Australia is doubling fees for arts degrees
bbc.com
bbc.com
The lede is a bit buried (and the financial restructuring "very complicated"), but here's the key insight to how Australia's implementing this:
The reforms redistribute these subsidies and changes the amount of funding that different subjects receive. For subjects like law and the humanities, the increase in student fees exceeds the decrease in government subsidies, meaning universities end up with higher fees overall. This is not the case in “job-ready subjects”, where universities are forced to absorb a shortfall since the government subsidies do not offset the drop in student fees. This, higher education professionals argue, means lower per-capita student funding that will not give universities the resources they need to produce more ‘job-ready’ graduates – and could even back-fire.
I personally concur with this:
“I think the idea that you can persuade the student who is interested in philosophy to go and become an engineer is just not how this is going to work,” says Joel Barnes, a public history researcher at University of Technology Sydney.
Of course, spending any time around a college undergraduate quickly shows you that most students take awhile to understand what their "philosophy" is. This, in my opinion, is the strength of America's (higher) education system - it is so flexible that one can decide to switch to philosophy/programming halfway through their training, once they discover that really is what they liked to do all along but had just never tried it. This Australian system would, instead, lock you into a cheaper major regardless of how miserable you are. Sounds to me like a recipe for a lot of incompetent engineers.
1 - https://americanaffairsjournal.org/2019/08/rotten-stem-how-t...
These loans are then automatically taken out of your salary based on earning a certain amount.
If those careers were in-demand, shouldn't the wages on offer be enough to drive students into those careers?
First, just because a career is high demand, high pay now doesn't mean it still will be in a few years. Enough people might go into it chasing the money to turn the shortage into a surplus.
Second, it can be hard to change careers later, especially careers that require a degree. Many will prefer to pick a career they are confident they will be happy with for the rest of the working life, even if that won't make as much money.
> First, just because a career is high demand, high pay now doesn't mean it still will be in a few years. Enough people might go into it chasing the money to turn the shortage into a surplus.
Sounds like a subsidy for the industries that hire those workers. High wages are good for workers. Why champion policies that would cost taxpayer money while lowering wages?
> Many will prefer to pick a career they are confident they will be happy with for the rest of the working life, even if that won't make as much money.
Correct. Which is why a degree of less certain market value should cost less - both to the payer, but also for the educating institution. I don't understand why art degrees should cost anywhere in the same ballpark as engineering degrees when you consider the cost differences in capital and labor inputs (labs and equipment vs art studios and supplies, engineers vs artists) and their eventual respective market values. Liberal and fine arts people (should) cost less to educate and they make less money. Ergo they should have to pay less to be educated.
The other thing - make it easier and cheaper to get a visa. And in the covid world, just hire FT remote forever people.
I had a similar experience when I graduated over a decade ago. My first gig was working for one of the big Indian offshorers - I actually spent a year in India, which was interesting. Regardless, after a few years on similar crappy contracts with over-worked, poorly compensated, indentured servants from India, who were tied to their employer via an H1B visa, I came very close to quitting software for good and going to law school.
Luckily, I found an industry that cannot use visa workers and have been able to make a successful career with working conditions and pay that's fair.
The visa system has turned most software gigs in the US into a very bad deal where ageism, long hours, lower and lower pay, and general working conditions get worse each year. Then they wonder why smart kids in college decide to go into law and finance, instead of STEM.
But if its pays poorly, and consists of IT/database management/code-monkeying another app/help-desk, then one understands why one mainly gets immigrants applying (because they're desperate for the job, are relatively unlikely to be discriminated against, and they meet the qualifications whereas australians can get better wages elsewhere for easier positions).
Honestly, I'm a bit dumbstruck by notions of a shortage of tech supply in australia. Comparatively we've got very little on the demand side, outside of a handful of big-corp IT departments (who have off-shored a lot of work to china/phillipines/india/etc) and IME we often pay relatively poorly...and government policy in terms of security/IP/storage/privacy etc is 'relatively' hostile towards the tech sector and driving firms offshore...
The E3 visa is similar to the H1b but it’s far easier to get because it’s Australian only (and now Irish too, iirc) and we only use ~3k of the 10k/yr quota. Getting one simply requires a standard 4 year degree, of which Software Engineering qualifies (what most institutions call the Comp Sci equivalent-ish degree in Aus) and a 5 min “interview” at a US consulate somewhere outside the US.
