Opinion & Commentary
More options in full-fee places
For seven years Australian universities have enrolled local full-fee under-graduates but the controversy surrounding them won't go away. Each year Labor's shadow education minister's staff search university websites to find the most expensive full-fee course. For the next 12 months they make it a symbol of unaffordable higher education under the Coalition.
The National Union of Students was so angry last year about the Victorian College of Arts' plans to undermine "talent-based entry" and introduce full-fee places that it tried to organise a blockade to stop the decision being made (it didn't succeed).
University offers each January trigger more complaints. In The Age, Louise Merrington confessed that it "continues to gall" her that if in 2002 she had been willing to pay nearly $15,000 a year, she would have been accepted into a course she just missed out on. After three years, she is still not over it.
Opposition to full-fee undergraduate places is emotional but is it sensible, and are there better alternatives? As Ms Merrington notes in her article, the ENTER scores required for each course do not in themselves signal academic merit. You do not need, for example, an ENTER of 99, or anything like it, to be able to complete an arts/law degree at Monash University . But you do need an ENTER of 99 to have been "clearly-in" for a HECS place in 2005. The reason for this is simple. The number of HECS places in this course, and every other course, is limited. There are various ways we could ration HECS places, but Monash uses what is, in effect, an academic auction in which, instead of bidding with money, you bid with marks. People who did very well in year 12 win in this process.
The complexity is that law places at Monash are not as limited as it first appears. Monash could offer many more law places than it receives under the rigid quota system used by the Commonwealth Government to distribute HECS places between universities and disciplines. It also has many more applicants who are capable of doing the course than can be admitted to HECS places. This situation exists at many universities and in many disciplines. Every year, thousands of applicants are disappointed because they miss out on their hoped-for university or course, although academically good enough.
What the full-fee undergraduate places do is alleviate this problem. They let qualified students who very much want to do their first-preference course, but who would otherwise be forced out by the quota system, achieve their goal. Until 2005 this option came at a hefty up-front price. The $200,000 degrees of ALP propaganda are very rare, but more standard three-year degrees could cost $40,000 or more in total.
From this year, a government loans scheme called FEE-HELP is available. Students who take out the loan incur a 20 per cent surcharge, so that a $10,000 fee becomes a $12,000 debt. After that, though, they repay on the same terms and conditions as HECS students.
This is why there has been a surge in applications for full-fee places this year. FEE-HELP reveals how much many of these people who missed out really wanted to do their first-preference course.
This perhaps rubs resentment into the disappointment of people such as Louise Merrington, whose ENTER fell short of their first-preference HECS place and did not buy a full-fee place. But such emotions should not count for much compared to thousands of people getting into the courses and careers of their hopes.
Labor says it will offer more HECS places, making full-fee places unnecessary. This, however, misunderstands the problem. Even with an in-principle commitment to meet student demand, the quota system is too inflexible to do it accurately or in time. Unless Labor pledges to abolish quotas, its approach is essentially to say "tough luck, do your second preference".
Andrew Norton is a research fellow at The Centre for Independent Studies.
