As I write this it seems the federal government is intent on creating a new generation of young Australians saddled with record debt, if it proceeds with its plan to hike up HECS/HELP fees.
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Since the introduction of the HECS system, we've seen student debt skyrocket. The latest figures are an example of what happens when you continue to raise fees, without investing in the university sector.
The Parliamentary Budget Office (PBO) costings projecting a HELP burden of $185 billion are based on the implementation of the Liberals' deregulation agenda, which would increase collective student debt.
The Liberals and their Nationals allies like to preach about reducing debt, yet they are creating a new ‘generation debt' - young people who may be prevented from making significant life decisions like buying a new home or starting a family, because of their skyrocketing HECS/HELP liability. Graduates will be walking out of university with a debt bigger than a housing deposit.
“By hiking up university fees, the government will be locking young people from lower-income families out of furthering their education. We only need to turn to the United States to see the disastrous consequences of deregulation of universities” Greens higher education spokesman Senator Robert Simms said.
It's clear entry-level jobs no longer provide a pathway for graduates to earn enough money to pay back their education. Government should be looking at how it can support and provide more employment opportunities for graduates, not reduce the HELP repayment threshold so they pay more when they are earn less.
There’s a wider issue at play here too, for the government needs to drop its deregulation agenda as it seeks to punish students by hiking up the cost of university course fees.
Students shouldn't be penalised for poor policy decisions by the Liberals and Labor that have led to the government writing off billions of taxpayer dollars due to bad debts associated with the for-profit Vocational Education and Training (VET) sector.
By going down the path of deregulation, studying at university will likely become unattainable for students from disadvantaged backgrounds.
It seems that everyone except Messrs Turnbull and Birmingham, their Cabinet colleagues, their back bench and sadly a large slice of the ALP, agrees the current for-profit model is broken. It is time to start looking for genuine solutions, rather than lumping more debt on students who are already under immense cost of living pressures. Instead of hiking up fees to plug this multibillion-dollar budget gap the government should focus on properly regulating the for-profit VET sector and redirect public funding into universities and TAFE.
Indeed, the fact that a number of privatised VET colleges have failed, leaving their students high and dry with debt but no qualifications at all, is more than enough evidence for anyone prepared to look without neo-liberal, Thatcher-like eyes that privatising vocational education just does not work. And then there’s the number of VET colleges that fraudulently enrich themselves to government funding by enrolling thousands of unqualified students that we have read about in the past few years.
And lest anyone can still be blinkered enough to try to raise the old canard of education being only for ‘private good’ I’ll remind them that the motto of their ‘local’ university, CSU, from which the regional economy so healthily profits, is “For the Public Good”. – Ray Goodlass