Tuition fees creep back

Tuition fees creep back

Simon Marginson

Three years ago, federal education minister John Dawkins overturned the ALP's traditional policy of free tertiary education and introduced the Higher Education Contribution Scheme, otherwise known as the tertiary tax.

The HECS was sold by Dawkins as not a "real" tuition fee because it was a deferred payment, to be met from future earnings. Dawkins promised faithfully not to introduce "real" tuition fees.

This promise has proven worthless. Tertiary tuition fees have been reintroduced, although the government has been cunning about it.

Fees have not been introduced directly by Canberra but by individual universities, and not for all students but for overseas and many postgraduate students. They have also been introduced in TAFE, not by Dawkins but by state governments and TAFE colleges.

The federal government has made all of this possible by lifting the old Whitlam government legislative prohibition on fee charging. The free marketeers in Canberra have got the institutions and the states to do the actual dirty work. The result is that tertiary education is being commercialised, though the market is creeping in rather than coming with a rush.

Under loose guidelines, universities are now allowed to run fee-based postgraduate courses — provided permission is obtained from the minister's office. This permission has been increasingly easy to obtain.

These fee-based courses are spreading quickly — wherever the universities think they can make a quick dollar setting up a new, impressive-sounding "qualification".

For example, at the University of Melbourne this year there are 46 fee-based courses. Top of the list is the Executive MBA (for the young merchant banker etc) at $31,000 a year.

You can do a postgraduate Diploma in Managerial Studies for $13,140 a year, a postgraduate Diploma in Development Technology at $5000 a year, a graduate Diploma in Computing Studies at $4800, or in International Property Law at $4800.

The keen trade union official on the way up can boost his/her prospects of displacing the general secretary with a graduate Diploma in Labour Relations Law ($4800 a year).

Other institutions that have set up a large number of fee-based courses include the University of Technology, Sydney, and Curtin University in Western Australia. Whereas in 1983 almost 90% of university income was from governments, today the figure has fallen to 75%. The rest comes from fees and corporate sponsorship. Fees have not yet been introduced in undergraduate courses, with the significant exception of overseas students, because that would provoke strong student opposition.

However, there is a real danger that the spread of "up front" fees for overseas students and postgraduates will eventually make fees so common that the universities will find it easy to get away with undergraduate fees as well.

The creeping commercialisation of universities is a divide-and-rule tactic designed to circumvent student opposition. The only solution is solidarity. Students not yet affected by up-front fees should join overseas students and postgraduates fighting against exploitative fees in their courses, and with TAFE students now facing fees as well. Everyone has a right to free tertiary education.

From GLW issue 5