Job Ready Graduates Package

Universities Accord: Why this urgent deadline is mission (almost) impossible

Last November education minister Jason Clare released details of Labor’s election promise ‘Universities Accord’ review of higher education. Its terms of reference are wide-ranging. Skills, equity, quality, funding, engagement, research, commercialisation, workforce, regulation, governance and connections to vocational education are all in the brief.

An ambitious schedule

A consultation paper released last month poses 49 questions for stakeholder feedback. Joining considered answers to these questions into a coherent set of recommendations on the Accord review’s timeline is a near-impossible task. An interim report is due in June 2023 and a final report in December 2023.

The most practical way forward for the seven-person Accord panel chaired by former vice-chancellor Mary O’Kane is to recommend policy responses to pressing problems and policy processes for resolving longer-term matters. Australia’s higher education system has faults, but most of them do not need admitting to the policy hospital via its emergency department.  

Student contribution reform should be a priority

My first submission to the Accord panel, made in late 2022, focused on matters I see as relatively urgent. These include the student contribution system established by the Morrison government’s Job-ready Graduates policy, which more than doubled student contributions for most Arts students, slashed them for nursing and teaching students, and moved most other student charges up or down. The idea was to encourage students to take ‘job ready’ or other ‘national priority’ courses.

The Morrison government agreed in 2020 to a Job-ready Graduates review to commence in 2022. The Albanese government slowed this review down by incorporating it into the Accord process. The student contribution reform timeline now looks like a final Accord report December 2023, legislation 2024, and implementation 2025. 

But every year Job-ready Graduates continues, with the top student contribution now above $15,000 a year, students charged this amount sink further into a debt that will take them many years, and potentially decades, to pay off. CPI-linked indexation of their accumulated HELP debt, likely to be around 7 per cent when applied on 1 June this year, will compound their financial misery.

A June 2023 interim report focused on student contributions would leave time for legislation later in 2023 and new student contributions in 2024. Job-ready Graduates itself worked on similar timelines.

My proposal links student contribution levels to other practical policy issues including HELP debt repayment times. One goal is to align average repayment times between courses, so that the years of work required to clear a debt become more similar. Underlying dollar amounts of debt could still vary. Doctors for example earn more than nurses, so with HELP repayments based on a percentage of income doctors repay more each year and can incur larger debts without causing longer repayment periods than nurses.

Student contribution rates cannot be set entirely in isolation from other policies that might be decided later in the Accord process, such as total university resources for teaching or the overall share of public and private finance. The price relativities between courses could, however, be set this year, with later smaller adjustments to support other policy decisions. Every study of graduate earnings shows arts graduate incomes at the lower end of the range, so arts student contributions would return to the cheapest level. 

The problems of a stakeholder-government ‘partnership’

 For longer-run policies, the Accord panel’s consultation paper suggests a ‘continuous dynamic partnership’ involving the government and sector stakeholders. A formal consultative body to promote regular discussion of higher education trends and performance is worth considering. But giving it a formal role in setting policies and priorities via an Accord ‘partnership’ would be a mistake.

The higher education institutions to negotiate a sector-level Accord partnership do not exist. The sector has many conflicting interests and opinions, within nothing like elections and parliament on the government side to reach decisions seen as legitimately made despite disagreement.

An Accord with real influence over policy direction would accentuate power imbalances. University management and staff are well-organised to promote their views in stakeholder discussion, but student and other groups are less effective. Student income support and HELP debt get little attention from non-student stakeholders. Policies on these topics affect household and public, but not university, finances. The interests of taxpayers are not considered by sector stakeholders, beyond general claims about higher education’s public benefits.

 A government-sector ’partnership’ approach also risks bypassing Parliament on issues that it should engage with, replacing legislated policies with agreements between the minister and universities.

The government should consult, but ultimately it must set priorities and make trade-offs between competing goals. The government and any new consultative body should diligently monitor higher education trends, but direction-setting should not be a ‘continuous’ or ‘dynamic’ process. Well-designed policies let higher education institutions adapt to changing circumstances within a stable set of rules. Such rules are a better basis for successful long-term strategies than deals that change with the mood and the minister.  

