Andrew Norton

Stories in the Fairfax papers this morning are talking about the doubling of fees for some arts degrees, to compensate for reduced government subsidies. That is only true of journalism courses, but the reason why these numbers are being arrived at are worth further examination.

The current system is based on funding a ‘unit of study’ (ie a subject) according to its field of education. Each field of education is allocated to one of eight ‘funding clusters’ that determine its ‘Commonwealth contribution’ (ie subsidy) and ‘student contribution’ (often called ‘HECS’). Universities set their own student contributions up to a maximum set by legislation, but in practice all charge the maximum amount.

As is common in the higher education system, various quirks of history rather than clear principles or policies explain these rates. As the figure below shows, this leads to very different overall funding rates for the subjects that someone enrolled in arts might take (I have adjusted 2014 rates up to $2016 for the comparison to come). In my view, only the foreign languages difference could obviously be justified by an inherent need for different teaching methods.

What the new Commonwealth contribution rates would do is bring the humanities and social science type subjects, except economics and languages, to a consistent level, as seen in the figure below. This means that humanities like history get a small increase in funding, while the others get a substantial cut.

From a first principles basis, the new rates look more consistent and rational than the rates they would replace.

If they go ahead (the government has signalled willingness to look at the detail of these cuts) do student contributions need to increase to take total funding per place back to current levels? Arguably, some of these disciplines have long been over-funded and there is scope to not simply maintain the funding status quo by passing on all reductions in Commonwealth contributions to students.

Overall, however, the ‘revenue theory of costs’ is likely to explain university operations more than any strict relationship between what it should reasonably cost to deliver a course and what it actually does cost. It’s Bowen’s law: universities raise all the money they can, and spend all the money they raise. No matter how much money they have, they always feel ‘under-funded’ because they let their costs increase to absorb any previous funding boost. This is why even absurdly rich universities like Harvard feel the need to do major fundraising campaigns.

So while some disciplines look over-funded relative to similar disciplines, it is likely that much of this extra funding has been built into expenditure over time (even if profits in some disciplines have been redistributed to other university activities). While they might not pass on all the Commonwealth contribution reduction to students, the internal trauma involved in reducing costs means that there are likely to be substantial student contribution increases.

One reason I am keen on opening the higher education system up to competition is that I want to bring in new players without these legacy cost structures, who I hope will be able to provide the same or better services than the universities while charging students lower fees.

Statements from the government that under their reform package higher education fees will go down as well as up have been met with ridicule in social media and even from a Canadian higher education policy research institute.

Certainly it is unlikely that fees for public university students will go down. Cuts to public subsidies for most disciplines mean that universities will need to increase their charges just to maintain current revenue per student.

But undergraduate students in private universities and colleges, and the TAFEs that now offer degrees, will become eligible for public subsidies under the Pyne reform package, as recommended by the report I wrote with David Kemp. Exactly at what level is yet to be determined. But it will be above the zero level most of their students currently receive (under various ad hoc deals with government, a few of the around 130 potentially affected institutions already have some subsidised places).

While I doubt that the full value of the subsidy will be passed on in lower fees, particularly in the more generously subsidised disciplines we should see fees dropping by thousands of dollars for students outside the public university sector. The Budget papers suggest that 80,000 students could benefit from this change.

There has been a lot of speculation about students facing $100,000 degrees if fees are deregulated. However, my view is that this is very unlikely outside small areas such as medicine, dentistry or veterinary science.

While we are still planning much more work on pricing issues, international student fees provide a a guide to the outer limits of what is likely to be possible – what universities think that the market will pay. Where there are deregulated markets for both internationals and domestics, in the private sector and at postgraduate level, our research is yet to find any cases in which domestic students are charged more, and many cases in which they are charged less.

Our methodology in collecting fees was to look at university websites and compare similar courses across universities. This was done for all the universities in 2013, although not all teach all the covered courses. We then deducted tuition subsidy amounts, as a guide to how these might bring fees down. The Guardian published the results.

The totals vary considerably, but most full courses would end up costing between $35,000 and $60,000 on a simple average of quoted fees. Students would have to decide whether or not the more expensive courses were value for money.