University reforms in Australia- and, especially, the Abbott government’s 2014 policy of total fee deregulation- have been a cause for concern and even protest among students across the country.
However, a recent study by Edith Cowan researcher Kwadwo Adusei-Asante has shown that students outside the major metro areas have been left in the dark on these issues, which he predicts will hinder them far more than their urban counterparts.
His research involved semi-structured interviews with 50 different people- a spread of students, teachers, and parents- across three localities in regional Western Australia.
One group of people lived near Mandurah, one group lived near Bunbury, and another were north of Perth.
“I wanted to get people’s sentiments on what they knew about the fee deregulation policy, and if that came into affect, how it would impact them,” Mr Adusei-Asante said.
University reforms
At present, the government subsidises every student who attends university, and the cost of courses is regulated.
However, under a deregulated system, universities have the autonomy to set their own fees.
“The government is intending to take off those subsidies, and allow universities to charge full fees from now onwards,” Mr Adusei-Asante said.
“If that came into effect, the literature and the evidence suggests that fees will go up, because everywhere university deregulation has been introduced, fees have gone up.”
Through HECS (the Higher Education Contribution Scheme), students will still not have to pay these fees up front, but once they begin earning enough to begin repaying their loan, they will have far more debt in wait.
Regional barriers
Mr Adusei-Asante said it was likely that this would reduce the number of students from regional areas who go on to tertiary education, as they struggle to cope with barriers such as accommodation, transport, and other expenses their metropolitan counterparts do not have to deal with.
“For some students they’ve had to move to Perth, not because they want to but because in a regional area they can’t do certain courses,” he said.
He said their research showed the number of students enrolled in ATAR classes were less than 20%.
“If you have a high school that is struggling to find people to do ATAR, and you introduce university fee deregulation, you’re exacerbating the situation,” he said.
Though complete fee deregulation was taken off the table earlier this year, the government still plans to implement partial fee deregulation in 2017/18.
In Mr Turnbull’s own words at a leadership debate in June: “What we will seek to do is to offer the universities the ability to deregulate fees, if you like, for a small number of flagship courses so that they can compete, so that you do get more competition between universities.”
Mr Adusei-Asante believes this is just a way of “testing the waters” before introducing full fee deregulation, in order to avoid the level of public resistance Mr Abbott’s government was faced with.
Kept in the dark
“I believe that if regional students knew more about the policy, they would’ve joined forces to write a recommendation to the committee that was proposing the bill,” he said.
“I think they were kept in the dark, unfortunately.”
Most people his team spoke to had little knowledge of the policy.
“Over 90 per cent of them didn’t know that there was something coming like deregulation. And this was 2015, when the government had planned that the policy would come into effect 1st of January 2016.
“So what would have happened, is it would’ve taken the regional people by surprise.”
Once prompted, the report’s subjects said they would have to defer going to university until they had saved more money.
Mr Adusei-Asante said that many of the staff his team spoke to didn’t know about the issues either.
“These are people are supposed to be guiding students as to their career and where to from high school,” he said.
“If you have a system where even the staff don’t know much about the deregulation policy, it’s a problem.”
The report read that rural isolation and the lack of opportunity that currently existed would be increased significantly if deregulation occurred.
Mr Adusei-Asante said because regional high school students are likely to be most affected by any reform of the Australian university sector, the federal government need to do a better job of communicating the changes to them.
He is now conducting a second research project aimed at further gauging the attitudes of regional Western Australians to the federal government’s proposed higher education reforms.