Source: Am Australian that moved to the US temporarily to work on an E3 because Australian tech companies simply don’t pay competitively.
Eventually I decided to bite, and responded back to a recruiter. "Why are you contacting me, I'm not in the Oz"
The answer was along the lines of the parent comment: "good technical hires go to London or San Fran."
The 'price' of the degree is not based on cost/demand, but essentially by government decree of which fee structure it sits in. I got my economics and arts degrees when they were in the lowest and medium bands (IIRC), and now they're in the highest bands, and its not because of the cost of supply...its because government policy is trying to use 'regulated price' as an attempt to bend applicants to particular areas it desires.
Add on our HECS system (whereby graduates pay back their student loans via our tax system upon employment) and suddenly the simple idea of tax payer covering the cost of these degrees becomes incredibly murky...
What really bothers me about the quote is that it sounds like "someone who is interested in going on cruises won't like studying anything practical so the taxpayers should subsidize a 4 year around the world cruise for them"
Unfortunate. How strange that in this very thread we are engaging in a dialogue fashioned in the method of someone who "liked going on cruises" 2400 years ago.
In software this is a recurring trend people from all walks of life with different professional backgrounds musicians, artists , lawyers regularly produce great software.
And I think this is how things are in real life, explicit specialisation is a mistake, we need people with diverse backgrounds who can think laterally, such engineers will enrich the engineering experience, we need all kinds of people not just straight A math students.
Because different people also bring along different ways of thinking and different ways of problem solving. After all Philosophy is as much as intellectual pursuit as engineering if no less.
Though I am kind of a semi socialist in for education, I would prefer Education to be free for all as long as you can qualify the entrance you should be free to pursue anything. I believe job market will eventually dictate what people study, if there are no jobs for humanities people in the market people might stop studying those things.
And there is an undercurrent in your post which seems to say that Philosophers are dumber than engineers ("recipe for a lot of incompetent engineers"). I don't think you'd ever hear someone say the opposite: that if an engineer studied the humanities for 4 years instead that that would be the recipe for "incompetent philosophers". I think it subtly undermines your suggestion that both degrees are equally worthwhile.
But incompetence is a lot harder to catch without something like a failed bridge collapsing.
I would not reverse my position with your counterexample - to make it perfectly analogous, it would mean that someone who wanted to be an engineer is forced to study philosophy instead, all while wanting to come back to engineering. I would argue that this person is likely to publish some very mediocre papers, then will be very unlikely to get tenure, and will certainly not become the next Jean Baudrillard. So yes, they would make an incompetent philosopher, and they would likely be pushed out of the academic community given the publish-or-perish model.
If the purpose of a philosophy degree is to create philosophers, then we rightly should be subsidizing the education of those degrees which society demands (engineers/nurses/tech/etc). You need to take an entirely different argument to say that society should subsidize philosophers despite the market demand.
The argument exists, and many people have made it. I personally do believe that higher education is good for society as a whole. So why not let those people who are getting an education for the purpose of simply being educated (rather than obtaining a job) be encouraged to learn a way of looking at the world through the lens of science? Just like philosophers, there is no guarantee they will actually do anything with such a degree. But the scientific lens that they learn will affect the way they understand the world around them, and that can surely be a good thing.
> the increase in student fees exceeds the decrease in government subsidies, meaning universities end up with higher fees overall.
Does this mean Aus .gov not only decides subsidies but prices of degree? On top of that, you have .edus going after foreign student tuition (which is or isn't price controlled?).
It's like they can't decide what to control and what to fix so they fix everything.
My mom back (in the USSR, a slightly different system where the number of spots + level of desirability, rather than the cost, determined how hard it was to get a particular degree) wanted to be an archaeologist, but the competition to get into the relevant school was too high, so upon failing to get in she chose to not wait another year and have another shot, and instead became an electrical engineer (also a BS/MS position). Nothing would have prevented the Soviet planners from creating more spots to train archaeologists at the expense of electrical engineers. If the banks in the US flat out refused to provide loans for degrees in say literature, much fewer people would get these degrees.
Getting a degree simply to get a degree is one of the failings of our higher educational system and the high cost of tuition doesn't usually justify those degrees.
