In today’s Oz, John Bryon argues against lowering the HELP repayment threshold by arguing that HELP is a profit-sharing scheme:

HECS (by whatever name) is not a loan so much as a profit-sharing scheme: the commonwealth not a bank but a venture capitalist. The public finances education for its own collective benefit, both economic and social.

It is rational to recruit potential students as widely as possible; it is also expensive.

So those deriving conspicuous personal benefit are asked to tip some of those dividends back in, up to a limit based on their time (and, today, disciplinary location) within the system.

It is unjustified to lower the repayment threshold below the average wage.

Now there are versions of income contingent payment scheme ideas which can be seen as profit-sharing. Milton Friedman’s original idea was along these lines, in which people pay a percentage of their income for a fixed period of time. Some people would pay nothing for their education, while financially successful graduates could pay many times their original fees or costs of their course. In theory, this could permit a high threshold, if the lender was confident that total repayments would at least cover costs.

But HELP isn’t a profit-sharing scheme. It is a partial cost recovery scheme, in which the most the Commonwealth can ever receive is the amount that it lent plus indexation (or loan fee, for some FEE-HELP students). Recovering costs in a labour market where many people work part-time means that the initial threshold cannot be high, and indeed it is relatively low in other jurisdictions that have income-based repayments such as New Zealand, England, and some US loan schemes.

The partial link with average weekly earnings in Australia was about the late 1980s politics of ending free higher education and probably a view that it wasn’t going to be hugely costly, given that at the time average wages was much less driven than now by people who didn’t have degrees (in 1989 10 per cent of workers had degrees, now it is 30 per cent). It was never a mechanism for profit sharing.