While the Senate education and employment committee report on the government’s higher education changes predictably endorsed Christopher Pyne’s plans to cut university funding and deregulate fees, Labor has zeroed in on one of the most significant weak points in the government’s case — its claim that fees will not necessarily rise significantly once deregulated.
Throughout the government’s so-far unsuccessful campaign to attract support for its changes, which will see university funding cut by an average of 20%, heavier loan repayment requirements for graduates and universities allowed to charge what they like for undergraduate courses, it has insisted it is not a given that deregulation will see fees universally rise. “‘Some fees will go up and some will go down’,” Education minister Christopher Pyne has claimed. However, Education department officials have admitted that no modelling was done on the impact of deregulation on fees.
In Labor’s dissenting committee report released yesterday, the opposition highlights the experience of partial deregulation under the Howard government, when then-Education Minister Brendan Nelson allowed universities to lift fees by up to 30%, arguing — in words that uncannily anticipate those of Pyne — that “some course costs would rise, some would drop and others would stay the same”. Once the reforms were introduced in 2006, within two years all universities had lifted fees.
As Ross Gittins explained in May, the experience in the UK has also demonstrated that letting market forces set university fees means fees only ever go up — reflecting that higher education simply doesn’t function effectively as a competitive market, due to the strong position of universities and the hard-to-assess nature of the product students are “buying”. Labor’s report also highlights the New Zealand experience in the 1990s, when deregulation saw skyrocketing fees that were subsequently capped by a Labor government.
The main committee report rejects the comparison with the Nelson reforms, quoting Education department evidence.
“In 2005 the Howard Government introduced a partial deregulation of student fees, such that universities could increase fees by up to 25 per cent. This measure, however, was not comparable to the current reforms, as fees remained capped ‘and the system did not allow for demand-driven enrolments, so that the access of institutions to Commonwealth Grant Scheme subsidies was limited.'”
Note that logic — that the failure of fees to fall under the partial deregulation model established by Nelson was because there was a cap preventing them from going up further than 30%. The issue again prompts the question of why no modelling was done by the government about the impact of fees on deregulation. In practical terms, of course, the answer is obvious: Education Department bureaucrats understood the likely outcome of any vaguely plausible modelling would be to show that fees would tend to rise, and probably rise significantly for Group of 8 institutions.
The attempted defence of deregulation by the University of Sydney’s vice-chancellor Michael Spence has also pointed to the inevitability of universal fee rises, with Spence making the circular argument that the big rise in fee revenue would enable Sydney to provide more scholarships for the courses it would make more expensive to access.
As the Labor report notes, there was no consultation with the sector by the government prior to the announcement of the reforms, except vague allusions by Pyne about coming reform. Between the lack of consultation and the lack of any rigorous basis for its claims about the impact of deregulated fees, the government’s handling of higher education reform has been every bit as inept as the Rudd government’s mining tax debacle — and for a sector far more important to the long-run performance of the Australian economy than mining.
39 thoughts on “Pyne’s higher education campaign echoes Labor’s mining tax debacle”
Norman Hanscombe
October 29, 2014 at 10:49 pmMatt Hardin, the post to which you refer was a response to max failing to understand the comments he directed to me about the importance of sticking to the point were using meanings for important words which aren’t those accepted in relevant disciplines. That max couldn’t understand the relevance of my comments re what was being said on the thread was why I responded; and had he not gone down that intellectual dead end I’d have said nothing. To see see attempts to help him as patronising is more of a comment on your approach to academic analysis than anything else.
Drsmithy, there still are courses where the value of degrees is determined by the quality of students’ work; but increasingly university staff are unwilling and/or unable to fail students whose performance they consider unsatisfactory.
Of course Labor Governments didn’t tell “Universities to lower their assessment standards”. What happened, and is still happening, is that many universities adopted policies which led to number of students, research reports and qualifications being inflated, thus building their Empires.
There are university staff and students who are strongly opposed to what’s happening, but in light of how those who’ve expressed concern have been treated, while offending staff are at worst moved on to another institution, who can blame them?
If all this sounds ‘patronising’ there’s certainly a need for more of it.
danger_monkey
October 29, 2014 at 10:55 pm@Duncan, unless the medical boards have gotten significantly easier, I don’t really care what the entry standards for a medical program is. The student still has to pass the professional exams to practice.
Besides, is there any evidence that the 94 vs. 65 correlates to performance by the student as a student or a professional? Often times it appears that these barriers exist simply to be barriers, not to ensure quality outcomes.
@Norman, for someone who claims a background in education, you offer up some really terrible prose from time to time. I think you might overrate your perspicacity and competence.
What’s happened Duncan is grossly unfair to students such as you who had the ability to benefit from demanding courses, but now suffer from ‘degrees’ of a lower quality obtained by students such as many of those commenting on websites which debases the value of genuine tertiary level awards.
Norman Hanscombe
October 29, 2014 at 10:57 pmDuncan, you’ve raised an interesting point. The elites have found a way around making it easier for their circle’s offspring to enter medicine. By making any unrelated degree as one of the entry requirements for medicine, they eliminate potential competition from many highly capable students from outside their elitist circles. This doesn’t let totally inept students enter medicine of course, but influence can’t buy everything in disciplines where medical deaths or collapsing bridges would cause embarrassment.
drsmithy
October 29, 2014 at 10:58 pmTrue enough to a point, drsmithy. Would you care to see a similar drop in entry standards for, say, doctors degrees?