The perverse disincentive of doubling tuition for degrees with expected low workforce value might reduce the number of undergraduates who have such deemed unnecessary degrees in the workplace, but what then do you do with those post-secondary school students who feel that a college degree is useful, regardless of what that degree is in?
I think we need a renewal of trade schools, apprenticeship programs, and a movement to more practical degrees.
Of course if you truly want to study advanced art or literature or history or theater, there should be a path for that, but the future for those in those fields are not in high paying jobs, which means that the tuition will very rarely be returned to the student in the form of wages.
Will someone pay me to watch TV all day because I’m really into movies? Probably not. You have to draw the line somewhere. I would be fully onboard your side of thinking if they were planning on getting rid of the arts in schools altogether but coincidentally, it’s more favorable for the schools to fund those fields because they get more money from the few that choose to pursue them.
Let’s also not forget that formal education is not the only or even the best way to explore your interests in these things.
You say that no one is stopping someone getting said degree, however often without subsidy/support it can be prohibitively expensive and that stops them. No one person may be stopping them, but systems doing so are no better.
Naturally, that comes with limits, since we are not yet able to function in a fully automated society where scarcity is abolished. Hence why the Aussie system caps the subsidised loans you may receive.
edit to add: I also support reducing the societal pressure that a university degree is the only path to success. I'd like to see much more support and emphasis placed on practical tertiary education, such as trades and the like. I think it's all too often an option that people dismiss because they're sold the lie that university guarantees success.
I don't personally get why anyone would ever do that, I always hated anything with art and music in school, but I don't want to stop them going for it. They need to live with the fact anyway that they might get a lower-paying job in the end and work in a field that's not related to their degree. But it's their choice.
That's why spending four years living your good life at college shouldn't be the focus--because you'll have decades more, and it's more important to get 50+ years right than it is to get 4.
For most, they get a degree because society says they should get a degree. The value is in the paper that says they are a graduate. The educational value is highly questionable. These graduates then get many of the same jobs they would have gotten without the degrees, or those jobs where "any degree" is suitable. Basically, what they are paying for is the paper that the degree is printed on and not the education that went into it. Many of these same graduates happily live their lives once they get the paper without further pursuing art history or english literature. If they were truly interested in both we'd see huge demand for art and literature continuing education from the large quantity of art and literature grads. But this is not the case.
I don't equate a college degree with a desire to pursue that subject.
For many the paper that says "college graduate" and the checkmark on their resume is the value they seek because society says they need that. But I don't see many altruistic undergraduates getting the paper for pursuit of higher liberal arts goals.
If an country or person doesn't produce in demand skills and produce in demand products, then it doesn't have any leverage with which to get the things it demands itself. An example of one such demand might be... a freely accessable largely tax funded teriary education system.
If we can't fund good education, then our living standards fall rapidly. Its the governments job to protect our living standards, and thus they might take interest in pushing people towards in demand skills.
This doesn't have to be as grotesque as you might think. Note that in the past, while University has always been 'open' in the sense that candidates are free to persue any course that they provide, student population was much, much lower. A bigger potion of the countries skills were much more commonly attained by on the job training, and apprenticeships, which are implicitly market driven.
Is that a student that picks up poorly demanded skills and can't attain reasonable income, long term won't pay into the tax system that allowed them to do that.
At certain level that would become unsustainable through the generations.
- Education is costly and only way it is affordable if the government provides subsidies both to the institution and to the banks for education loan.
- The government has limited resources and has to allocate funds for many other things other than education.
- In this scenario its prudent that government does a priority allocation.
It’s not anti-market for a subsidizer to cut subsidies for things that don't produce things the subsidizer wants as effectively as other alternatives, so the direction of both the fee effects and the funding changes is sensible.
The relative size of the two changes (the subsidy changes being larger than the fee changes), which means that the university gets less for the job-ready degrees and more for the less-useful ones, however, is silly.
Historically that wasn’t particularly true, and presently it's only sometimes true.
> And when they do they try to find a major that has maximum overlap between their strengths, interests and earning potential.
I suspect that the share of applicants that does anything approaching an analysis that would support that conclusion is closer to 0% than 100%. You seem to be both making assumptions about motivation and rationality (in the economic sense) that aren't well grounded.
> You aren't going to make engineering any more attractive to someone by making it cheaper, if the salaries weren't already doing it.