Andrew Norton is Professor in the Practice of Higher Education Policy at the Centre for Social Research and Methods at the Australian National University.  He is a member of the Australian Universities Accord Ministerial Reference GroupHe blogs at andrewnorton.net .au  Follow him on Twitter @andrewjnorton 

Header image of the February 21 meeting of the Ministerial Reference Group is from Jason Clare’s Facebook page

Why the federal government must ditch Jobs Ready Graduates now

New figures challenge the assumptions behind the Job-Ready Graduates package, introduced by the former Coalition government and unchanged by Labor. That package has underestimated the value and employability of arts, social science and humanities graduates.

The employment outcomes of students enrolled in arts, social sciences and humanities degrees have risen to 89.6 per cent – an increase of 25 percentage points according to the Quality Indicators for Learning and Teaching (QILT) 2022 Longitudinal Graduate Outcomes Survey released this month.

The Package, introduced under former Education Minister Dan Tehan in 2020 and implemented this year, has seen the cost for students of many arts, social science and humanities degrees more than double.

QILT’s longitudinal study shows that the graduates in a wide range of disciplines, including arts, social sciences and humanities are highly employable and that attempts to drive students into some fields at the expense of others are misplaced.

The report measures the medium-term outcomes of higher education graduates based on a cohort analysis of graduates who responded to the 2019 Graduate Outcomes Survey. 

It noted the figures around generalist degrees “continue to demonstrate an important point – that while undergraduates from some fields of education, in particular those with generalist degrees, have weaker employment outcomes soon after completing their course, the gap in employment outcomes across fields of education tends to narrow over time.”

The Federal Government must commit to abandoning the policy which is putting our students at a significant financial disadvantage.

Nick Bisley

It also states that while vocational degrees tend to have higher employment outcomes than generalist degrees in the short term “the gap in employment rates between those with vocational and generalist degrees diminishes over time”.

80 per cent of students following their passions

This research follows earlier findings from the Universities Admission Centre Student Lifestyle Report. It found 81 per cent of the nearly 14,000 Year 12 students interviewed said passion would guide their choices for further study.

Four in five of last year’s high school graduates have said passion is their leading influence when choosing a degree, showing that the previous government’s attempts to drive enrolment numbers using fee increases was always likely to fail.

These statistics further disprove claims fee increases would guide student preferences under the JRG.

DASSH is calling for university fee reform under the upcoming Accord to be undertaken by the Federal Government given the lack of evidence linking fee levels to job outcomes and career success more broadly.

Productivity Commission observations

In addition to results from the above reports, the Productivity Commission has recently made several key points about student fees being used as incentives in its 5-year Productivity Inquiry: From learning to growth. In this report the Commission finds that students are best placed to judge for themselves what education suits their interests and their aspirations.

The report rightly points out: “Government subsidies for tertiary education could be allocated more efficiently and equitably, without necessarily increasing the total amount of public funding.”

“Currently, governments set differential subsidies based on targeting public benefits and skill needs, but these have little impact on student choice because income-contingent loans eliminate upfront fees and make price differences less salient.”

Our members believe attempting to manipulate student preferences through price signalling is counterproductive to the aims of having an efficient and high-quality tertiary system.

DASSH strongly supports the evidence in the report that shows human capital will be more in demand in the future than ever before.

“As our reliance on the services sector expands, people’s capabilities (‘human capital’) will play a more important role than physical capital in improving productivity,” the report states.

“General and foundational skills will continue to underpin the workforce’s contribution to productivity, and as routine tasks are automated, newly created jobs will increasingly rely on areas such as interpersonal skills, critical thinking, working with more complex equipment, and accomplished literacy and numeracy.”

The skills described in the report are derived through the education of students in the arts, social sciences and humanities. It is impossible to know in advance what the value of these disciplines or specific courses offered within our degrees will be in part because of the rapidly changing nature of the labour market and the innovative ways in which knowledge is put to use in society.

The current price settings for arts, humanities and social sciences degrees were set without any evidence that they would work nor any consideration about the impact on current or future students. 

Those degrees are valued by employers and provide a strong intellectual foundation for long term career success. The JRG punishes students who want to pursue studies that are beneficial to them and society more broadly and a new and more equitable pricing level should be developed.

The Federal Government must commit to abandoning the policy which is putting our students at a significant financial disadvantage.


