Category: History of education

The 2003 Cabinet papers and Brendan Nelson’s higher education reforms

Andrew Norton3 Comments

In the history of Australian higher education policy Brendan Nelson, the Liberal minister for education from 2001 to 2006, is perhaps under-rated. Several student funding structural changes he legislated 20 years ago are still in place. These include:

  • Student contributions set by universities up to a legislated maximum and going to universities (previously HECS was a fixed government charge);
  • A per full-time equivalent student Commonwealth contribution based on subject field of education (previously universities received an overall operating grant, which although informed by an early 1990s costing exercise did not directly tie money paid to discipline-level enrolments);
  • Commonwealth-university funding agreements as a method of allocating student funding to institutions, which made funding arrangements more transparent (but also turned into a backdoor instrument of policy and regulation that bypasses Parliament);
  • Through FEE-HELP, extension of student loans to full-fee undergraduates and students in private higher education institutions (the more limited Postgraduate Education Loan Scheme, PELS, was already supporting university full-fee postgraduates).

The 2003 Cabinet papers

The annual National Archives release of 20-year-old Cabinet papers, with the 2003 papers released earlier this week, gives us a look behind the scenes as Nelson’s reform package was developed and debated. Three digitised Cabinet documents record proposals and decisions, but not the Cabinet discussion. Sometimes, however, Cabinet thinking can be inferred from requests for further work and contextual material in the submissions.

This post focuses on changes to income contingent student loans.

The loan scheme that did not make it through Cabinet

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Mapping Australian higher education 2023 – official release

Andrew Norton2 Comments

Mapping Australian higher education 2023 is now available from the ANU Centre for Social Research and Methods website.

Update 26/10/23: A reader has pointed out that list of FEE-HELP NUHEPs is incomplete. A column of names from the original Excel file was omitted during production. The full list is available here. This list also includes three non-FEE-HELP providers registered by TEQSA since the pdf version was finalised. A corrected version of Mapping with the full list of NUHEPs, as of mid-2023, is here.

If anyone has noticed other errors please let me know.

Conflicting visions of higher education’s purposes

Andrew Norton3 Comments

I blurbed Mind of the Nation, Michael Wesley’s new book on universities in Australian life, with the statement that it ‘shows how rising and conflicting expectations of universities create controversies that will not go away’. His book is about the cultural and political position of universities rather than higher education policy as such, although policy provides evidence of how politicians and voters see universities.

University administrators – Wesley is a deputy vice-chancellor – are at the centre of these controversies, blamed by all sides for whatever is wrong with universities. Mind of the Nation explores why universities receive so much critique and so little love or (from a university perspective) public funding, despite many successes and contributions: life-changing experiences for students, moving from an elite to a mass higher education system, creating a new export industry, large increases in research aimed at solving practical problems, and engagement with local communities.

Wesley asks why Australians admire the successes of their sporting teams, musicians and actors but not universities.

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Would free university increase or decrease higher education participation rates in Australia?

Andrew Norton5 Comments

In a previous post I argued that Australia’s practice of charging fees for higher education reflects its broader patterns of taxation and public funding of social services.

But we have had free higher education before, 1974-1988. For a government already spending over $600 billion a year the cost of free higher education is not beyond the feasible range. I estimate costs at $4.6 to $5.9 billion a year on status quo numbers of student places in public universities. The range reflects uncertainties about how domestic students currently paying full fees would be handled. The $4.6 billion transitions currently Commonwealth supported students to free, while the $5.9 billion fully compensates universities for lost fee revenue.

Of the arguments for free higher education the one that people find most intuitive is that it would increase higher education participation. People consume more when prices go down. But somebody is paying – the government on behalf of taxpayers – and so how they would respond is the key variable in whether the number of students would go up or down.

Debt aversion

Supporters of free higher education often make demand-side arguments, that fees or loans are a deterrent to higher education participation, especially to people from disadvantaged backgrounds.

As someone with working class origins free higher education advocate Duncan Maskell says he would not have gone to university if he had to take out a loan. Occasional school student surveys have picked up similar sentiments. But the ‘debt aversion’ hypothesis has always had trouble distinguishing between sensible prudence around taking out debt that probably is not worth it (good debt aversion), and over-caution in taking out debts that would probably lead to significant long-term benefits (bad debt aversion).

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Why do Australian university students pay fees?

Andrew Norton2 Comments

University of Melbourne VC Duncan Maskell secured some not always entirely positive media coverage today for his call to make university education free for domestic students.

University education is free or very cheap for students in some European countries and was also free in Australia between 1974 and 1988.

Why do countries differ on university fees?

My theory of why countries differ on this issue draws loosely on the work of Julian Garritzmann. We observe broad coherence between higher education finance systems in each country and their overall tax and social service/benefits systems. The chart below shows patterns in the OECD. Australia is in a cluster of countries in our region with government expenditure below 40 per cent of GDP and quite similar fees in $USD purchasing power parity terms. The countries with free higher education tend to have governments that consume more than 50 per cent of GDP.

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The public-private balance: A failed rationale for setting student contributions

Andrew Norton3 Comments

A previous post on the reasons given by government for setting student contributions, like this post based on a new paper of mine, listed five rationales used for implemented policies: course costs, private benefits, public benefits, increasing resources per student place, and incentivising course choices.

