Statements from the government that under their reform package higher education fees will go down as well as up have been met with ridicule in social media and even from a Canadian higher education policy research institute.

Certainly it is unlikely that fees for public university students will go down. Cuts to public subsidies for most disciplines mean that universities will need to increase their charges just to maintain current revenue per student.

But undergraduate students in private universities and colleges, and the TAFEs that now offer degrees, will become eligible for public subsidies under the Pyne reform package, as recommended by the report I wrote with David Kemp. Exactly at what level is yet to be determined. But it will be above the zero level most of their students currently receive (under various ad hoc deals with government, a few of the around 130 potentially affected institutions already have some subsidised places).

While I doubt that the full value of the subsidy will be passed on in lower fees, particularly in the more generously subsidised disciplines we should see fees dropping by thousands of dollars for students outside the public university sector. The Budget papers suggest that 80,000 students could benefit from this change.