Nick Bisley is President of the Australasian Council of Deans of Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities. He is Dean of Humanities and Social Sciences and Professor of International Relations at La Trobe University. His research focuses primarily on Asia’s international relations, great power politics and Australian foreign and defence policy. Nick is a member of the advisory board of China Matters and a member of the Council for Security and Cooperation in the Asia-Pacific. Nick is the author of many works on international relations, including Issues in 21st Century World Politics, 3rd Edition (Palgrave, 2017), Great Powers in the Changing International Order (Lynne Rienner, 2012), and Building Asia’s Security (IISS/Routledge, 2009, Adelphi No. 408). He regularly contributes to and is quoted in national and international media including The Guardian, The Wall Street Journal, CNN and Time Magazine

Why Labor must reconsider the Job-Ready Graduates package now

The Coalition Government used the pandemic-induced shock to introduce legislative measures,  commonly known as the Job-Ready Graduates (JRG) package, to  restructure the nation’s higher education (HE) funding arrangements. It had failed to get these reforms up on three separate occasions.

The change was primarily framed as an intervention to ensure that higher education – and its graduates – would be ready to help the nation avert COVID economic shock. JRG would  address the skills shortage, weak university/industry linkages, growth in the school leaver population, and geographical attainment gaps in the sector. 

In a recently published paper (Crisis and Policy Imaginaries: Higher Education Reform during a Pandemic), we critically review the JRG package through the lens of crisis and policy response. 

We ask what was seen as a problem to be fixed by the Morrison Government, what policy responses were introduced, and what was conceived as a desirable future enabled by this policy reform.  

Limited public consultation

To begin with, the change process did not pass through proper public consultation. Policy initiatives may come from top-down (e.g. in the form of political narratives and theories) as well as from bottom-up (e.g. in the form of social movements and public submissions that draw on shared conceptions about what society is and should be).

In the case of the JRG package, the process proceeded with no genuine public consultation: the Government allowed a mere five working days for public submissions. Notably, except for arguments on social work education, none of the critical issues raised by the sector was considered in the final bill. 

Crisis opportunism

Before 2020, the Coalition Government tried and failed at restructuring the HE funding on three occasions.  When the COVID-19 pandemic hit the sector hard, the Government seized the moment to make its fourth attempt at reform. The pandemic exposed the vulnerability of Australian HE. Many people were also distracted by the health crisis. The situation presented an opportunity to impose unpopular reforms. The reformers were keen not to waste a crisis.

The policy selling point was that the health crisis (COVID-19) coupled with fast-paced technological changes in the workplace pose a risk to national economic productivity and competitiveness. The policy purported to provide a solution. 

In essence, the JRG package signifies what Boin and colleagues refer to as ‘crisis exploitation’. The Government framed the COVID-19 pandemic and the associated fear of an economic downturn as a crisis to sell old policy packages and imaginaries. 

As Fassin notes, in a time of crisis, a policy narrative has elements of both temporality (triggering a sense of urgency) and affectivity (triggering anxiety). Crisis narratives make drastic policy changes possible by creating a shared perception of threats or opportunities. We find that crisis opportunism was cynically exploited by the former government to prosecute an old policy agenda. 

Recycled Imaginaries

Imaginaries represent shared visions of desirable futures. When it generates new imaginaries, a crisis can be transformative. Sargeant speaks of crisis as ’a moment of discontinuity’ that requires ‘an act of imagination large enough to envisage a future different from the continuities mandated by the past, and powerful enough to generate a strategy sufficient to chart a path towards this future’ (emphasis added).

In this vein, the JRG reform relies on recycled imaginaries and a tired lexicon. The JRG agenda was essentially set years before the COVID-19 crisis, and the desirable futures outlined in the policy are largely a rehearsal of old political arguments for increased efficiency, productivity, and accountability.

The Morrison Government used the pandemic as an opportunity to (re)articulate its pre-existing neoliberal policy imperatives of privatising and economising HE. Public spending on HE is linked to the need for maximising economic returns. JRG envisages HE as a subset of the economy:  universities should support the nation’s economic goals of productivity and competitiveness by producing more graduates in selected ‘fields of economic productivity’.

In essence, the rupture caused by the pandemic was both a crisis seized opportunistically and an opportunity lost by the Australian Government for visionary reform. In justifying the timeliness of the reform, rather than constructing new imaginaries, the Government reactivated old neoliberal visions of society and the economy. 

Issue omission

In a policy process, the framing of issues matters. As Edwards notes, ‘It is only once a policy issue is accepted as a problem that people can ask, “What can we do about it?”’

