Che Gorr Burchmore always knew he wanted to go to university, but he wasn’t quite sure what he wanted to study.
“When I just finished my exams last year, I knew that I needed a year [to] collect myself and then see what direction I want to go,” he told triple j’s Hack.
He decided to follow his passion and ended up enrolling in commerce and law at Deakin University in Melbourne, commencing next year.
The cost of his degree wasn’t a factor in his decision.
“It’s never really been about the money for me. It’s whether I’m enjoying my education and learning new things and connecting with new people.”
Seventeen-year-old Alyssa Jandayan is in the same boat. The Year 12 student is passionate about performing but decided that she needed a job with greater financial security.
“Living from job to job in the entertainment industry wasn’t going to sustain me in the economy as much as maybe becoming a psychologist with a stable job,” Alyssa told triple j’s Hack.
She’s decided to study psychology, with a view to becoming a clinical psychologist.
Like Che, she hadn’t factored in the cost of a psychology degree, or the HECS/HELP debt she’d incur.
“The money at the end was probably going to be a ‘later me’ issue.”
As the commencing class of 2025, both Che and Alyssa will be attending university under the Job-Ready Graduate program.
The scheme started in 2021 under the former Coalition government as a way to funnel students into areas of skills shortage by decreasing the cost of those courses.
Figures recently released by the federal Department of Education reveal the discrepancies.
Arts, law and commerce students like Che can expect to fork out nearly $17,000 a year for their courses, compared to just over $4,600 for agriculture or nursing students.
Alyssa can expect to pay $9,300 a year if she studies behavioural science as part of a psychology degree, but nearly $17,000 a year if those units are part of an arts or sociology degree.
All of this adds up.
A person graduating from a three-year nursing degree would expect a student loan debt of $14,000.
But a recent graduate of a three-year degree in history would have a HECS/HELP debt of $51,000.
“I don’t think it’s fair. It is restricting people who might have or do have dreams to study commerce and law or journalism,” Che said.
“It’s a bit alarming and it hurts a little bit,” Alyssa said.
“It puts a lot of pressure on the upcoming graduate classes, because they really have to … have everything after high school figured out.”
Job-Ready Graduates ‘has failed’
According to the Universities Accord, a broad-ranging report into the tertiary education sector, only 1.5 per cent of students changed their courses as a result of the Job-Ready Graduate scheme.
“It hasn’t worked in the way that it was intended,” CEO of Universities Australia, Luke Sheehy, told Hack.
“University students aren’t choosing to enrol in certain degrees that became cheaper under the system.
“All universities across Australia have said universally that Job-Ready Graduates has failed as a policy proposition.
“We want to see [it] replaced with a better, fairer and more sustainable financing and funding system both in terms of what students pay, but what universities get paid to deliver world-class education to Australians.”
Federal Education Minister Jason Clare told the ABC shortly after the release of the Universities Accord that Job-Ready Graduates was not working as intended.
“There were more people doing arts degrees after it started than before,” he said.
But he went on to say changing the policy is “expensive” and “not easy”.
In a statement to Hack, Mr Clare said funding the priorities of the Universities Accord would take time, and the government was setting up the new Australian Tertiary Education Commission that would help determine course fees in the future.
‘Pricing students out of their dreams’
The new vice-chancellor of the University of Western Sydney, which has a higher proportion of low socio-economic and migrant students, said the cost discrepancies are locking some cohorts out of tertiary education.
“We still have massive underlying problems and a broken system,” Professor George Williams told RN Breakfast.
“If you look at a student who might want to do an arts degree — a bedrock degree for many of our Indigenous students, low SES students — we’ve just hit the 50k mark for an arts degree.
‘We’re actually pricing students out of their dreams, out of their aspirations, out of their future.”
More than 40 per cent of First Nations students take on a society, culture or creative arts degree, according to figures from Universities Australia from before Job-Ready was implemented, in 2020.
Mr Sheehy said more recent figures were hard to analyse because they included the anomaly of the COVID-19 pandemic, which saw a sharp increase in the number of people enrolling in higher education.
“Overall, the cost to go to university is something that particularly those students from disadvantaged and poor backgrounds think about. So we know anecdotally that those cost barriers are impacting those people from those groups,” Mr Sheehy said.
“The majority of students in the Australian higher education system are women. So we know the impact across the board disproportionately impacts women.”
Arts degrees are a “ticket to a better life” for many students from disadvantaged backgrounds, Professor Williams said.
“We know the system is broken.”
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