Opinion & Commentary
Raising tax threshold will restore incentives
Parents choose private schools for many reasons, but among them is the belief that more private school students go to university, and with higher ENTERs have more choice of course and university.
The data confirms this impression. For the Year 12 of 2003, 80% of Victorian independent school students who applied for university enrolled at university for 2004, or were offered and deferred a place. From government schools, the rate was 62%.
Non-school factors, such as the socioeconomic status of private school students, explains some but not all of this difference Several statistical studies confirm that after taking into account students’ backgrounds account private schools still boost their pupils’ ENTER scores and university entrance rates. The Australian Council for Educational Research found that attending an independent school was worth around six ENTER points.
Because of this, even when university education was free it was still claimed that some parents bought their child a place at university, or secured him or her a place in the more prestigious and lucrative disciplines. Instead of paying directly for higher education, parents paid private schools to help their child achieve better Year 12 results.
More recently, the financial logic of such spending on private schools has been questioned. About a year ago a left-wing Canberra think-tank, The Australia Institute, suggested that there was now a cheaper way of getting into university than attending a prestige private school for six years. In January this year, The Age reported Melbourne University academic Richard James as saying that parents needed to make a hard-nosed decision as to whether it was better to spend their money on secondary or tertiary education.
They pointed out that it is now possible to buy your way into university through full-fee place. Though there are still cut-off scores for full-fee places, they are lower than for government-subsidised places. After all, only a gifted and fortunate few receive the ENTERs of 99 plus needed for the most competitive courses.
Though some full-fee university courses are very expensive, most are cheaper than six years at a top private school. On this argument, if private schools and full-fee places are alternative means of accessing the most competitive university courses, then full-fee places are cheaper.
But does this really add up? To get into these courses, students still require an ENTER in the 90s even for a full-fee place. So in deciding whether or not to send their child to a private school, parents must guess at what difference a government school would make to their child’s final results, and whether that would affect admission to the course their child wants to do.
The reality is that when parents are evaluating the worth of a private school education, probably in their child’s early to mid-teens, they don’t have the information needed to decide between that and a full-fee place. Even if currently performing reasonably well at school, it’s very hard to know how successful kids will be in exams that are well into the future. Often parents are still very unsure in the weeks after the exam, let alone years before. And how many kids know their aspirations as young adults aged thirteen? Sometimes they still aren’t sure they’ve made the right choice after their application is in.
In the face of such uncertainties, the best option is to keep options open. And keeping options open for the highest demand courses requires ENTERs well into the 90s even for full-fee places. Would the average six ENTER points lost from going to an independent school make the crucial difference? It may well, which is why not going to private school would be a gamble for these ambitious parents.
Another major risk is policy change. Over a young person’s secondary education there will be at least two federal elections. However badly Labor is polling now, who could confidently say that this will be so in six years time? Not even the most pessimistic Labor supporter or the most optimistic Liberal supporter would be certain of a Liberal victory two elections from now. And Labor is committed to abolishing the full-fee undergraduate places.
Nor is there any guarantee that the Liberals will keep full-fee places. They exist because of quotas on subsidised places, but a proposal to abolish quotas has been to a Coalition Cabinet before. It may be successful next time, making full-fee places unnecessary. Why make long-term decisions based on possibly short-term policies?
The Australia Institute was presumably more interested in highlighting what it sees as unfairness in the education system than in offering advice. But their analysis is now being repackaged as something parents should consider. If parents think carefully about their alternatives, they will see that private schools now offer more than a possible full-fee place in the future.
Andrew Norton is a Research Fellow at The Centre for Independent Studies.
