Opinion & Commentary
Artful dodges
The ripples of Britain's fiscal crisis reached Melbourne last month, in a seminar on the public funding of the humanities and social sciences. As part of budget cuts to universities, arts students in English universities are likely to lose all tuition subsidies. It has arts faculties in Australia worrying about their public funding.
I was a speaker at the Melbourne seminar, and tried — without much success, I fear — to steer the audience away from what I see as their doomed devotion to public funding. While big cuts are not a likely outcome of the current Australian review of teaching funding, nor are the big increases that arts and other university faculties hope to receive.
Pragmatic politics alone suggest that Australian governments will rarely lift spending per higher education student, in the humanities and social science or any other field. The mix of public and private spending on higher education around the world reflects broader patterns of public and private provision. Australia is in a group of OECD countries with relatively low taxes, and correspondingly high private funding of education, health and retirement.
Once these public-private mixes are in place, it is hard to undo the political settlements they create. There are few votes in large tax increases or service cuts. A government struggling to sell a carbon tax isn't likely to have any more luck with increased taxes for smaller classes in history, literature and philosophy.
Politics aside, it's not clear why public funding to the humanities and social sciences should increase. An economist at the seminar observed that university graduates are typically a good deal for governments. They put low burdens on the welfare system and, on average, pay large amounts of tax. But arts graduates earn significantly less and therefore contribute much less tax than people with degrees in other fields. Education dollars would get a better return on investment in more vocational courses.
The more typical arguments for arts courses focus on non-economic benefits. Though these benefits are hard to quantify, academic humanities and social sciences increase our knowledge of the world, with some practical and positive consequences. But this doesn't get us to a public funding conclusion. Privately funded education in the humanities and social sciences can also lead to these good outcomes.
Private funding is the solution that few people seem to want to contemplate. But the most compelling evidence of the value placed on the humanities and social sciences is that people want to study them. The broad arts and creative arts field had about a quarter of all first-preference applications last year. Tens of thousands of new students every year start their education in the humanities and social sciences.
Some commencing arts students have altruistic motives, but for many and perhaps most arts students, their motivation is personal intellectual interest. Often they combine arts with a vocational qualification; so they have time to read and think about the big questions, without jeopardising their careers. Income from the vocational degree pays for the arts degree.
A greater reliance on paying customers may even be good for education in the humanities and social sciences. In an excellent essay in a recent issue of Griffith Review, the philosopher John Armstrong lamented the inwardly focused and hyper-specialised nature of the contemporary humanities. A public funding model, with one largely indifferent customer in the government, provides little incentive to focus on the interests of a wide audience, by offering insights into the "greatest narratives, the biggest adventures in thinking, the finest creative works".
Arts faculties thinking more about what might persuade students to pay extra for a better education in the humanities and social sciences could help everyone. The faculties would earn more, the students would learn more that they want to know, and if better graduates are the result, then the general public, too, will share in the benefits.
The English cuts to humanities and social science funding have been greeted with horror. But for social scientists the cuts will also be a real-world experiment. Will the students still come? Will it change what is taught? The answers to these questions could influence the long-term politics of Australian higher education.
Andrew Norton is a Research Fellow at The Centre for Independent Studies and editor of Policy magazine.
