Name: Senate Education and Employment Committee (part 2 of 2)
Uploaded: 2026-04-28T05:35:00+00:00

00:00 - 01:53

Speaker 12

Day. And essentially in that cost study, they were expressly told to look at teaching and scholarship costs only, and so that excluded any time spent on research. And they also decided to basically set the new rates based on the average costs as they were back in the late 2010s. And as one of the earlier witnesses also said, that assumes heavy casualisation of teaching etcetera which has kept costs down. I think the main effect of this was really in some disciplines and I think particularly in science and engineering.

I think there probably had been some implied research funding left in those rates. And so they took pretty heavy cuts as part of job ready graduates. So even though there were slight incentives on the student side through reduced student contributions to take those courses, there were reduced incentives on the supply side, the university side, to actually increase supply because there were fewer places left. Then you've got this separate thing going on, which is trying to manipulate the student contributions to guide student choices, which we've been discussing just before, which I think, as I said before, I think they probably have had some marginal effect, particularly on the people who were not quite sure whether university was the right choice for them. At the moment spending $17,000 a year just to try something out is pretty expensive.

And I think I wouldn't do it unless I was pretty confident. Yes, I want to do this arse degree or yes, I want to do this law degree. And so they're the people we've lost. I think we can actually see some evidence for that in fact that attrition has gone down suggests we've got a smaller pool of students who are more committed to their original course of action rather than people who are still deciding whether university is the right thing for them or not. Senator?

01:58 - 02:37

Speaker 44

Yes. I agree with everything that Andrew just observed, but there's one one other effect of this, and this is a a longer term effect of the introduction of these fees, which relates back to the issue that I raised earlier about the culling of subjects, courses, disciplines, and the academics who teach them related to arts, humanities, some of these social science subjects. So at University of Wollongong, my colleagues have been telling me that the effects on the students have been pretty devastating because a lot of the existing subjects in which they are enrolled, the programs that

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