By Marina Cameron
As part of a drive to channel money away from the public sector and into private hands, the government is looking for further ways to cut funding to higher education.
After cutting $2.3 billion from university operating grants last year, the Liberals announced that universities would be allowed to offer 25% full fee-paying places on top of the quota of government/HECS-funded places.
Full fees for undergraduate places are part of the drive towards "user pays". The government wants to shift more of the cost of education onto the "users", ignoring the benefit of higher education to society in general, and big business in particular.
The 25% proposal was a clever one. The government cuts funding and leaves the running up to individual institutions, letting them do the dirty work of privatising education.
The government has said (but refused to promise) that government/HECS-funded places will be maintained. But once the undergraduate fees market is opened up, universities will do anything they can to attract fee-paying students. That means catering for fee-paying students in courses, services and places. Non-fee places will not be maintained.
The federal ALP and some student organisations, like the guild at the University of NSW, have argued against fees on the basis that merit, not money, should be the prerequisite for higher education. But that argument could be overcome by a full fees system which provided scholarships for a percentage of places.
It ignores the most important thing for students: some undergraduate fees will lead on to all undergraduate fees; to ensure real equity and access, education should be free.
Business and the government are already pushing a system in which operating grants to universities are largely replaced by funding vouchers which students spend at the institution of their choice.
Education minister Amanda Vanstone is preparing the way for this with comments like those she made on April 5, that in effect HECS is a government "scholarship" (because students pay for only part of their education). The underlying idea is that a fees system with a few scholarships is the only option.
The vice-chancellors are falling in behind this argument, calling simply for more scholarships. Professor Ken McNab, who voted in the University of Sydney senate on April 7 to introduce fees, summed up the thinking behind this capitulationist approach when he stated that the fight against fees was lost in the 1980s with the introduction of overseas students fees and HECS.
The fight against fees is not over. Implementing fees will not be a smooth or easy process. Attracting fee-paying students and changing the system to cope with this is fraught with problems, none of which are made easier by large student opposition.
Accepting any part of the government's arguments in favour of "user-pays", efficiency through competition and structuring education to the needs of business, means accepting the end point — privatised education.
We should be mobilising students, staff and the community in the opposite direction. Victories against specific fees proposals are possible if students and staff launch a concerted campaign of opposition, linked into a campaign against the government's whole agenda of cutting higher education.