Suddenly Everyone's Talking Education

Sydney Morning Herald

Monday January 29, 2001

Gerard Noonan

An election looms and bingo: some cash has been found for students, Gerard Noonan writes.

For a person who has spent much of his lifetime in academia, Dr David Kemp's political career has been a series of surprising reversals on the education policy front.

The latest about-face is the revelation that post-graduate students at universities will be able to undertake their courses without reaching too deeply into their own pockets.

Under the present system, almost all university students going on to do a second degree or further coursework must pay their university fees up front before they even sit down in a lecture theatre or tutorial class.

A small number can avoid this, such as those on scholarships or those doing research. But most postgraduates come under the system introduced in 1994 under Labor as part of the brave new deregulated world of university life. It was a system enthusiastically endorsed and extended by Dr Kemp's coalition government.

If you wanted a second degree that might boost your earning power or make you feel more erudite at dinner parties, then you could fund it yourself.

But with the steady advance of qualification creep and the rhetoric of a clever country growing ever louder, a policy which seemed to punish learning was looking untenable, even to the ideologically pure who deplored public investment in such things.

Miraculously, the Government in its new-found wisdom has discovered $995 million to loan to post-graduate students over the next five years to encourage them to complete their courses.

Dr Kemp's office reckons it will help some 240,000 students or potential post-graduate students.

There will, of course, be strings but fairly modest ones.

Repayment on a loan is deferred until the student completes his or her second degree and starts earning income.

This is a similar system to the higher education contribution scheme (HECS) which allows first-time or undergraduate students at university to complete their first degree and begin paying when they get a job.

But just how much income will trigger the repayment process is unclear. Undergraduates begin repaying their HECS fees through higher tax rates when their annual income reaches just over $22,000.

Dr Kemp has changed his tune since his leaked 1999 Cabinet submission when he was proposing a fully-deregulated higher education sector. The submission, knocked on the head by the Prime Minister but only after days of adverse publicity, had proposed that all students take out interest-bearing commercial loans to pay for their university tuition.

Now, just 18 months on, the Government wants to be deeply involved in anything with education stamped on it. Welcome to an election year.