Labor has released its higher education policy today. Some first thoughts:

The sensible

* They want to build on the new QILT website (itself a big improvement on MyUniversity) to provide better information to students and parents in making informed choices. It’s not in Labor’s policy, but I would suggest that there are two big information gaps for prospective students at the moment. For QILT, the units of analysis are the course and the university. However, as the attrition rates reported elsewhere in Labor’s policy imply the more important unit of analysis may be the prospective student – ie, student attributes matter more than university or course attributes in predicting completion. The other issue is that while prospective students are getting improved information about choices within higher education and vocational education (see the MySkills website), there is not much on the choice between higher education and vocational education. But that’s the choice people with weaker academic backgrounds need to be considering.

* They would keep the demand driven system. Previous talk of using compacts as a backdoor way of steering the supply side of the demand driven system is absent from this document, and if it has been dropped I think that is a good thing.

* There would be better processes: a green and white paper to sort out the detail of their policy once in government. They are also proposing a Higher Education Productivity and Performance Commission. The main discussion about the Commission is on labour market forecasting, but there is much else it could do to meet the goals implied by its title.

The neutral

* They are promising a ‘Student Funding Guarantee’, which they say will boost per student funding by $2,500 ‘compared with the Liberals’ plan’. Perhaps compared to the 2014 Budget policy, but not so far as I can see compared to the status quo, which is the most likely outcome under the Liberals as well, even if they would rather spend less. Just indexing the current average per student funding rate by 2.5% a year I get quite similar projections to Labor. Incidentally, 2.5% is less than universities would like, but in recent times weak wage growth means that the indexation system Labor introduced last time they were in office is not producing the increases in grants that universities thought it would.

Incidentally, the wording in the document is not always as careful as it could be, blurring the distinctions between per student funding and per student government funding. Universities won’t be 40 per cent better off per student each year under Labor; without spending cuts or fee deregulation it is just that more of their money will come from government. The accountability pressures may differ slightly depending on whether the government or students pay, but a dollar is a dollar regardless of where it comes from. Apart from ideological considerations around public-private funding shares, so far as I can see universities will be financially indifferent between Labor in 2018 and the status quo (which is just Labor policy as of 2012).

The not so good

* Labor’s plan to write off the HELP debt of 100,000 STEM graduates was controversial when it was announced in May. As I said at the time, it is at best wasteful and at worst will encourage prospective students to take high employment risk courses. The Higher Education Productivity and Performance Commission will be able to identify the problems.

* They will not implement the Kemp-Norton report recommendation to extend the demand driven system to non-university providers or sub-bachelor degrees. However, they will announce further policies regarding the TAFE system and pathway programs prior to the election.