This week I am on a panel discussing a fair price for students to pay for their university education. Both those who want students to pay more and those who want students to pay the same or less draw on fairness arguments.

Fairness arguments for higher student charges

Fairness to other taxpayers: Critics of free or cheap higher education have long thought subsidising students was unfair to other taxpayers. Way back in 1972 Malcolm Fraser criticised Labor’s free tertiary education policy on the grounds that it would lead to a ‘wharf labourer paying taxes to subsidise a lawyer’s education’. The 1988 Wran report, which recommended the introduction of HECS, justified it partly on the basis that ‘taxpayers carry most of the burden of higher education [but]…most taxpayers are not privileged members of society and neither use nor directly benefit from higher education.’

Fairness to other taxpayers is perhaps the lead trigger idea in reducing public spending and increasing student charges. Two of the three proposed nominal cuts in per student public spending of the last 30 years (1989 was the exception) occurred when there was a Budget deficit, creating an active choice between increasing taxes or charging students more.

A fair price: Underlying the fairness to other taxpayers notion is also an argument that it is fair to ask people to pay for what they receive. This has led to a recurring idea that there should be a ‘balance’ between private and public contributions to the cost of higher education. It appears in the Wran report, the arguments for the 1996 funding cuts and HECS increases, the Lomax-Smith review of funding (never acted on), and again in the Pyne and Birmingham policy documents. Students should pay for the benefits they receive, and the public should pay for the benefits it receives.

The public-private balance idea has had little influence on policy detail. Public benefit calculations have never been used to set public funding rates, and private benefits have been used to set private funding rates only once, in a back of the envelope way, in introducing differential HECS for 1997. This created the idea that student contributions should be linked to likely future earnings. Differential HECS connects to a market idea of a ‘fair’ price – pay more, get more. But it also links to progressive notions that the relatively rich should pay more, or get less in taxpayer-funded benefits. This is a common idea in the Australian welfare system. Despite the weak association with policy detail, repeated use of the balance metaphor suggests it reflects intuitions about how higher education should be funded.
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