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The thing to remember is that in Australia the Federal Government provides interest free loans [1] to students to fund their studies. The government also subsidises university studies. In the past the government has reduced the subsidy for law and engineering on the basis that people who did these courses would earn more, and therefore should pay more. Now they have flipped that to drive students into in demand careers, as there is a shortage. This doesn't mean that humanities aren't important, but that since the government subsidies university courses, they are going to invest in whats most important for the country.

These loans are then automatically taken out of your salary based on earning a certain amount.

[1] https://www.studyassist.gov.au/help-loans/fee-help

It should also be noted that the same conservative Australian government hasn't done much to help along/build the STEM industries in the country. There's a lot of unemployment in graduate Comp Sci and IT degrees and Engineering is a real risk. So whilst the loans help get educated, Australia is a difficult place for STEM graduates to get a foot in the door to full time work.

As a person who hires software engineers in Australia, it's hard for me to understand this perspective. The last few times I've tried to hire a junior I've received very little interest from new Australian graduates. The vast majority of applications come from Indian migrants, not local graduates.

Its a bit meaningless without posting the salary/job/location. For the last 10 years I've been in data science/analytics in capital cities, and i'll get waves of local masters/PhDs applying for every job.

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...

Can I ask what sort of salary range and work you typically offer? It could be many graduates see the big US numbers and expect similar.

We're working on python web backends and react frontends for a large automotive corporation. The salary is average for our area, but like most we don't advertise with a salary and still don't get much interest. I've had an ad out now for a week and have received < 10 applications.

How do you have solid grasp on what the average is? I googled "Python web salaries Melbourne" and the answer came back at the top from Indeed at $750 per WEEK. I wouldn't apply for something paying $39000 per year in a city that is incredibly expensive. Payscale[.]com had it at $73k for Python (not just web) as an average, still not that high but you should expect a few applicants.

It’s not even just that they expect similar, it’s that they can pretty easily get it if they are ok living in America for a while.

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.

I did a working holiday in the Oz to do fiber optic network stuff for the NBN. Applied to Amazon and one or two others (Telstra, et al) in Australia on a lark. I still get hit up by them occasionally.

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."

That is my perspective as well, recruiting in a field that is tech adjacent. Practically everyone who applied for vacant roles were either Indian migrants, or people here on visas.

Probably because you've flooded the market with Indians on visas, who've pushed down wages and working conditions, just like in the US (and now Canada). Smart students don't want to work in an industry where the working environment gets crappier every year if you're not in the 5% working at FAANG.

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.

For what compensation?

I'm speaking on my own behalf, and not representing my employer, so I don't want to provide too much information. As I understand it, based on what HR tell me, for the industry we are in we offer at the low to mid end of market rates on salary, and make it up in performance pay (bonus).

I would ask your HR department for a clear example of a company at the low to mid end of the market rates on salary. And which market i.e. city, state, national or global assuming the entire software industry.

I'm not in the software industry. We have lots of movement between the main players in our industry and so salary ranges while opaque are broadly known to most people in the industry

Out of curiosity what industry do you work/program in?

Retail.

> Now they have flipped that to drive students into in demand careers, as there is a shortage.

If those careers were in-demand, shouldn't the wages on offer be enough to drive students into those careers?

You’re giving 18 year olds too much credit. Ask the average college student what job they’re planning on getting with their degree and how much it pays and they won’t be able to tell you.

As an easy counter-example, there was a decent drop in people getting CS degrees following the dot-com bubble implosion and pervasive rumors of offshoring thereafter. Correspondingly, there was an uptick while the bubble was forming.

College students may not know precise numbers. But they're sharp enough to work out "barista with an art degree" makes less than "banker with a finance degree". And if they don't already know "art degree = low-paying career" we're failing them before they ever reach college.

A lot of people think art degrees will pay well because they see the explosion of interest in anime, web illustrations, comics, and graphic novels. They don’t see the supply side though, so they assume good demand means a good career path.

Not necessarily. There are at least two reasons more money might not be sufficient for many students.

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.

I think you're making my points for me.

> 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.

Increase what you'll pay and voila - no shortage. What if everyone did that? Then those ex-IT tradies will come back out from the literal woodwork. Diaspora in Singapore, US, etc. might come back home and live the good life, etc.

The other thing - make it easier and cheaper to get a visa. And in the covid world, just hire FT remote forever people.

Oh but it totally will works. Economic incentives change decisions at the margins... sure, many won't switch from philosophy to engineering, but faced with increased costs (for example), many will.

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.

That's a funny sentence to read as someone who started as a philosophy major and is now an engineering manager.

I think it actually might work, if enough number of people who think they are interested in Philosophy go ahead and study Engineering, every now and then you might have enough engineers to fulfil the demand.

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.

I'm all for education, but I don't think it's quite that simple. Why should we value a degree in philosophy the same as a degree in the sciences?

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.

Actually, my statement was value neutral - at least in the scope of its paragraph. All I am saying is that someone trained to do X while hating X is bound to hate their job. Hating one's job means you are not incentivized to perform it well - ergo, to an external eye, "incompetent."

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.

This argument doesn't seem consistent with the idea that college should not be just a path for job readiness.

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.

This is the interesting part to me:

> 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.

When the tax payer is footing the majority of the cost of these degrees this sort of attitude is very relevant.

Well we've got to be a bit careful when we use the term 'cost' here. Cost inputs to produce law/economics/philosophy are sweet F all compared to some of the inputs required to produce science/medicine/etc. And then we've got the university internal-cross-subsidisation structure between degrees, as well as the full-fee paying structures for immigrants/externals.

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...

You may not be able to convince someone who is interested in philosophy to study engineering (although I personally know several people, myself included, who are interested in both philosophy and engineering) but if they lack the funding to support themselves during the bachelor's degree them I doubt tht they have enough funding to support themselves after the degree. They should be encouraged to pursue a professional that can support them financially first. That can be engineering, as you quoted, but also most of STEM and most technical subjects (plumber, electrician).

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"

You're equating philosophy with "going on cruises?"

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.