Funding for University Disciplines – Reprioritised!

Background & Context

Article: University fees set for biggest shake-up in a decade

tl;dr: Education Minister Dan Tehan is proposing changes to university fees in a bid to encourage people to study degrees in areas that are more guaranteed to get a job, in a bid to alleviate the economic & jobs crisis caused by COVID-19.

The one caveat to bear in mind: This is only a proposal, it still has to pass the Senate.

Some quotes concerning the affected areas:

“Nursing degrees, maths courses and psychology degrees will be slashed to just to $3700-a-year in massive discounts designed to encourage younger Australians into the jobs of the future.”

“The cost of an arts degree and communications courses is set to double to $14,500 a year as the Morrison Government tries to dissuade students from studying courses without a clear job pathway.
Law degrees and economics will also face fee hikes of nearly 30 per cent rising to $14,500.”

My Opinion

I can understand why they chose to do it, but I very much disagree with how they did it and the ongoing implications (of which they appear to not have thought deeply about).

Questions & Thoughts

Will these fee changes actually encourage people to reconsider?

Truthfully speaking I honestly don’t think it’ll have a very significant impact on people deciding what they want to study (university degree wise). As far as I understand it, HECS is a very convenient system where one pays back the debt only after they start earning above a given income threshold, so a lot of people in general (speaking from my middle-class background) would mostly shrug and still go for whatever they wanted to do .

While I don’t know the proportion of Australia’s population in middle/lower-classes, I would suspect that those who tend to value money & studying-something-to-get-a-job higher than others would be enticed by it, but it certainly wouldn’t be their only deciding factor.
Amy Thunig has a great perspective in terms of arts/humanities being more accessible and achievable for those in lower socioeconomic areas. And once again for me the question boils back to “Is there a significant proportion of said people in lower socioeconomic areas sharing the same thoughts such that supporting them would result in the desired results?”

What do these imply about their (Tehan and Morrison’s) priorities?

From what I’ve seen I’ve noticed they’re leaning a bit more towards favouring the economy, so this kind of decision makes sense from their reasoning at a surface level. They fundamentally want to prioritise getting more people back into jobs, and more money back into the economy. Making it cheaper for students to study and quickly get jobs ticks both of these points, with a double dip in terms of students paying less for their fees meaning more money to put into the economy.

And thus we attempt to get into the meaty and presumably most-controversial part of this whole thing:

The importance of humanities.

In my opinion the educated world is becoming more aware that we need a good solid mixture of humanities and STEM, especially now that the tech bubbles are running into tricky ethical and legal issues of which require humanities experts to be able to navigate this particular sphere.

The problem is now the government is in a position where they feel they have to rebalance things in terms of their priorities. In the article it mentions modelling was used to determine areas that were more likely to result in jobs.

The argument that humanities teach critical thinking skills is a fairly weak one, in my opinion. One fundamentally still needs the relevant discipline knowledge to be able to apply and navigate them in more practical, applied and hands-on areas, and if there are subject disciplines that teach critical thinking skills along with said discipline (& practical) knowledge, then wouldn’t it be a natural tendency to favour those?

So the question to me becomes: What can humanities offer right now and in the short term that would benefit society, jobs and the economy?

And honestly, I don’t know. As someone in mathematics who could easily be employed in data science, statistics, some kind of software engineering, I have a wealth of opportunities to me that would have a more significant and noticeable impact, but I have absolutely no idea on where people in the arts & humanities end up. Do they end up in areas relevant to their discipline, or is it just overall being a more educated individual that can better handle certain complexities, or…? It wouldn’t be fair for me to posit an opinion from here onwards, but I do want to stress the importance of looking at this whole scenario from the government lens perspective.

Perhaps the modelling/interpretation/data is flawed?

Truthfully that is always a possibility, but since we’re not privy to those details there’s not much we can comment on about it, honestly. We can definitely point to sources that suggest otherwise (e.g. Michael Healy picks out arts-related disciplines from joboutlook.gov.au which have strong job growth according to pre-COVID estimations), and perhaps theorise that the survey data collected for modelling does not paint an accurate picture/summary, but truth be told I wouldn’t know where/who to start influencing.

This does however raise one question if we were to question the data: Is it possible that recorded data of arts graduates are not accurately representing the whole picture? That’s not one I can answer, but I can think of reasons how and why the data they were using might be questionable to begin with.

Bad Arguments I’ve seen on Twitter

People mentioning their arts degree and their successful career: This is survivor bias. Just because people are leading successful careers with their arts degree does not mean the same automatically applies to everyone else with an arts degree. This is also why you don’t ask generic (rich/privileged) successful people what their advice is – you ask people that you know who have been through the hard yards.

An arts degree teaches [set of generic skills]: Apart from a select few, these skills are not exclusive to arts degrees and as mentioned previously, are also practised in different contexts in STEM degrees. Fundamentally it boils down to specific areas in an arts degree that are more practical than others e.g. someone studying international studies & policy would have a stronger standing than someone who studied Greek history (in the least I have a primary school friend who went that way and now works in politics)

One person wrote that arts graduates are employed more than STEM people. The percentages quoted was approximately 83% to 82%. In my opinion that is not a significant difference (even when considering possible bigger numbers). Something more akin to a 5% difference would be enough for me to agree.
There was also an article in The Conversation about arts graduates making more money than STEM graduates. I haven’t read it so it’s not fair for me to rebut it.