The draft support for students guidelines received significant negative feedback from the higher education sector. As I wrote in a couple of blog posts, the guidelines interfered in matters of academic judgment and interacted with existing regulations in ways that create duplication and confusion.

Academic judgment

I’m glad to say that the interference in academic judgment provisions have been removed in the enacted support for students guidelines.

Regulatory overlap

The support guidelines explanatory statement discusses their relationship with the higher education threshold standards, which are administered by TEQSA. It says that the threshold standards set the ‘minimum’ requirements while the support for students policy, which is administered by the Department of Education, sets ‘additional, complementary requirements on providers to support their students.’

I accept that there can be situations that, while meeting the minimum quality standards set by the threshold standards, the Commonwealth does not want to fund, or wants to ensure that it gets value for the money.

The support for students policy only applies to higher education providers getting Commonwealth grants and/or offering their students HELP loans. More than 50 providers remain outside the public funding system. However, the rules apply to all students in providers receiving public funding, regardless of their individual funding status. [Update 2/2/24: The Department’s FAQs says that the rules only apply to students in CSPs and/or taking out HELP loans. However I am not clear on the legal basis for that statement. The support for students requirement sits in division 19 of the Higher Education Support Act 2003. In one section, 19-35, it has specific additional rules on student selection that apply only to CSP/HELP students, which I think supports an interpretation that the division otherwise applies to all students. Section 19-30 says that providers must treat all their students fairly (emphasis added). It would presumably breach this fairness requirement to offer supports to CSP/HELP but not other students.]

An example of an appropriate funding-related requirement is the student support guidelines rule relating to HELP borrowers. Providers need to ensure at-risk students are notified that the census date is when they will incur a HECS-HELP or FEE-HELP debt. It is in the Commonwealth’s interests, as well as a student’s interests, that unnecessary HELP debt is not incurred.

But matters such as identifying and supporting students at academic risk are of a more general nature that ought to be covered only once by regulation. Possibly this will be the outcome of a review of the threshold standards. As part of announcing the support for students policy, the minister said that he had asked the Higher Education Standards Panel to look into the threshold standards on these matters. He also wanted to ensure that ‘universities are appropriately implementing the threshold standards’.

That last point, I think, partly explains the support for students policy. The Department seems to think that the TEQSA risk-based approach is not working, and wants to move to an audit-based policy. That, in turn, requires more specific and standardised rules against which higher education providers can be audited.

While the explanatory statement discusses the relationship between the support for students policy and the threshold standards, it does not address overlap with the subject-level academic suitability and genuine students rules in the funding legislation.

Reporting

Another improvement on the draft student support guidelines is that the annual provider compliance report no longer includes repackaging data universities already report to the government.

Starting date

The start date for the support for students policy has been moved from 1 January to 1 April 2024. [Correction 2/1/24: The start date for the guidelines requirements has been moved to 1 April, but the more general requirements for information on processes for identifying at-risk students and reporting the supports available still commenced on 1 January.]

Conclusion

The revised student support guidelines are definitely better than the draft guidelines. But this area of policy remains untidy. It will cause more confusion and incur more compliance costs than needed to protect the interests of students and taxpayers.