University is expensive, especially so for humanities students
The PM and the education minister have made big noises about easing cost of living pressures for Australians with large HECS/HELP debts. But they’ve been very slow to do anything about the high cost of getting a degree in the first place.
Students of communications, humanities and the arts are particularly bad off since the Morrison government came up with the controversial Job-ready Graduates package (JRG) in 2020. JRG increased the cost of law and commerce courses by 28% and saw the cost of humanities subjects more than double. At the time, ministers argued that price incentives would redirect students to STEM, nursing, teaching and other areas.
Before JRG, fees for degrees were justified by some combination of the cost of teaching (for example, teaching dentistry is more expensive than history) or the graduate’s expected earnings (for example law and business graduates tend to earn more than those in creative arts and social sciences). JRG tossed away these justifications. Arts subjects are cheap to teach, and graduates have relatively lower earnings.
JRG even failed on its own terms. One analysis found that less than one in fifty (1.5%) students swapped their field of study because of the change. Students are still enrolling in courses targeted by the Morrison government but face astronomical debt for doing so. Perversely, JRG universities now get less overall funding than they need to deliver STEM courses.
JRG compounded what was already a dire situation for graduates. Between 2006 and 2024, the average HECS/HELP debt for people in their 20s grew from $12,600 to $31,500. The time it takes to repay that debt has also blown out, from an average of 7.3 years in 2006 to almost a decade in 2023.
Repealing JRG would make a real difference to the cost of living for arts, communications and law students and graduates over the long term. It would also remind Australians that universities are not just factories for pumping out skilled workers.
Commonwealth parliamentarians shouldn’t need to look far for justification of the value of an arts degree — more than a third of MPs in the 47th Parliament were arts graduates. For them, higher education was either free or significantly more affordable than it is today. If the next parliament wants to show that it is serious about helping graduates with the cost of living, it would scrap the unfair Job-ready Graduates package.
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