At the level where the subsidy makes the difference between being able to afford the program at all and not, you certainly will. But even at higher income levels it'll make a difference, especially for people who aren't malign decisions on long-run economic analysis but more on “college is expected” and “it all costs the same, and X sounds fun”.
But if it's a money-making degree, you can get a loan for it and pay it off after getting a job. Affordability is unlikely to be a concern in that case.
Not saying what they're doing is right. Just saying that from a purely economic perspective, it makes sense. I don't think university should be purely economically driven, though.
Pay off for those respective industries, and the people in them. So why should taxpayers subsidize something that would be profitable and paid-for anyway? Government should be subsidizing things that the market won't pay for precisely because there're no money in it.
Paying for something that has little industrial use and doesn't boost GDP numbers would actually be idiotic and anti-market.
Governments often pump money into things seen as having long term benefits for a country. Examples: investing in agricultural independence, roads, phone networks.
An entirely free market would still have these. Government investment gives it an initial push to develop faster. Australia decided they have some fields they should prioritize for national development. The idea of people working in one industry or one company for life is long gone, so expecting a company to subsidize someone's education just isn't happening unless they're already in the company.
Furthermore, an entirely free market approach to art majors would probably have even fewer art majors. If governments didn't subsidize degrees or offer loans or funding or anything of the sort, nobody but the elite would be studying art history at the academic level at all.
So the government either remains completely neutral and funds things equally, it funds nothing at all, or it funds according to national needs. Some countries choose #1 or #2. Australia chose #3.
As an arts/law graduate, who has since moved into a senior, highly technical IT role, I can honestly say that had I not moved into the IT field, my existing and already large university tuition debt would never have been repaid within my lifetime.
There is such a huge glut of humanities graduates in Australia now, that unless you are graduating within the very very top percentile, you are guaranteed to have wasted both time and money for no return.
I hope for a better future where education isnt a commodity and isn't merely a way to prepare you to join a company that takes away most of the value you produce as profit for themselves.
Higher education is a business in itself. And the whole system has optimized for goals that we might not agree with, but this is how it is.
Is that true in Australia? I assumed universities in Australia would be similar to the UK, where all classes are in the chosen subject only?
It was then up to the student what they studied in the spare units (science, language, accounting, Chinese calligraphy, etc) with an option to cram more in or add an extra year for a double-degree.
Sometimes units in different departments were very highly encouraged, such as formal logic in philosophy when doing CS or EE.
I did not even have an engineering ethics class.
Surely a better solution is to provide lots of incentives to get a STEM degree - more carrot less stick.
I suspect their motivations if their stated goal is to get more STEM graduates, then this is not the best solution.
Working as intended.
Lower cost for a STEM degree = lower risk in the event that you don’t find a job. Existing higher relative compensations = bigger carrot.
As others in this thread have said, this will reserve humanities degrees for those that can afford them, i.e. the rich, who will become the lawyers and managers. Many managers have humanities degrees.
And on a lighter note, where will our baristas come from if there's no arts graduates?
It would be a poor society that doesn't have people educated in the arts.
Who knows, maybe there is in fact a B.A. in Gender Studies requirement at my local coffee shop I don’t know about. ;)
You never know. They do keep demanding diversity. Diversity of thought might be just the thing.
But we already have BAs, presumably mostly folks that are naturally more geared towards that. And they’re not great for designing planes. So I’m proposing bringing the next generation of those same types of people, but to pursue engineering instead. You still need the technical education to do the work but perhaps it should be more than kids that grew up with Legos is what I’m saying.
The funny thing about tax money is that it comes from taxes. Every carrot that is given out is someone's stick.
If the purpose of reorganizing the fees is to incentivize certain careers, it makes sense to align your carrots and sticks likewise.
STEM degrees are not for everyone, and to exclude a percentage of the population from higher education is unnecessary in Australia.
This is not universally true. At least, not all education leads to the same increase in human capital.
I would argue that getting educated about art history does nothing to increase human capital. You may have enjoyed learning about art history, but knowing what a tryptic is does not make you a more productive member of society.
And the fact that art history majors earn a lot less than stem majors on average seems to confirm this. Being able to build bridges is simply more valuable to society than knowing some obscure facts about dead people.
Precisely. There's a market for STEM majors already - so why subsidize it with taxpayer money? Shouldn't that be used for education that doesn't have monetary value?
What could be the consequences good or bad?
