Month: June 2014

Will private schools suffer from university fee deregulation?

Andrew Norton1 Comment

In The Australian this week, Buly Cardak suggested that university fee deregulation could undermine private schools. Under the current system he suggests that parents pay large sums to private schools to maximise their child’s ATAR, which in turn increases their chance of getting into their desired university course. However, this may become more complicated in future.

With fee deregulation there will be a shift from competition on ATAR only to competition on ATAR and tuition fees. This could well have a ripple effect on the fees charges by private schools.

It is certainly possible that some high ATAR students would decide not to pay the fees Group of Eight universities charge, and go for better value for money options at other universities. However, this does not necessarily mean that ATAR cut-offs at Group of Eight universities would go down.

The reason that ATARs may not change, or even go up, is that under fee deregulation Group of Eight universities could change their business strategies. To generate profits under the current system they operate high-volume/low-margin businesses for Commonwealth-supported students. But with fee deregulation, they could go for lower-volume/higher-margin business to generate the same or more profit on fewer students. Smaller intakes can allow higher cut-offs, even if some high ATAR students go elsewhere.

The Group of Eight are still likely to have plenty of academically strong applicants. For students interested in research or researchers, the Group of Eight will still be dominant. For students interested in prestige, the Group of Eight will still be dominant. They will still have well-located campuses. And for high-ATAR students interested in meeting other high-ATAR students, it is hard to imagine how the Group of Eight won’t still have the highest concentration, even if they don’t have quite the same total number as now.

So it will still be difficult to get into Group of Eight universities, and there will still be powerful incentives to maximise ATAR scores.

There are other assumptions in Buly’s article that give us further reason to doubt that private schools would suffer financially from fee deregulation.

His agument assumes that large numbers of families make financial trade-offs between school and higher education. Although some parents do pay their children’s higher education student contributions, most don’t. Upfront payments have been steadily declining, down to 16.4% in 2012, compared to 22.5% in 2005. Generally, parents pay for school and children pay for higher education through the HELP loan scheme.

We should also be cautious about the idea that ATAR factors are dominant in the decision to use private schools. Research into parental choice of schools has found that it is values, discipline and especially religious factors that are typically most important. The cost of higher education won’t change any of these factors.

If parents used private schools for university admission more generally, the demand driven system might have led to reduced need for private school ATAR-boosting. It’s still hard to get into Group of Eight universities, but it has never been easier to get in somewhere. But so far this is not showing in school enrolment data.

My best guess is that higher education policy will have little effect on private schools.

Update: This idea is popular with University of Melbourne academics: here and here.

What proportion of uni graduates leave Australia permanently?

Andrew Norton1 Comment

In our Grattan report on HELP doubtful debt, we struggled to get long-term data on graduates leaving Australia. We were interested in this issue because currently there are no provisions for recovering HELP debts from graduates living overseas.

The latest HILDA Statistical Report doesn’t report on HELP debtors, but it does include information on people with a bachelor degree or above. Perhaps unsurprisingly, they are more likely than people with other qualifications to leave Australia permanently, as seen in the figure below.

emigration by level

Based on general emigration data, our report assumed that graduates with personal or family links to another country would be more likely to emigrate. HILDA confirms that this is the case, with people with both parents born in a non-English speaking country having three times the emigration rate as people with both parents born in Australia. However, 87% of people with NESB parents remained.

emigration by parent birthplace

Reflecting the general Australian population and the education focus of many migrant groups, nearly half of Australia’s domestic students in 2011 had at least one parent born overseas. While HELP debtors going overseas is a much smaller issue than the deceased estate write-off, these numbers suggest that it would be worthwhile to do more to recover HELP from overseas debtors. The Grattan doubtful debt report discusses some of the practical issues in doing so. Since the report was released, the government has said that it has had discussions with the English about mutual efforts to help collect student debt.

Parent birthplace 2011 students

Higher education reform clarifier #6: How realistic is the Greens’ university cost website?

