universities by boosting government funding would be extremely expensive.

Yong’s proposals, outlined in a submission to a Senate committee inquiry, would be “budget neutral” – or, in one case, would increase the government’s outlay by a modest 3 per cent – while sparing nursing, teaching and several other disciplines from fee increases.

Yong said that rather than trying to devise a “technically correct” fee schedule, the government should aim for “the best achievable schedule under fiscal and political constraints”. That meant acknowledging the need to “protect politically and socially sensitive low-fee fields”, he said.

Any changes should also “reduce the largest and least defensible JRG fee hikes”, “minimise fee increases where possible”, “avoid major reductions in per-student university revenue” and “keep aggregate government cost broadly neutral”, Yong told the committee. Authorities should apply these principles “in conjunction with ongoing costing work”, he said. “The model I have created can and should be tweaked.”

Costing work is currently being conducted by a working group that advises the Australian Tertiary Education Commission. But overhauling the JRG is not on its to-do list, according to a progress report covering its first nine months.

A vice-chancellors’ forum, convened last October to “shape the agenda” of the working group, confirmed that its role was not to “revisit” JRG “but to focus on understanding costs”.

Yong, an economist who has researched JRG at length, is a teaching fellow in Harvard University’s economics department. He said the current approach risked perpetuating the “unfair” cost of arts degrees, and the government should use its political capital to “move more quickly”.

Under his proposals, fees would fall in numerous disciplines – including law, business, economics and human movement, as well as humanities – while rising in areas including science, allied health, engineering, information technology, maths and statistics. He said no fee changes would be more extreme than those imposed through JRG, and the highest fee band would decline by 14 per cent to A$14,900.

One proposal would see universities’ per-student revenue falling in about a dozen disciplines while rising in seven. Yong said the revenue reductions could be eliminated entirely if government funding increased by “only” 3 per cent.

john.ross@timeshighereducation.com