Less women doing college - but it's already empirically proven that women don't really push for STEM (and no, it's not only due to sexism).
Less degrees overall. This is maybe a good thing, since people are going to college without thinking what they really want to do (not having a plan).
More people doing vocational education, since it's not so easy to go to college for that arts and humanities degree that you'll be sure to pass.
Finally, waking up people to the fact that it's not so necessary to get a college degree for most professions on earth anyway.
Rather than saying 'the government provides subsidies / loans' -- it's preferable to think of this as the population does this, with the government merely administrating.
In theory the government should reflect the will and interests of the population, but in Australia that's not the case on most important issues (climate change, fossil fuel usage, renewables, health, etc) and there's no evidence to suggest they've got it right with this decision.
Trying to guess what the job market will look like in 10-30 years from now, and fiddling with deferred monetary incentives today, sounds like hubris.
HECS - university fees - came (back) in around 1990, initially a flat rate of A$1800 per student per degree. Naturally this number has risen steeply over the last three decades.
Interestingly many of our politicians obtained their qualifications when tertiary education was effectively free (1974-1990).
This, along with considering breakdown of what subjects our politicians actually studied at university [1], should be considered as they blithely toy with the long term social and economic effects of coaxing people into career pigeon holes.
[1] https://www.torrens.edu.au/blog/business/what-degrees-do-min...
I think this is true of all public spending in some sense. Governments don't have money. Rather, the population does, and via taxation, the government is able to administer it how it chooses, for better or worse. Hopefully for the better, of course.
In some cases the distinction's less compelling, say defence, where individually I'm unlikely to notice the budget allocation, let alone how that expenditure is sliced up. It's still fair to say that it's the collective's money, but government budgeting for it is just not scrutinised in the same way.
Also, with education it's fundamentally different as almost everyone goes through some part of the education sector at some point in their lives.
In Straya we have about 1.5 million people in tertiary (university, colleges, etc) education today. This is a large chunk out of of the 25m population.
Consider also that we have 13.5m tax payers, and about 17m eligible voters (and voting is compulsory here).
I feel that 'the government spends this money' distracts us from the provenance and accountability for these crucial and significant social decisions.
One way to think about this is as a "disincentive to study job-relevant fields".
But another way to look at this is further entrenching the reality that only the wealthy and privileged can afford to be less vocational in their thinking about college.
I'm not sure the outcome here is great.
Isn't that perfectly reasonable? If you have the means to study as a hobby, then you should be able to enjoy that. If you haven't yet got the means for that, then earn it and maybe your children can do an arts degree off the back of your engineer's salary or you can do it yourself when you retire. The whole point of the government subsidizing education is to create useful workers that give more back to society with their useful work. Not to indulge people's pseudo-intellectual pleasures.
It's not as if arts degrees make people somehow superior at understanding society and arts and culture. Those are things anybody can pick up even with no formal education. Understanding the scientific method, statistics and critical thinking would go further in making well rounded useful thinkers than knowing what some ancient person's opinion about his local society was or training to become an activist who refuses to allow themselves to think objectively.
Many topics in maths and engineering are very intuitive to pick without formal education. To understand Humanities requires discussion with others. Writing and getting feed back on a lot of essays, listening to and explaining ideas in seminars, testing out an idea in a lecture. It can take a decade to start to understand someone like Foucault. It's hard to find a community of specialised discussion outside of formal education. Just picking up humanities from a few youtube videos or whatever is what I am convinced has led us to the kind of unobjective activism that is reacted against so much recently.
This is why years ago I watched the humanities students struggle endlessly with their first year statistics unit. The incredibly simple, first year statistics unit.
Who gets the slots available in a course is dictated by the students' results in the final exams in high school. (This is approximately true: in NSW several exams before the end of high school also count. Some universities will offer places based on the "other" high school exams if they can predict what your final exam result will be with sufficient accuracy.)
The student with the highest marks gets the place they want, and then the next student down gets their first preference, unless it is full, in which case they get their second, third, fourth, preference. And so on down through all the student candidature.
Theoretically this whole system should let a sufficiently capable average income student study humanities (or whatever they want).
In practice there are problems -- some schools have teachers who are very good at getting good marks for their students in the final exam; actually being intelligent and creative doesn't really help as much as it should -- but it's not an overly terrible system.
It's a reduction of subsidies, to maximise the government's ROI.
