Australia needs the full dose of its higher education medicine

When doctors prescribe antibiotics, they warn you that if you don’t take the full treatment course, you risk being left with something much worse: an antibiotic-resistant superbug.

When postgraduate representatives appeared before the Senate Education and Employment Committee on 28 April, we outlined the consequence of ignoring that warning when it comes to implementing the recommendations of the Australian Universities Accord: stunted ambition and a sclerotic economy.

In the words of its chair, Mary O’Kane, the accord’s 16th recommendation – reducing student contributions and reforming HELP repayment arrangements – “came together in a package” with its 17th – improving access to postgraduate coursework studies. Her logic was sound: reforming undergraduate prices and repayment conditions had to be addressed alongside increasing the number of subsidised postgraduate places or the arithmetic would fall apart.

However, even recommendation 16 has not been implemented in its entirety. Repayments have been addressed: they now begin once someone earns around the median wage. Yet nothing has been done about the price of bachelor’s degrees – which, by 2026, the Job-ready Graduates (JRG) legislation had inflated to A$17,399 (£9,020) a year for arts, humanities and commerce.

Because the price hikes were never reversed, the repayment reform merely spreads an inflated ~$50,000 debt over a longer repayment horizon than the full package would have done. According to Monash University analyst Andrew Norton, arts graduates will not now clear their debt until they are in their late 50s. And Treasury documents confirm that the government’s repayment reform, sold as making student loans fairer, will keep graduates on the debt treadmill O’Kane was trying to stop.

Worse still, rather than improving access to postgraduate studies, the reforms to date will do the opposite.

As everyone was talking about A$50,000 arts degrees, they missed the fact that the JRG reforms actually made taught postgraduate degrees more accessible. This is because while every domestic undergraduate course attracts a government subsidy, postgraduate coursework degrees are mostly full-fee; an MSc at Monash costs an Australian approximately A$92,000 – compared with less than $20,000 for a subsidised Commonwealth-supported equivalent at Western Sydney University. But JRG’s flexible funding let universities give postgraduates Commonwealth-supported places (CSPs) when undergraduate demand was soft.

The result was that the subsidised share of postgraduate coursework increased from 43.7 to 49.6 per cent of the whole. According to the Department of Education, there were 6,043 more Australians studying subsidised health postgraduate degrees in 2024 than in 2020. In IT, there were an additional 835; in science, 330; in commerce, 328, and in education, 316. The disciplines that Jobs and Skills Australia says are in demand, requiring skilled migration, just so happen to be: professional, scientific and technical services, healthcare and social assistance, IT, teaching and finance.

However, while the recently announced “managed growth” plan promises A$3.6 billion in incentives to enrol about 16,000 additional undergraduates from the bush and the outer suburbs per year, it places hard caps on all other CSPs.

In the Australian Financial Review last week, the chief commissioner of the new Australian Tertiary Education Commission (Atec), Barney Glover, said: “We need to reassure postgraduate course students that we think there will be more CSPs in the system.” But it is fair to say postgraduates were not reassured.

The problem is that “We think” is all the model permits Atec to say. Under managed growth, universities still get to decide how their capped CSPs are spread between undergraduate and postgraduate levels, but if your subsidised places were running short, would you protect the postgraduates, whom you can always charge the full fee, or the legally guaranteed regional and low-SES undergraduate cohort?

Regardless of the legal element, you might argue that non-traditional students are the right priority to have. Yet if a A$50,000 BA locks the average graduate into lifelong debt, adding around A$75,000 to that debt for a full-fee Master of Teaching is certainly out of the question for a regional or low-SES Australian.

Postgraduates as a whole are already struggling. The Australian Bureau of Statistics says there are more postgraduates than undergraduates doing paid work during their studies – and 250,000 full-time working Australians cannot afford additional study. Incentivising the removal of CSPs from postgraduate degrees will only exacerbate that situation. We must get degree prices right and have the subsidies for students from the bush and outer suburbs follow the skills, not the level of study.

Unfortunately, the government and the Coalition recommended against a Greens’ bill that would start fixing degree prices because they were waiting for Atec to determine the true cost of university education and develop the correct funding model. In other words, the government spent two years and around A$54 million establishing Atec, a subdivision of the Department of Education, to generate a set of recommendations about how to implement an earlier set of recommendations.

As recently as May, Glover called JRG “failed and flawed” in The Australian. But his admission that change would require us to “convince government of the need for investment” doesn’t bode well for Australians wanting to upskill any time soon.

In fact, Atec’s recently released statement of strategic priorities expressly excludes any mention of degree prices. And the body isn’t due to advise the government on a replacement for JRG until sometime in the second half of 2027 – just in time before the next general election, allowing the government to claim to have met a promise it made before the last one.

This isn’t good enough. Two years and three budgets since an accord report Labor itself commissioned, Australia’s higher education system needs the full course of treatment. The doctor orders both a reversal of the JRG’s fee hikes and the preservation of the postgraduate CSP pipeline.

After all, it would be a bitter pill to swallow for all concerned if Australians from the bush and outer suburbs were only able to complete an undergraduate degree, rather than the full course of studies our workforce needs.

Jesse Gardner-Russell is the national president of the Council of Australian Postgraduate Associations (Capa), and a PhD candidate in ophthalmology at the University of Melbourne.