Should higher education courses be tax deductible?

Andrew Norton3 Comments

The universities are calling for tuition fees to be exempt from the $2,000 maximum tax deduction for self-education.

The low tax deduction plus the more easily-defensible closing off of the voluntary HELP repayment bonus could have major effects on some students.

For a presentation I was doing at Swinburne today I prepared an example using a Swinburne Graduate Certificate of Engineering, a course marketed as professional development and therefore likely to have sufficient link to the student’s current employment to be deductible.

I assumed that the student was currently earning $75,000 a year, giving them a tax rate of 32.5% plus the 1.5% Medicare levy. I assumed they would take out a FEE-HELP loan and then repay it to claim the 5% bonus for voluntary repayments. As figure 1 shows, the two measures substantially reduce the effective cost of the course to the student.

Figure 1: Effective cost of course under current arrangements
swin 1

As figure 2 shows, with just a $2,000 tax deduction and abolition of the repayment bonus the effective cost of the course to the student increases by more than 50%, from $6,600 to $10,100.

Figure 2: Effective cost of course under proposed arrangements
swin 2

There are interesting conceptual issues here. The tax system is already biased against human capital investment, as students cannot claim a tax deduction for their investment in their future salaried earning power, though they could if they bought a range of physical assets to produce trading profits.

For undergraduates, arguably the public subsidy and the HELP loan scheme removes any bias against human capital investment. Most undergraduates cannot get easy access to other forms of capital. But in the largely full-fee postgraduate market many students would have alternative investments for the available cash.

There are complications in the argument. It is not always easy to distinguish ‘consumption’ and ‘investment’ higher education. It doesn’t seem quite right that with tax deductions the effective cost of course is much higher for someone on a 15% marginal tax rate than someone on a 45% tax rate. In a book I wrote a decade ago, I thought that maybe flat-rate subsidies were less distortionary than tax deductions.

I’m still not entirely sure how to deal with this issue. But we should watch enrolments in postgraduate courses very carefully.

Uni VCs should take some blame for consequences of latest cuts

Andrew Norton5 Comments

Well so much for the Universities Australia campaign for increased public funding of higher education, with another half-page ad in today’s Weekend Australian. The government has announced a new wave of higher education spending cuts.

As usual with these weekend announcements there is not much detail available, and not all the numbers make sense to me on current information. For universities, the main impact will come from ‘efficiency dividends’ of 2% in 2014 and 1.25% in 2015. This will be the first cut to nominal per undergraduate student funding since the Dawkins reforms 20 years ago. [Mookster makes the point below that after indexation there will not be a year-on-year reduction, though I am anticipating that there will be a reduction to Commonwealth contribution amounts in the Act.]

Reducing public funding to higher education is not in itself problematic. But arbitrary changes to the prices universities receive for reasons which have nothing to do with higher education (funding Gonski is the claimed reason in this case) are not easily justifiable. In a more market-based system, we could see whether students would rather put up with cuts or pay more to maintain current services.

This outcomes highlights the political failure of the Universities Australia process that led to their current policy document. By maintaining an exclusive focus on public funding rather than building a political case for more fee deregulation they were always taking a big risk. The idea that a $5 million university advertising campaign could alter the political calculation that there are more votes in schools and health was always pretty fanciful. And so it has again proved to be, even sooner than I thought.

The reality here is that there are vice-chancellors who would rather undermine the services they can provide than concede an ideological point about student charges. They should take some of the blame for the problems these cuts will cause.

Is the University of New England’s MOOC legal?

Andrew Norton2 Comments

Update 21 February: UNE VC Jim Barber advises me that UNE Open students will not be enrolling at UNE, and that DIISRTE is ok with UNE Open. I still think that current regulation is poorly designed for innovation in higher education, but it looks like this venture is OK to proceed.

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Original 20 February post:

Today the University of New England announced an innovative new way of delivering higher education. Inspired by the MOOCs, it plans to unbundle its higher education services.

…through a new platform called UNE Open, UNE will [] begin offering a range of postgraduate and undergraduate units through open courseware…..UNE Open will offer a range of fee-for-service products alongside the open courseware, including tutorial support, examinations and, ultimately, students may choose to have their learning recognized for credit into a UNE degree

Vice-Chancellor Jim Barber’s op-ed on his plans is here. I think this is an excellent initiative. But in offering its services this way, UNE is moving into uncertain legal territory.

