The Job-ready Graduates student places debate

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Update 30/9: The minister has announced $326 million over an unspecified period, but starting in 2021, for additional student places. This would have a a significant effect on the calculations below. I will update again when I have more detail.

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One of the many disputed points in the Job-ready Graduates Senate inquiry was over the number of student places it would create. The Department of Education’s answers to questions on notice provided new detail, including annual estimates, shown in the chart below.

Over the longer-run, there are multiple mechanisms in JRG that could require or encourage universities to deliver more student places than now. However, the Department does not explain how it arrived at most of its numbers. They do explain the assumptions behind their 2021 forecast. For the reasons given below, I doubt that these justify a claim of additional places compared to status quo policies remaining in place.

Funding envelope

Of the 15,000 additional funded places, 7,000 are said to come from ‘increased flexibility for universities within the funding envelope’. This refers to ending three separate Commonwealth Grant Scheme grants for sub-bachelor, bachelor and postgraduate coursework places. Instead, universities would have a single ‘funding envelope’, within which they could freely move resources between qualification levels.

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Can enabling courses survive?

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Enabling courses are niche product of the Australian higher education system. Although quite diverse, they aim to improve academic preparedness for higher education study. Enabling courses often target general academic problems, but also discipline-specific gaps.

Public universities can offer enabling courses on a full-fee basis with a FEE-HELP loan, but most enabling students are in Commonwealth supported places they get for free. In 2018, universities had nearly 22,000 CSP enrolments, who used just under 12,000 EFTSL (most enabling courses are short).

CSP enabling places are funded from a mix of the normal discipline-based Commonwealth contribution and an ‘enabling loading’ in lieu of a student contribution. Both funding sources come from the Commonwealth Grant Scheme.

From 2011 to 2019, enabling places came from an allocation for sub-bachelor places, but with an implied enabling allocation, the set number of places that received the loading. The ‘fully-funded’ loading was about $3,400 per student place in 2018, but due to over-enrolments – students above the allocated number – it averaged about $2,700. This compares to a weighted average student contribution of $8,100 if these had been charged.

The government moves against enabling courses

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Job-ready Graduates: My Senate inquiry submission

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My submission to the Job-ready Graduates Senate inquiry is now on the Education and Employment Committee website, but the published version has an error in Table 5, so use this version instead if interested (update 16/9: correct version now on the Senate website).*

The submission does not have a lot in it that people who have read this blog since June will not have seen before. But the submission overview summarises what I see as the three key policy errors that make Job-ready Graduates not well designed to achieve its own objectives. I have copied it in below.

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What happens if the Job-ready Graduates bill is rejected?

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The Innovative Research Universities lobby group says that rejecting the Job-ready Graduates bill is ‘not an option’, while proposing several amendments to it. But its rejection by the Senate is still an option. What happens if it is rejected?

In this post, I argue that status quo policies can deliver similar outcomes in meeting student demand over the next few years, while causing much less disruption to the higher education sector.

Student places

The government says that it will ‘fund more bachelor‑level Commonwealth supported places (CSPs) at universities from 2021.’ Some universities will receive notional allocations, and regional Indigenous students will get demand driven places. But at a system level I don’t believe that direct Commonwealth funding will increase student places in the coming years, beyond what could be delivered under status quo policies.

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How should student contributions be set? Part 2: Letting universities set their own prices

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In the first post in this series on the conceptual and philosophical thinking behind student contributions, I argued that successive governments have primarily used them to limit system-level public expenditure.

Once the public spending constraint is achieved, this approach leaves room for other methods of setting student contributions. This post looks at giving universities a role in deciding what level of student contribution to charge.

Liberal plans for fee deregulation

The idea that universities should set their own fees on top of a government subsidy has a long Liberal lineage. Plans to lift controls on fees were in the 1991 Fightback! package, David Kemp’s 1999 leaked Cabinet submission, and in Christopher Pyne’s unsuccessful 2014 higher education reform proposal.

For fiscally-constrained governments, part of fee deregulation’s attraction is its scope to further reduce public expenditure. Universities can compensate for public spending cuts with increased student charges. But fee deregulation also has a more positive agenda.

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Notes on the Job-ready Graduates bill, as introduced

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The Job-ready-Graduates bill was introduced in the House of Representatives this morning. A couple of points on the funding floor and the social work/mental health deal with the National Party:

Funding floor

One unpleasant surprise in the draft Job-ready Graduates bill of earlier this month was that, with each funding agreement, the minister could reduce a university’s funding without parliamentary scrutiny or approval.

The bill as introduced has a clear fix of this problem – but from 2025: amending section 30-27(3)(b) of the Higher Education Support Act 2003 (HESA 2003). From then, the minister cannot reduce the university’s maximum basic Commonwealth Grant Scheme funding for higher education courses below what it was the previous year.

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

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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.

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Universities should have a Commonwealth funding floor

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

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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.

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Should students lose Commonwealth support for failing to complete subjects?

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Update: As of 2024 the failed subjects policy no longer applies.

Post updated 1/01/22: Clarifying that the rules apply to non-completion of subjects as well as academic fails, updating to take account of amendments, and removing now irrelevant 2020 content.

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On 1 January 2022 a further element of the Job-ready Graduates package commenced, which restricts Commonwealth support for students who fail to complete at least half the subjects they have taken.

General rule – failing to successfully complete more than half of subjects leads to loss of funding entitlements for that course

The general rule is that students who fail to successfully complete more than half their subjects in a course will lose their entitlement to Commonwealth support: section 36-13 of the Higher Education Support Act 2003 (HESA 2003) for Commonwealth supported students, for FEE-HELP students section 104-1A . At public universities, FEE-HELP borrowers are mainly postgraduates, as they cannot offer undergraduate full-fee places except in narrow circumstances.

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Checking that students are on track to pass – the government’s proposal

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My previous post argued that some university students needlessly incur HELP debts and fails on their academic record. This post looks in more detail at several measures proposed in new legislation to alleviate this problem.

Although these measures arrived without warning they have a history. With some amendment and addition, they extend to public universities rules applying to non-university higher education institutions since the 2017 provider integrity legislation. In turn the 2017 non-university provider legislation imported vocational sector rules intended to avoid a repeat of the VET-FEE HELP debacle.

Provider marketing and student motivations

The issues in VET FEE-HELP and higher education are, however, quite different. The offering of inducements, misleading statements about HELP, and cold calling that would be restricted or banned for public universities by the new legislation never or rarely happen in higher education.*

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