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When the Morrison government first introduced the Job-ready Graduates scheme in 2021, some in the university sector were cautiously optimistic.
Fees for nursing, teaching and engineering students would be substantially reduced under a package nominally designed to steer students towards disciplines where Australia needed workers and away from the lofty humanities and social sciences.
But its folly has become apparent, with $50,000 degrees in arts, law, business and social sciences leaving thousands of students across the country beginning their professional lives in serious debt and some in the sector warning those fees could double in the near future.
On Tuesday, Universities Australia CEO Luke Sheehy told a hearing into a private member’s bill, brought by Greens senator Mehreen Faruqi, that Australia was inching towards $100,000 degrees.
“It’s unacceptable,” Sheehy said.
“[Job-ready Graduates] is a barrier to opportunity, it has pushed costs onto students, driving up debt. It has pulled around $4 billion out of the system since 2021.
“It’s not that hard to fix, it just requires some political courage and some additional funding.”
Should the bill pass, an arts degree would revert from $52,000 to $24,500 with equivalent changes across law, commerce and economics, according to modelling submitted by Dr Adam Lucas from the University of Wollongong and Dr James Guthrie of Milan’s IULM to the inquiry.
However, Sheehy and a host of university vice chancellors, sector experts and advocacy group leaders who gave evidence to the inquiry in large part oppose the bill because it would lower student contributions to degrees without increasing government spend.
Constitutional constraints mean the bill cannot require increased Commonwealth spending.
Higher education analyst Andrew Norton said the bill would halve total funding rates for arts degrees, jeopardising their provision by universities.
“Ending $50,000 arts degrees by ending arts degrees is not what the bill’s advocates want to see,” he said.
Job-ready Graduates has been routinely criticised for its failure to achieve the planned outcome of changing students’ minds about what to study, with more expensive humanities degrees still among the most popular for students.
In her submission, Group of Eight Chief Executive Officer Vicki Thomson said the scheme had instead “broken the link between student contributions and prospective earnings … and expanded the portion of debt unlikely ever to be repaid”.
Job-ready Graduates has reduced the nation’s overall university funding to the tune of $4 billion over the past five years, Universities Australia says.
While in opposition, Labor vociferously opposed Job-ready Graduates. As opposition education minister, Tanya Plibersek branded the scheme a “total fraud that doesn’t deserve backing from anyone with common sense or a conscience”.
Yet almost four years since Labor took government, the scheme remains.
“I’ve been clear that the former government’s Job-Ready Graduates scheme has failed,” said Education Minister Jason Clare on Tuesday.
“There’s a lot to do.”
Asked by the ABC earlier this year when Australians could expect to see reform, Clare refused to say.
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