In this respect, the JRG package can be defined by the issue it omits from consideration.  For instance, while the reform advocates for innovation, productivity, and competitiveness, issues of research and research training receive no attention. The urgency of decarbonising the economy and the role that universities might play in this was ignored in the reform. No substantive reference is made to the perils of climate change, its impact on employment, public health, agriculture, water and energy, the environment, and all areas of social and economic activity.

Further, through price signalling, the reform privileges STEM fields and unfairly undervalues the importance of humanities and social sciences. The economy is seen as entirely constitutive of the nation, allowing little space for culture, society, or genuine political debate. The focus on teaching, health sciences and STEM fields is justifiable. The issue is not with expecting universities to be responsive and adaptive to the nation’s needs and priorities. Instead, an excessive emphasis on technical training risks the emergence of generations with little or no regard for democracy, social cohesion, and environmental justice. As Ronald J. Daniels, the president of Johns Hopkins University, argues, universities play a critical role in fostering democracy by way of supporting ‘social mobility, citizenship education, the stewardship of facts, and the cultivation of pluralistic, diverse communities’. 

Technology calls for adaptive humans and effective adoption of technology requires expertise from social sciences as well as STEM fields. Technological changes indeed raise the skill requirements of jobs, but human capital (the educational attainment of the workforce) is a narrow parameter of progress. A cohesive, prosperous, and free society is much greater than the economic activities underpinning it. 

The JRG package also frames equity issues reductively. The complex and nuanced equity categories articulated in previous policies are reduced to a crude city/rural divide. 

Workforce nativism

Elements of the reform are also nativist in orientation. The policy discourse around the legislation rehearses a range of nativist tropes about Australian universities for Australian students and Australian jobs for Australian graduates.  This obscures the vital roles played by international students and immigration in Australian economic and social development over our history. The nativist vision seeks to return to a period in which the HE sector was not dependent on the revenue generated by international students’ fees without providing the funding which universities turned to international tuition fees to replace.

This nativism echoes the populist anti-globalisation sentiment we are witnessing globally. Elements of nativist imaginary also evoke an earlier exclusionary, racist, and xenophobic period of Australian history, including the White Australia regime that persisted for much of the 20th century.

The Job-ready Graduates Discussion Paper stressed: “A strong economic recovery will depend on knowledge-intensive jobs held by Australians who are highly skilled, creative and flexible.” However, this nativist rhetoric failed to acknowledge Australia’s historical dependence on immigration to compensate for a skills deficit, especially in STEM fields. This might not come as a surprise given the anti-immigration agenda and populist inclination of the ruling Coalition. 

In closing

A moment of a significant rupture may also be  a moment of bold measures. It challenges the legitimacy of the status quo and puts pressure on the ruling elite to devise coping strategies. A crisis also demands new imaginaries–new shared visions of the desirable futures. Taylor identifies two pathways of imaginary formation: new theories that inspire new practices or reinterpretation of existing practices that lead to a new vision of the future. During a crisis, as our analysis shows, those in power may also choose to enact pre-existing imaginaries, responding to new challenges with old answers. 

In our view, the JRG package was a cynical exercise at several levels, most obviously in its seizing of the moment of the pandemic to prosecute a change that it has been pursuing since at least 2014. In emphasising market-based competition, personal choice, and human capital, the policy package overlooked the importance of such inclusive goals as civic cooperation, shared commitment, and human capability

From here to where? It appears that another round of HE reform is on the horizon. The new Federal Government has an opportunity to reimagine the future and purpose of Australian HE. We urge boldness. Australia’s world class HE sector stands ready to engage creatively and constructively with government, the community, and current and future students. Australian universities are well-positioned to  contribute to a bold change agenda: one which tackles the skills gap and the host of other actions needed for Australia to continue to thrive as a democracy which acts in the interests of its citizens and the planet.  To that end, extensive sector-wide consultation is critical. 

 

Tebeje Molla is a senior lecturer in the School of Education, Deakin University. His research areas include student equity, teacher professional learning, and policy analysis. His work is informed by critical sociology and the capability approach to social justice and human development.

Denise Cuthbert is the Associate Deputy Vice Chancellor, Research Training and Development at RMIT and has published extensively on higher education policy and practice.

      Denise Cuthbert, RMIT University