The Australian‘s higher education gossip column High Wired has a suggestion for new higher education minister Simon Birmingham:

HW’s first policy suggestion to Birmo is please reverse the stupid decision to rename HECS as the Orwellian sounding HELP scheme. Can we please go back to HECS? Thank you.

After ten years of HELP I still routinely have to explain that it is like HECS, showing that the HECS brand is very resilient (and still partly there, through HECS-HELP). On the other hand, the shift from HECS to HELP was more than just a re-branding exercise. It reflected the evolution of policy.

Under the original HECS the terminology was mainly about the new payment that students had to make, a Higher Education Contribution. Students accumulated a Higher Education Contribution debt if they chose to borrow the money. HECS ended up describing both the charge and the loan, even though they were two different things.

Even before HELP, there was an accumulation of things students could borrow for on an income-contingent basis but were not ‘contributions’ to the cost of government-subsidised university places: for postgraduate full-fee courses, for OUA courses, and bridging courses for migrants. They all had different names, although the debts were added together for repayment purposes. From 2005 the government decided to also make income contingent loans available to students at non-university higher education providers and for study overseas. Since then, we have added loans for some vocational education students and for the student amenities fees. None of these additional loans are for ‘contributions’ either.

So the decision to call the charge for a government supported place a ‘student contribution’ and to give the loans a single name, the Higher Education Loan Program or HELP for short, seemed to clarify and simplify what was going on (at least until they started lending for non-higher education activities).

In practice, however, there is a lot of confusion. Even people making otherwise reasonably well-informed comments about higher education get the names of the loan schemes muddled. Perhaps it is time to bring back ‘HECS’, as a brand-created word in its own right rather than as an abbreviation, to describe the loan scheme. We could then try to insist on ‘student contribution’ for the charge that can be either paid upfront or borrowed.