I don’t care a whit for entry standards. It’s exit standards (and by extension, standards during study) that matter. Exit standards may have declined – I don’t know, and in my experience most people claiming they have bring little evidence and large amounts of “back in my day” rhetoric to bear – but they are entirely divorced from entrance standards.
Note that entrance scores – especially back when you’re talking about – are not directly a measure of how “hard” a degree is (and, hence, the quality of graduates). I went to school with two people who desperately wanted to study medicine and I’m sure would have excelled at it, but could not enrol in a medical degree because they only got an OP score of 2 when the requirement was 1. Engineering – amongst the hardest degrees out there – tends to have unspectacular entrance requirements (eg: a quick look on UQ’s website shows only an OP score of 6 required). A science degree has an OP requirement of 11 !
(Specifically for doctors, the AMA keeps a tight lid on their numbers through various means, so as to maintain its members’ high salaries. No matter how many aspiring, brilliant and capable students might be out there, we will never have more doctors than the AMA allows us to have.)
For “hard” degrees, from a quality perspective, the system is largely self regulating. Few students will attempt a degree like Engineering or Medicine if they do not think they can finish (since that HECS debt still has to be paid off, even if you don’t graduate), and almost none will persist with it past the first semester. Anyone who has studied Engineering will be able to testify at the dropout rates of the first twelve months.
For “soft” degrees it’s a different matter, but the substantial increase in graduates in those fields is simply a rational response on their behalf, to the increasing formal qualifications asked by employers for even the most basic jobs. You just about need a degree to get a job as a secretary, these days.
On the employers side, these arbitrarily high requirements are a response to increasing numbers of job seekers thanks to our high (and structural) un- and underemployment levels, allowing them to very quickly filter out a significant percentage of applicants.
One could make an argument that lower entrance standards are a tool used by Universities to fleece the Government out of some fees for students who should never have enrolled in the first place, and that that is “bad”, but privatisation would make that situation worse, not better.
Norman Hanscombe
October 29, 2014 at 11:03 pmdangermonkey, at 79 and having never mastered the typewriter let alone the internet, I acknowledge my posts are far from perfect language. On the other hand, since my help is still recommended to students from time to time in relation to top level students, I shall try to face your criticisms bravely.
Gavin Moodie
October 30, 2014 at 3:44 amI think Keane may be confusing 2 things. The Coalition under Nelson lifted fee caps by 25%, as Keane quotes from the Education Department’s evidence. The Coalition is now proposing to cut teaching subsidies by an average of 20%. If universities want to maintain their revenue they will have to increase fees by 30% because currently fees are 40% of the total financing of teaching spending.
I’m also not sure that Keane has understood the Education Department’s evidence, as flawed and poorly expressed as it is paraphrased in the majority report. I think the Department is arguing that in 2005 the Coalition lifted fee caps but did not lift caps on the number of places. With demand increasing but supply remaining constant prices rose.
In 2010 Labor removed caps on the number of students public universities could enrol in baccalaureates. The Department is arguing that with supply unregulated deregulating fees will not necessarily result in price increases. It is also prolly further arguing that extending public subsidies to private provides will increase competition on price against the public universities.
Neither argument seems plausible to me, but it is as well to at least understand them.
Norman Hanscombe
October 30, 2014 at 8:43 amThere has been widespread confusion, Gavin, arising from the manner in which the issue of fees has been handled generally. This has helped obscure the fact that universities have been less interested in courses which meet students needs than in enlarging their empires and presenting impressive looking facades which bring them kudos and further grants.
This has been left in the too hard basket by politicians on all sides because explaining the problem would require them to then do something and whatever they did would bring influential howling banshees down upon them.
Examples of university staff attempts to fail students who were blatant plagiarists or below standard are rarely dealt with accurately by the media, so who can blame staff who (for self-preservation) have given up trying to have the corrupt system stopped?
Chris Hartwell
October 30, 2014 at 12:58 pmDr Smithy, just to lend some credence to your claims of engineering drop out rates – of the 100 or so who started with me, only 30 graduated in the four years allotted. And yes, 50 of those who dropped out did so in the first year. Some toughed it out all the way through to third year before changing courses.
tonyfunnywalker
October 30, 2014 at 2:18 pmAn interesting article in the Washington Post. The temptation to enrol in EU (not UK) Universities especially for PG programs and MBA’s will blossom.
The nice thing is that many of these have an online component for both teaching and learning.
About 30% of students recieve online teaching at Australian Universities already and Virtual Universities are on the rise so prospective students should widen their scope of choice and still benefit from a tertiary education without the “out of pocket” pain that Pyne promises.
For specialist business programs the offerings are often superior to the Australian equivalents.
Having taught in specialist online masters programs for many years in Europe and South Africa the quality of the programs are first class with periodic peer review ensuring that standards are maintained.
EQUIS accreditation is essential for business programs when choosing between competing programs.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/worldviews/wp/2014/10/29/7-countries-where-americans-can-study-at-universities-in-english-for-free-or-almost-free/?TID=SM_FB
Duncan Gilbey
October 30, 2014 at 4:54 pm@Chris Hartwell
I understand that something of the order of 30 odd percent of university starters don’t complete their degrees for one reason or another.
This must add colossally to the running costs of universities. As I hinted in my original post, there are many issues affecting universities (and just to be clear, deregulation of fees won’t resolve any of them) but costs cannot keep rising.
My point about “standards” was that maybe increasing entry standards is a way of addressing this wastage (for want of a better term).
Maybe a higher entrance standard will dissuade people who might drop out from starting in the first place. Currently the ambulance is at the bottom of the cliff.