A sixth rationale has repeatedly been considered but never become policy, the idea that the distribution of benefits between public and private should drive the distribution of costs between public and private, as represented by the government and students. This post explains where this idea came from and why it has always been rejected.

Origins in the justification for HECS

As my earlier post noted, the public-private benefits idea first appeared in the Wran report that led to HECS. Its logic was not explained, but I think it was a corollary of the private benefits argument – that if students should pay for their higher education because they received private benefits then it seemed to follow that the government, on behalf of the public, should pay for the benefits they received. This is a normative argument about who should pay rather than an empirical claim that public subsidies produce public benefits.

The Wran report did not recommend this approach because calculating private and public benefits was too hard.

The balance metaphor

As part of the 1996 Budget the Howard government, with Amanda Vanstone as minister, introduced private benefits as a rationale for specific course contributions. Conceptually, however, this was quite different to the private-public benefits idea. The Vanstone version was the private benefits of a course relative to the private benefits of other courses, rather than the Wran private benefits of a course as a proportion of all benefits private and public or, at a system level, overall higher education private benefits as a proportion of all benefits.

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The five student contribution rationales since 1989

Andrew Norton6 Comments

In a new paper published by the U of M’s Centre for the Study of Higher Education I chronicle the history of student contribution rationales – the reasons the government gave for HECS rates and then student contributions.

I argue that five rationales have been used: private benefits, course costs, increasing resources per student place, incentivising course choices and public benefits.

A key turning point is the 1996 Budget, when the government abandoned a flat HECS charge across all disciplines and introduced differential HECS. This required a more complex set of justifications than previously. The government’s arguments had to explain not just why students should pay compared to the previous free higher education system, but also why they should pay more for some courses than others.

The Wran report

The HECS system was recommended in a 1988 review chaired by former NSW Premier Neville Wran. It introduced four concepts that were subsequently influential in thinking about how to charge for higher education: private benefits, public benefits, a balance between private and public benefits, and course costs.

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Academic freedom as a principle and a practice (a review of Open Minds: Academic Freedom and Freedom of Speech in Australia)

Andrew Norton4 Comments

Open Minds: Academic Freedom and Freedom of Speech in Australia is an accessible overview of the subjects in its sub-title. It covers rationales for academic freedom and freedom of speech, the current law, historical controversies, and emerging threats.

Its authors are two law academics, Carolyn Evans and Adrienne Stone, with Evans now a vice-chancellor. Jade Roberts, a legal researcher, assisted them.

As a general concept few people are against academic freedom. Nobody is calling for powerful figures – ministers, bureaucrats, or vice-chancellors for example – to direct the detail of what Australian academics research, teach or say. Yet the historical chapters of Open Minds report many cases through the decades raising issues of ‘academic freedom’. People regularly see exceptions to this otherwise widely-supported idea.

In judging disputed situations first principles can help. Yet these are also the subject of disagreement and grey areas. Academic freedom is not a clear and unchanging principle but instead a practice that has evolved over centuries, originally as institutional autonomy from church and state, with the current idea of academics personally having freedom developing from the late 19th century.

Only this year, after Open Minds was published, have the precise words ‘academic freedom’ with a definition been inserted into university funding legislation. Until then, as the Open Minds chapter on law explains, the language was of ‘free intellectual inquiry’, with universities and regulators left to decide what that meant. Even this terminology is recent, dating from 2011 in funding legislation and accreditation regulation, with ‘free inquiry’ used from 2000 in national legal definitions of a university. Australia has had universities since the 1850s.

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Recurrent critiques, concerns and crises in Australian higher education

Andrew Norton4 Comments

In a previous post on Gwil Croucher and James Waghorne’s Australian Universities: A History of Common Cause, I noted a range of significant changes in Australian higher education over the last century. This post looks at recurrent themes.

Debate about the purpose(s) of the university

From the start Australia’s universities served multiple purposes, with on-going tensions between knowledge for its own sake, typically most strongly supported by academics, and meeting practical needs, typically most strongly supported by governments.

At the 1920 meeting that Croucher and Waghorne mark as the start of a national organisation of universities, University of Sydney Chancellor Sir William Cullen warned against ‘adopting too enthusiastically the current preoccupation with ideas of “national efficiency”‘.

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Key differences between Australian and British higher education: regional versus national markets and institutions

Andrew Norton1 Comment

In two previous posts on higher education parallels between Britain and Australia, prompted by reading Peter Mandler’s book on Britain, I also noted that there were some important differences, which this post explores.

National versus regional systems

Mandler argues that in Britain a national higher education system emerged out of a ‘patchwork of institutions dating back to the middle ages’. Although local funding has been part of higher education finance in Britain, national funding was more significant early in the 20th century, and dominated the post-WW2 expansion of higher education. Universities were linked in a common funding system.

As a recent book by Gwil Croucher and James Waghorne explains, in Australia state governments were significant funders of higher education until the national government took over in 1974. Laws regulating the foundation of universities were state-based until 2011, although agreements between the states created a high degree of uniformity from 2000.

In Britain, free higher education from 1962 and a means-tested maintenance (income support) grant helped universities recruit nationally. Britain had a national applications and admissions system from 1961. However, devolution in the UK means that there are now differences in higher education finance between jurisdictions.

Free or consistently-priced undergraduate education across Australia since 1974, along with means-tested student income support, has not fundamentally changed the largely regional nature of Australian higher education. Most students attend universities in their state, and usually in their home city. Australia’s admission systems remain state-based.

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