MELBOURNE, 22 June, 2023: Professor Duncan Maskell, Vice Chancellor of University of Melbourne, has called upon tertiary education (education for people above school age, including college, university, and vocational courses.) in Australia be free. Mr. Maskell said this in The Vice-Chancellor’s annual address to the University of Melbourne community, delivered at Melbourne Connect on Tuesday 20 June 2023. “Education cannot be reduced to a private good,” he said.
The Vice Chancellor who himself is a product of free education said, ” Since the introduction of student fees we have not solved the problem of disadvantaged people having access to higher education. But importantly, what we have done by normalising the business of the students paying their university fees, is to entrench in our culture the idea that university education is only of private benefit to individuals – not public benefit to societies. This is a gravely mistaken emphasis, I would argue.
Against my argument here, some might say that the cost to government of returning to a ‘free’ university education regime would be excessively burdensome to public finances. To that I would reply that the future positive revenue implications from having more university educated people in the country would easily outweigh the cost. This is in fact a point made by successive ministers for education, usually in defending student debts against criticism that they are too burdensome to students! The fact is that increased earnings associated with higher education qualifications naturally result in increased taxation earnings to government, and this is a long-term benefit, seen over the course of long working lives, when university degrees are completed by students in young adulthood.
The essential point here is that the year-on-year public revenue at stake in funding student learning is not the main issue. This is fundamentally about the kind of population that we want to shape for the future in this country. I believe that, generally, the more educated a population is, the higher the standard will be for many different things. Thus, the public as distinct from private benefit from increasing education in a population is real. From a public policy point of view, education cannot be reduced to a private good. Of course, I am not arguing that there is no private benefit in education. But from a nation’s point of view, the private benefit is not, and should not be the whole story that determines our policy choices governing student fees.”
From 1974 onwards university education in Australia was free until the Higher Education Contribution Scheme (HECS) was introduced in 1989.
According to HR & Block, ” HECS-HELP has two components – it is both a loan and a student discount. For example, if you are an eligible student, the Australian Government (through the HECS-HELP scheme) will pay your course fees for you. The Australian government pays the amount of the loan directly to your education institution. Loan repayments are then made through the Australian taxation system when your income reaches a certain threshold ($47,014 for the 2021-22 financial year). It is possible to make voluntary repayments at any time regardless of income.”
In his address, Mr. Maskell also touched university research funding saying:
“A more rational approach for the nation, is to establish clearly and transparently, with an agreed methodology, the full economic cost of doing research. You might be surprised to learn that this is not a simple exercise. The complexities of different costs for research within different disciplines and the time fractions spent by academics on teaching and research are two areas that indicate the complexity. But it should not be beyond the capacity of governments and universities to agree to a methodology to arrive at a transparent estimated full cost of research that can be used as a benchmark for research funding policy. In fact, it has been done in other countries, including the UK.
I am not even saying, necessarily, that governments should fund 100 per cent of the cost of research, though this would be the ideal outcome. But we should have clarity about the full cost, so that government can decide to what extent they will fund the nation’s research effort.”
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