Problem #1 is that under section 19-85 of the Higher Education Support Act 2003 universities are supposed to charge every student who enrols in a unit of study. They can offer ‘scholarships’ to bring the price back down, but that significantly complicates this ‘freemium’ model.

UNE can argue that the open courseware is not a unit of study, defined as a ‘subject or unit that a person may undertake with a higher education provider as part of a course of study’. Just studying the curriculum materials online could not lead to recognition as a unit in a course of study, but if students have the possibility of examination and academic credit then arguably it is a unit of study.

Perhaps UNE could create a legal workaround in which students don’t actually formally enrol, they just take the unit without enrolling. However, even this is skating on thin legal ice. At a course of study level, enrolled is defined to include ‘undertaking’ the course of study. Again, we hit the problem of the closer the ‘undertaking’ gets to academic credit the more it looks like an enrolment and something to which section 19-85 applies.

Problem #2 is that under section 36-55 of HESA 2003 there is a floor price of the highest student contribution amount for a Commonwealth-supported student unless the student could not have enrolled as an award (ie degree) student. I’m not sure how this provision is intended to be applied. People already enrolled in degrees at UNE for which the unit in question is relevant are covered I think, but it seems to cover a broader group: anyone who might have been admitted. So if your ATAR was very low you can get a discount, but if your ATAR was high you can’t? Sorting out who falls within section 36-55 and who does not would be complex, and undermine a simple open enrolment model.

Problem #3 is that HESA does not support the unbundling of charges into separate components. Section 19-100 reads

A higher education provider must not charge a person a fee for a course of study that exceeds the sum of the person’s tuition fees for all of the units of study undertaken with the provider by the person as part of the course.

I think this makes it difficult to offer cheap, stripped down versions of units and then charge more later for examinations or academic credit.

A literal reading of section 19-90 suggests that UNE could have multiple different fees charged at enrolment depending on level of service. But that wasn’t the intention of the legislation – as I recall it, the purpose of this provision was to allow different cohorts of students to be charged different fees for the same bundle of services (for example, students who enrolled in a course at different times could be charged different amounts). And it undermines a key flexibility of the stated UNE model: that students can decide as they go what level of service they want.

I hope my reading of HESA is wrong, or that UNE can drive its open courses through the loopholes. But Australia’s system of higher education funding and regulation was designed to support an homogenised higher education service. It is poorly equipped to deal with innovative higher education business models. That the system is an obstacle to premium higher education services has long been well understood. But with UNE’s proposal, we are starting to see how it is also an obstacle to discount higher education.

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More detail here.

Uni scholarship donations not so praiseworthy

Andrew Norton6 Comments

I saw the PM on the news tonight praising Graham Tuckwell’s $50 million donation to the ANU to fund undergraduate scholarships. No doubt there are worse ways for a rich man to spend $50 million, but there are also much better ways.

Like many scholarship schemes, the Tuckwell scholarship will go to people who already have plenty of potential that is unlikely to go to waste. They will go to university anyway, find mentors anyway (one of the claimed benefits of the scheme), and make something of their lives. They are not the people who need help.

Instead, these scholarships are used for essentially wasteful positional competition between universities. The ANU will use the Tuckwell’s scholarships and the associated publicity to try to take top students away from Sydney, Melbourne and other universities that buy talented students .

If I had $50 million to spend on higher education I would put it into MOOCs. I don’t know if they will really turn out to be the next big thing in higher education. But Coursera, for example, on a capital base of US$22 million has already attracted 2.5 million enrolments. It includes many people from developing countries with little prospect otherwise of higher education. It can make so much more difference than adding to the advantages of people who have so many already.

Business groups again outspend left-wing third parties

Andrew Norton1 Comment

The annual AEC third party political expenditure returns were released this morning. Annual reporting was introduced by the Howard government with the pretty express purpose of harassing left-wing third parties such as green groups and GetUp!. However it catches industry groups as well, and as the table below for the third successive year they have outspent left-wing groups.

The law does not require disclosure of which issues were pursued, but the main industry players for 2011-12 were industry groups involved in the carbon tax ($9.3 million) and and pokies regulation ($4.3 million). (Updated noon 1/2 to correct misclassified expenditure).

