Education Minister Dan Tehan on the fee changes
FOR a political grouping that regularly lectures against interfering in the free market, the Liberal-led Coalition has been busily practising a range of interventionist economic policies recently.
The JobKeeper subsidy - still huge at $70 billion instead of the originally estimated $130 billion - was an unexpected but well received measure to minimise job losses during the COVID-19 economic shutdown.
Yesterday's re-weighting, by subject, of university fees - charged through the Higher Education Contribution Scheme or HECS scheme - was also linked to the coronavirus crisis by Education Minister Dan Tehan, when he formally unveiled the shakeup at the National Press Club in Canberra.
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The immediate response has been mixed at best. Mr Tehan positioned the new policy as driven by a desire for closer relations between universities and business.
As admirable as this sounds, it would be hard to find a federal education minister who had not cited this as a priority in the 31 years since HECS began in 1989.
Yet a supposed need to turn out "job ready" students still prevails, as if the clear linkage between education level and earnings did not exist, and as if millions of domestic and international students educated in Australia over the years had not found ready employment.
Mr Tehan's concern over "skills shortages" is also a familiar refrain, but history shows that timing any increase in the "needed" disciplines is a difficult art that runs the risk of creating a surplus of the graduates who were previously in short supply.
Mr Tehan's mechanism is simple enough.
The courses he wants to encourage, at the technical and vocational end of university subjects, will become cheaper.
Medicine, veterinary science and dentistry remain the same.
The creative arts, law, commerce and the humanities will increase - and in some instances more than double - in cost.
This aligns with the STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) philosophy that has dominated secondary school course-shaping in recent years.
But one result of an education in the humanities is the broad intellectual grounding it gives its recipients.
Indeed, before COVID, the push was for STEM to become STEAM, recognising the importance of the arts.
It may be a small irony, but the new policy looks biased against the very education that helped Mr Tehan, with an honours degree in arts and two masters qualifications in politics, to the position he holds today.
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