Opinion & Commentary
Students gain in change
Are low-income young people more or less likely to go to university than they were 20 years ago? An article by Peter Spearritt against university fees (Perspectives, August 26) suggests that the answer to this question must be ``less''. Low-income people are deterred by fees and, in Australia, we've had two big fee increases in the past two decades, with the introduction of HECS in 1989 and differential HECS in 1997. The correct answer to the question, however, is ``more''. In fact, low-income school leavers were twice as likely to attend university in 1999 as they had been in 1980.
Clearly the story is more complex than Spearritt's article suggests. The explanation comes from a mix of supply and demand factors. On the supply side, there are many more student places than there were before HECS, though they are still limited by government, and charges can be deferred until the student earns an income.
On the demand side, higher education is a more attractive option than in the past. The number of full-time jobs for teenagers halved in just a decade from 1988 to 1998. Professional jobs, by contrast, became much more numerous. Many teenagers from low-income families realised that aiming for one of these jobs was a better idea than leaving school, and that HECS was much cheaper than unemployment or low-pay jobs.
Spearritt wonders what world I live in when I claim that the main problem low-income students face in going to university is not price but their Year 12 results. Unfortunately, it is the real world. The most detailed data comes from Victoria, though other states are likely to be similar. There, well under half of Year 12 students in low-income government schools achieve Year 12 scores which don't give them any realistic chance of going to university. While more low-income teenagers attend university than previously, for the majority university still isn't an option at any price. Spearritt also flags coming from a non-English-speaking background as a problem. Yet a consistent finding over many years is that people from non-English-speaking backgrounds are more, not less, likely to go to university. For students born in Asia, or whose parents were born in Asia, the differences are stunning, with attendance rates often double those of people from an English-speaking background.
Of course, going to university costs money, even when tuition costs are deferred, and Spearritt notes that many students work to support themselves. Yet this isn't, as he suggests, something that overwhelmingly affects students from low-income backgrounds. Partly because low-income students get the full youth allowance, they are the least likely to work, though most do. In 2000, 19 per cent of full-time low-income students said work adversely affected their studies, but the figure was 12 per cent even for students from the highest-income families. The work-study balance is always a potential problem, but most students manage it.
Contrary to the impression given by Spearritt, no one proposes that the typical Australian undergraduate pay full fees. The foreshadowed change is that universities be able to charge a fee which goes to them, rather than one which goes to the government, as does HECS.
There is no historical evidence that modest fee rises have any negative effect on attendance rates. History is likely to repeat itself. Prospective students still will compare the costs of going to university with its benefits. For most graduates, having a degree brings significantly higher wages. Even those who do not secure professional, managerial or technical jobs are much less likely to be unemployed than those without degrees. Higher education will remain a good deal, for poor and rich alike. Andrew Norton is a research fellow at the Sydney-based Centre for Independent Studies and author of the forthcoming CIS book The Unchained University
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About the Author:
Andrew Norton is a Research Fellow at the Centre of Independent Studies.