Plus, you still get a tax-free (although indexed) loan. If you want to do arts and/or humanities, you definitely can. Your loan, which you don't pay a cent of until a certain salary, and then only a percentage of your salary after that, will just be larger.
Except, weirdly, the reduction in subsidy is less than the increase in fees, so institutions will get more money (fees + subsidy) for the not-job-ready degrees, while getting less for the job-ready degrees. Which makes no sense at all.
This is not a new phenomenon. I went to university in the US 20 years ago. Very few students ever thought to question the narrative they were hearing. Critical thinking was not taught where I went to school unless you were in a hard science. And from what I see around me today, it’s still not being taught.
It seems that critical thinking is generally seen (by whatever system is in charge) as an ugly thing, which, in some cases, must unfortunately be allowed to rear its head, so that progress can be made. Critical thinking is really quite a natural thing for humans to do, but it is for the above reason that it is largely stamped out of us by the school system.
I completed a year long TAFE (TAFE is technical school, 5 days a week) like foundation course prior to studying communication design at university because I originally began a degree I quit after two weeks and it was too late to restart another degree. Myself (and other students) that competed this foundation year had a major advantage. We already learned the basic tools we would need and practiced concept development so university for us was a better space for us to learn an experiment. Considering teaching contact hours a year in a TAFE is like two in a uni. Guess what! This foundation course which ran for more than 20 years lost its public funding. Furthermore, the degree I had to apply a portfolio to enter now takes in much more students with no portfolio and more or less similar amount of full-time staff with casuals picking up the rest.
The problem is multi-faceted. The honest truth is any coalition government (this is the Aus Liberal Party for U.S. folk reading) is ideologically hell bent on removing public support of anything they can. On top of that they load other ideologies about the humanities being less important than the sciences. I'd start by not commodifying tertiary education and giving students the opportunity to explore and discover their flair with smaller and richer courses before going to uni.
Give kids more vocational stuff to do at school. Most children grow up with almost no understanding of the world of work.
Improve the humanities courses. Suggesting that they offer no workplace skills is nonsense. If you go to a good uni, you get skills that are useful in business. Simple.
Make university low-cost - why does it need to take so long? why does it need to cost so much? Make it more expensive really helps no-one. If you made a bad choice, you are now more fucked. The price mechanism doesn't work with education (ironically, this may have been clear if policy-makers had more STEM education...or is economics a social science? Who knows?).
Most of these effects are because humanities courses matriculate way more students than STEM, entrance to STEM is often controlled by trade bodies, the students have different goals, and more lower quality institutions do more degrees with more students that get thrown into humanities.
University is not the be-all...if you study history, that shouldn't really limit your career in any way. There are countries that turn out masses of STEM grads and haven't taken over the world (India, China's "engineer mindset" amongst its political leaders is also infamous). I am in the UK, and most people who do STEM degrees end up doing something non-STEM related to actually make money (either CS or finance)...most STEM jobs here actually pay poorly (most engineers earn the average salary, staying in academia in a STEM field is career suicide).
It is great headline but I suspect it will achieve little.
This is in Australia, where not only do you get tax free (but indexed) loans for university, but the government also provides a "Commonwealth Supported Place" - they cover half the fees, and then you get your tax-free loan for the other half.
This is entirely just trying to maximise ROI for the government. If people want to do an arts degree, they are able to, and will still get the tax-free loan. But the loan will be higher, because the government is less willing to subsidize degrees that have a lower likelihood of high income.
1. The "job emphasis" of higher education is out of control. That is not the primary purpose of higher education. The proper end of education is the education of the human person, not the production of a workforce. We are savages with a pinch of technical savvy perhaps, but nonetheless savages. Of course, savages make good slaves, even when they're rebelling. Of course, one must know the end of human life to be able to know the end of education. From this observation, we are led to, the second point...
2. Sadly, most universities are wholly incapable of implementing a sound curriculum . Sure, the humanities are being measured by their industrial utility, but the humanities aren't blameless. If you thought the amount of garbage the STEM fields put out is jaw-dropping (it is), then I invite your to meet the humanities. The humanities have been slipping into decadence for some time and have become victims of ideological corruption.
I wondered about their future earning potential, and where they would work.