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The Greens’ What will my degree cost? website is aimed at politics rather than real education choices, but the idea of an education finance website is a good one. As I argued in The Conversation this morning, we also need to start helping people choose between vocational and higher education. But of course the information in a political website needs to treated with scepticism – even if I am the source of some of it.

For their website the Greens are using data I provided to various newspapers a few weeks ago, but without the caveats I attached to it. To reality check some of the wilder speculation at the time about $100,000 degrees, I used international student fees.

While international student fees are market rates, I believe that they are the upper limit of what is plausible for domestic students. This is because where we have deregulated markets for both international and Australian students, in postgraduate courses and in higher education providers outside the public system, in the vast majority of cases domestic students are charged less.

Some of the possible reasons for charging domestic students less are genuine cost differences, university missions aimed at serving domestic students, and a more competitive domestic market. But whatever the precise reason, the fee numbers in the Greens’ website are almost certainly higher than the average student will be paying in the future, and definitely much higher than the best-priced courses that will be available.

The campaigns being run by the Greens, the NTEU and NUS are likely to leave many people believing that higher education will be much more expensive than it really is. This is a problem for universities under the demand driven system. Under the previous system the supply of university places was set by government well below demand, so reduced applications had no effect on final enrolments. Now with supply and demand quite evenly balanced fewer applications could easily translate into fewer students for some universities.

A number of universities have recognised the problem, and announced price freezes for students starting during the rest of 2014. I think universities are going to have to a lot work on this for the 2015 intake to correct inaccurate beliefs about costs that some of their prospective students will now have .

Higher education reform clarifier #5: Would arts degrees need to cost twice as much?

Andrew Norton2 Comments

Stories in the Fairfax papers this morning are talking about the doubling of fees for some arts degrees, to compensate for reduced government subsidies. That is only true of journalism courses, but the reason why these numbers are being arrived at are worth further examination.

The current system is based on funding a ‘unit of study’ (ie a subject) according to its field of education. Each field of education is allocated to one of eight ‘funding clusters’ that determine its ‘Commonwealth contribution’ (ie subsidy) and ‘student contribution’ (often called ‘HECS’). Universities set their own student contributions up to a maximum set by legislation, but in practice all charge the maximum amount.

As is common in the higher education system, various quirks of history rather than clear principles or policies explain these rates. As the figure below shows, this leads to very different overall funding rates for the subjects that someone enrolled in arts might take (I have adjusted 2014 rates up to $2016 for the comparison to come). In my view, only the foreign languages difference could obviously be justified by an inherent need for different teaching methods.

arts now

What the new Commonwealth contribution rates would do is bring the humanities and social science type subjects, except economics and languages, to a consistent level, as seen in the figure below. This means that humanities like history get a small increase in funding, while the others get a substantial cut.

arts changes

From a first principles basis, the new rates look more consistent and rational than the rates they would replace.

If they go ahead (the government has signalled willingness to look at the detail of these cuts) do student contributions need to increase to take total funding per place back to current levels? Arguably, some of these disciplines have long been over-funded and there is scope to not simply maintain the funding status quo by passing on all reductions in Commonwealth contributions to students.

Overall, however, the ‘revenue theory of costs’ is likely to explain university operations more than any strict relationship between what it should reasonably cost to deliver a course and what it actually does cost. It’s Bowen’s law: universities raise all the money they can, and spend all the money they raise. No matter how much money they have, they always feel ‘under-funded’ because they let their costs increase to absorb any previous funding boost. This is why even absurdly rich universities like Harvard feel the need to do major fundraising campaigns.

So while some disciplines look over-funded relative to similar disciplines, it is likely that much of this extra funding has been built into expenditure over time (even if profits in some disciplines have been redistributed to other university activities). While they might not pass on all the Commonwealth contribution reduction to students, the internal trauma involved in reducing costs means that there are likely to be substantial student contribution increases.

One reason I am keen on opening the higher education system up to competition is that I want to bring in new players without these legacy cost structures, who I hope will be able to provide the same or better services than the universities while charging students lower fees.