Political expenditure disclosure laws are very complex, including a requirement for disclosure of spending exceeding $11,900 a year on ‘the public expression of views on an issue in an election’. So third parties operating during 2011-12 were required to forecast which issues would be issues in the 2013 election, which we now know will be on 14 September. As it is very hard to predict what will be an issue that far out (quite possibly, not pokies in the end) there is a basic rule of law problem with this provision.

Under the current system, these complexities are largely restricted to major players which spend $11,900 plus a year. But in bill before the parliament, which the government this week announced it would try to pass by 30 June, the threshold for disclosure would drop to $1,000 in any six month period. This will catch many small political groups run by volunteers, few of whom will have any idea that their trivial political activity could land them in serious legal trouble.

Government rejects higher ed funding review’s main recommendations

Andrew Norton5 Comments

To nobody’s surprise, the federal government has rejected the 2011 base funding review panel’s main recommendations (media release here).

The biggest policy change suggested by the BFR panel was that every student should pay 40% of the Commonwealth-supported funding rate, with taxpayers paying the other 60%. With students currently paying between 28% and 83% of their course’s funding rates (details at p. 52 of Mapping Australian higher education), that would have meant some students paying less (eg law, business) and many others paying more (eg medicine, nursing, engineering, science, education).

Logically and empirically, 40/60 was always dubious. It was based on the idea that government should pay the anticipated future value of higher education’s public benefits. Graduate Winners argued against that idea, proposing a framework in which the public aims to profit from its higher education investment.

The flat 40/60 was based on the idea that public benefits were similar between disciplines. As one of the main public benefits was increased tax revenue, that assumption is clearly false (data also in Graduate Winners, but easily inferred from the BFR background paper on private financial returns). And even if this was true, it logically leads to a flat rate subsidy and not a proportion of total funding rates, which have nothing to do with subsequent benefits.Read More »

Is the university experience worse than 40 years ago?

Andrew Norton4 Comments

”I don’t think the university experience is nearly as good for students as it was 40 years ago. There are a number of changes, but most important is teaching is taken much less seriously than it used to be.”

– Robert Manne, The Age, 19 January 2013

I suspect he’s right that senior academics spend less time talking to and mentoring the most intellectually engaged and able undergraduate students than they did 30 or 40 years ago. But for the average student academics generally probably do a better job of organising and presenting their course materials, and this is showing in increased student satisfaction with teaching.

The data is from the Course Experience Questionnaire, run by Graduate Careers Australia. The figure appears in the 2013 edition of Mapping Australian higher education, to be released tomorrow night. (Update: out now.)

Do higher education subsidies produce public benefits?, 1985 version

Andrew Norton4 Comments

I spent the last day of 2012 tidying up my chapter in a book I am co-editing on the Dawkins higher education reforms (the aim is to publish in mid-2013 to coincide with the 25th anniversary of the government white paper). The subject of my chapter is the Liberal response to the Dawkins reforms, which turned into a story about the Liberal role in the long, convoluted path from the state-dominated higher education system created in 1974 to a more privately-funded, market-based system.

Mid-1980s Cabinet papers released today provide a bit more of the background. At this point, Labor was still committed to free education for domestic students. But the Department of Finance thought that this was a bad idea, and wrote a memorandum explaining why.

It has the usual material about free higher education not changing the socio-economic profile of students. But it also contains a version of the key argument in my Graduate Winners report:

While these external benefits [better organised and functing political and social systems, potentially lower crime, sickness, disease, application of research undertaken in conjunction with education] are of course very difficult to measure they are widely believed to exist. To acknowledge their existence however is not to make a case on efficiency grounds for the full public subsidisation of higher education: full susbidies would only be warranted if there were no private benefits at all which is not likely to be the case; most people would expect extra income, status, and work satisfaction as a result of tertiary education…

It goes on to note that there is no public benefit from hobby or recreational study, and there is a risk of over-investment – ie, there could be greater economic and social well-being from investing the same money elsewhere.

I don’t think Finance’s document quite describes the underlying logic of its argument, which 1) are there public benefits from a course? (if no, just leave it to the market); 2) If yes, are the private benefits large enough to attract students? (if yes to this question, just leave it to the market); 3) If the private benefits are not large enough, will public subsidies lead to enough public benefit to justify intervention?

But they are certainly right that a public benefit argument can’t possibly justify full public funding of higher education, as susbequent events showed.