The Univeristy I study has the following sort of degrees under the Bachelor of Arts :
Anthropology and Sociology,
Archaeology,
Architecture A & B,
Chinese Studies,
Classics and Ancient History,
Communication and Media Studies,
Criminology,
English and Literary Studies,
European Studies,
Fine Arts,
French Studies,
German Studies,
History,
Human Geography and Planning,
Linguistics,
Music Studies,
Philosophy,
Political Science and International Relations,
Psychology
All of which, at the very least, seem to be very worthy things to learn.
Where I'm from (Belgium), there's also a tendency to focus more on educating for jobs instead of stimulating human curiosity and knowledge.
It's the same type of people who advocate progress and innovation, and just don't see how moulding people's education to an existing situation is counter-productive to their hopes for progress.
It's also the type of people who pay lip service to agile development methods, but cannot stand the insecurity of not knowing what the outcome will be.
We're living in times where many people fear being unproductive or producing something only to discover that is has no immediate value. Instead of moving us forward, such fears bring us to a standstill.
The cost isn't doubling. The government isn't covering half the cost of the degree.
Hear countless anecdotes of people saying they used their arts degree to get a professional job, so this sort of indexation shouldnt be a problem
Uh, it also means a lose-lose for other students.
- they are partially directly subsidizing the cost of degrees for domestic students. The extent of subsidy has not changed in the new policy. (questions: is the direct subsidy the same for all degrees? do arts currently get more or less than STEM?)
- they set the fees that universities are allowed to charge students. In the new policy, the allowed fees for humanities have doubled, the allowed fees for STEM has decreased.
- also, there is HECS/HELP, which is a scheme where all domestic students (not PR/exchange) are allowed an interest-free, CPI-indexed loan that is only paid back slowly when the student's wages go beyond a certain threshold. This is for the full cost of the entire degree, and is a big part of why students tend to be price-insensitive.
- fees for international students are roughly 5x domestic students, and they don't get HECS/HELP. They are basically subsidizing the entire system. The covid situation has dried up this revenue stream and now the unis (who have not been financially prudent during the fat years) are deep in the red, with rumors of bankruptcy starting to circulate.
editorializing:
1. Arts and humanities are bad choices if you're already poor. If you're from a rich family it's actually pretty great - light course load, personal growth, better male/female ratio, etc. If you're poor and you do arts, you will have trouble getting a job. People should be allowed to choose whatever degree they want, but the government shouldn't subsidize bad choices.
2. The government seems to be implementing this in a suboptimal way. It seems that there is a fee increase but no decrease in subsidy (or there's a mismatch). I would just lower the subsidy for arts/humanities and allow a fee increase that matches exactly.
3. I doubt this will produce worse engineers. The engineering degrees in good unis are heavily sought-after and difficult to get in, and this just increases the number of applicants, while the number of available places won't change much. I think the largest effect is unis will spend more on marketing their arts degrees, since these will be more profitable going forward.
If it leads to the arts departments upping their game to attract students, it's probably a net plus.
YMMV...
It's really hard to know how this will play out. The higher fees for instance is an argument the faculties should get more money and because Australian students can defer all payments of fees only on CPI it might not change numbers much.
They make ends meet because Australia has free healthcare, and the previous generation is very wealthy and can support them. This only lasts one generation of course.
There seems to be a dearth of opportunity for young professionals. On the one hand you have people in their 60s - 70s working longer, because they earn a LOT (eg > $300K a year as well established doctors, lawyers, accountants). The pay scales in government jobs also mean senior people can earn huge amounts just by virtue of being around for a long time (ie close to double what someone 20 years younger would earn for doing essentially the same thing). On the other hand you have young professionals who can't get a decent job, with ever more candidates piling up behind them.
I am not sure about the idea of a STEM shortage in Australia. Is this broadly true? The last mechanical engineer I spoke to quit to become a java programmer because he couldn't get a job. On the other hand a guy I know in Fintech hired out the whole team from overseas, there wasn't anyone with .NET experience locally. Boeing has a software shop and they used to hire a lot of engineers, not sure what they do now. It's puzzling. I suspect there are some social effects at play that are restricting labour market mobility and also that universities are not well aligned with the labour market. One thing I definitely notice - there is a real lack of highly technical startups here. Apparently venture capitalists in Australia are not the best. 'I wouldn't piss on them if they were on fire' was one comment I heard about local VCs.
[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2019/09/meritoc...