Category: Higher education finance

How should student contributions be set? Part 1: Should student charges contribute to system costs or the student’s course costs?

Andrew Norton1 Comment

This is the first of a series of posts looking at the conceptual and philosophical issues underlying debates about student contributions since the late 1980s.

The series is prompted by Dan Tehan’s proposed changes to student charges, but not limited to them.

This first post looks at the student contribution’s relationship to overall public funding, and whether it is intended to offset total government expenditure on higher education, or the cost of the student’s own course.

Course cost student contributions have been considered, but not implemented

The Whitlam experiment with free higher education ended in the late 1980s because the Hawke government wasn’t willing to pay the full cost of expanding enrolments. But then and since people have disagreed about whether students should contribute to their own costs or more broadly to the system’s costs.

Read More »

Universities should have a Commonwealth funding floor

Andrew NortonLeave a comment

Update 27/8/20: A funding floor has now been inserted in the Job-ready Graduates bill, albeit with some remaining issues.

———————————————————————————————————–

As expected, the legislation for Dan Tehan’s higher education policy would formally repeal the Higher Education Support Act‘s bachelor-degree demand driven funding provisions, with a small exception for regional Indigenous students.

Funding for Commonwealth supported bachelor degree students has been capped since the end of 2017, so this might seem like just a formality. But in reality the repeal involves a major structural change, one that could undermine important higher education policy objectives.

Even though section 30-27(1) of HESA 2003 created a power to cap, section 30-27(3) required that the capped amount be at least the previous year’s funding level. The only way that a university could get less money than the previous year was by enrolling too few students, reducing their payment under the demand driven funding formula (section 33-5(5)). In effect, the link to previous Commonwealth payments created a funding floor that the government could only lower with parliamentary approval.

Read More »

2021 will be a competitive year for university applicants

Andrew Norton3 Comments

Whether the Tehan reforms pass the Senate or not, in 2021 universities face a recession-induced spike in demand. This post looks at the system’s capacity to respond under each policy scenario.

Commonwealth Grant Scheme

Based on last year’s portfolio budget statement, which requires some averaging of years, under status quo policies the Commonwealth Grant scheme will increase by about the rate of inflation. As Commonwealth contributions are indexed to inflation, and universities are already delivering more student places than needed to get their maximum grant, the 2021 CGS funding increment would not require any additional student places.

Under the Tehan reform scenario, starting in 2021 the government will add ‘growth places’ that are partially linked to population increases in the 15-29 age cohort. But these places will not increase Commonwealth Grant Scheme funding compared to 2020. Rather, the maximum CGS payment is first reduced and then slightly increased by the growth places. The lost funding would be recycled in a proposed industry linkage fund, but this puts new constraints on university spending rather the freeing up funds for new student places.

Read More »

How will the number of student places increase under the Tehan reforms?

Andrew NortonLeave a comment

Although I don’t support the Tehan plan to steer student demand to ‘national priority’ fields, from day one I have supported increasing the number of student places.

According to the Department’s discussion paper on the reforms, they will ‘support an additional 39,000 university places by 2023 and almost 100,000 places by 2030’. These additional places are needed to meet previously unexpected demand due to the COVID-19 recession and, from the mid-2020s, the ‘Costello baby boom’ cohort (although the former Treasurer perhaps should not get too much credit for them).

This post examines how student places for undergraduates might increase under the Tehan reforms. For general readers, the first section on major sources of additional places includes the key policy changes. Read on after that part if you need to know the detail of higher education policy.

Read More »

Commonwealth and student contribution reforms create a harder cap on ‘priority’ than ‘non-priority’ courses

Andrew Norton4 Comments

My previous post examined how, for many disciplines, price signals to students and universities contradict each other under the Tehan reforms. Without demand and supply incentives lined up, enrolment patterns by discipline may not match the government’s ‘national priorities’.

The overall price signal for the university, the total per student funding rate for each full-time equivalent enrolment, is made up of two components. These are a Commonwealth contribution, paid out of the Commonwealth Grant Scheme, and a student contribution, a university charge paid by students up to a legislated maximum amount. Most students use HECS-HELP loans to pay their student contributions.

This post looks at what separate effects the Commonwealth and student contributions might have on university behaviour, independently of how they combine to form a total funding rate.

Read More »

Funding incentives for students and universities in the Tehan reforms: some are aligned, others contradict each other

Andrew NortonLeave a comment

The higher education reforms Dan Tehan announced last month make the idea of ‘national priority’ courses, which are often but not always linked to employment prospects, a central feature.

This is a significant conceptual shift in the funding system. Historically, deliberately steering the system by course has been a marginal aspect of policy. It has occasionally been done by allocating new places to preferred fields, especially in the mid-to-late 2000s. In the same period, some changes to relative student contributions, particularly in the case of science, were designed to boost demand. But universities, influenced by student preferences, largely decided how student places were divided between courses.

In the Tehan proposal, universities will remain the main decision makers. The government will not directly allocate money to national priority fields. Instead, the government will send price signals to students across all fields of education, with low student contributions indicating national priorities, and high student contributions discouraging non-priority fields. Altered student preferences will, if the policy goes to plan, cause universities to shift student places to priority areas.

Student contribution effects

To date, most discussion has centred on what effect the new student contributions will have. My own position on this is mid-debate.

Read More »

Regional universities are especially disadvantaged by funding based on average costs

Andrew NortonLeave a comment

Dan Tehan is the most regionally-focused education minister I can remember, and quite probably ever. Multiple new or expanded programs for regional campuses and students are part of his higher education plan.

But a sector-wide central feature of his policy, the closer alignment of discipline-level funding rates with average costs, poses particular problems for regional universities.

As the Deloitte Access Economics analysis of teaching and scholarship costs found, regional universities have higher average costs than city universities. It says that:

Read More »

Can a block grant system work on lower per student funding rates?

Andrew NortonLeave a comment

In recent posts I examined how various average teaching costs compared to the proposed new student funding rates. Average costs provide a rough guide to the decisions facing universities. Fortunately, the cost data has average costs for each field in each university in the sample. This detail offers a more nuanced understanding of how the new funding rates will affect universities.

The published cost data is from 32 universities and covers 20 fields of education. Not every university offers courses in all fields. In total, 551 fields are examined for profits and losses.

Read More »

Correction post – true average costs, whether average costs are true, and that chart

Andrew NortonLeave a comment

In a post last week, I suggested that a chart on average teaching costs compared to funding rates in the Tehan reform discussion paper, which was causing concern and confusion, and was later amended by the Department of Education, might make things look worse than was the case.

This turned on what kind of ‘average’ we were looking at. There are multiple versions of average 2018 estimated costs by field of education floating around – an average of averages (all institution average costs by field added up/number of institutions), a median of averages (institutional average cost in the middle of the range for each field), and a true average (total costs for field/EFTSL in field). I thought the chart might use an average of averages, which would over-weight low-EFTSL, high-average cost institutions.

But, having realised that I had the true average numbers when I thought I did not (in a file with a name that did not reveal this aspect of its contents), I now think the Department’s chart is based on true average figures.

Read More »

Financial influences on job-seeking university applicants

Andrew NortonLeave a comment

In an earlier post, I argued that student interests drive course choices, but also that more than 80 per cent of first-year students hope for improved employment outcomes.

It follows from this that, within their cluster of interests, prospective students would plausibly choose courses with the best apparent employment and income outcomes.

This theory helps explain trends seen in applications data. While supply-side and timing problems mean we do not always have enough ‘job-ready graduates’, rarely do we lack ‘job-ready applicants’.

Read More »