Australia’s opposition parties have raised concerns that the federal government’s plan to scrap the 50 percent pass rule will leave more Australians saddled with unnecessary student debt.
However, the Coalition, which introduced the rule in 2020, said the provision had originally been introduced with the intention of protecting failing students from accruing further HECS debt.
Tony Pasin, Liberal MP for Barker in South Australia, said that for a student unable to meet the 50 percent pass rule, it was “highly likely that a student will not complete their course,” leaving them with massive debt “without any university qualification to show for it.”
He said that about 41 percent of full-time students fail to complete a four-year degree on time, while 21 percent end up dropping out completely.
Loans under the Commonwealth assistance program are indexed according to inflation and skyrocketed to 7.1 percent on June 1.
Total student debt in Australia now sits at $75 billion(US$48.8 billion), of which a “large portion” is not expected to be paid back. The average amount of student debt is just under $25,000 per student.
Notably, Mr. Pasin said the number of people with student debts over $100,000 (US$65,000) has tripled in the past three years.
“It is far easier to enrol a student than it is to ensure that student completes a three- or four-year degree. For too long, universities have measured their success in terms of enrolment figures but this must change,” he said.
The Coalition called on the government to implement more measures so that universities are held to account and prioritise student outcomes.
“What really matters are completion rates, because only students who complete their degrees can derive the benefits those degrees confer in the open employment market,” Mr. Pasin said.
It comes after Education Minister Jason Clare said the decision to abolish the 50 percent pass rule was made because the rule disproportionately affected students from poor and regional backgrounds.
“Across the country, more than 13,000 students have been forced to leave their degree. And most of those students are from poor families and from the regions or from the bush,” he said.
But Mr. Pasin argued that there was a lack of understanding behind the numbers, and that some of the 13,000 students may have been “protected” from incurring too much debt.
“We don’t know whether those students went on to do another course, moved to full fee-paying courses or dropped out altogether,” he said.
“Perhaps they moved to a TAFE course and are now thriving, pursuing their dreams by completing a course better suited to their needs.”
Meanwhile, Greens MP Elizabeth Watson-Brown has called on the federal government to wipe out student debt completely.
“We need to wipe student debt, or at least abolish indexation and raise the minimum repayment income to the median wage,” she told Parliament, adding that stipends for Ph.D. students should also be raised to “at least minimum wage.”
Affirmative Action Accountability
There were also questions around accountability to ensure that Indigenous Australians granted university spots through affirmative action complete their courses.Labor aims to double the number of Indigenous students at universities in the next decade, from 5,000 to 10,000.
To achieve this, the government plans to expand the current guaranteed funding scheme to all Indigenous students. At present, it is only available for Indigenous students living in regional and rural areas.
This affirmative action plan is expected to cost around $34 million over the next four years and would be a better use of taxpayer money, according to Mr. Clare.
“The cost of having somebody in jail every year is about $120,000. The cost of a university place is $11,000,” he said, noting that a young Indigenous person was more likely to go to jail than university.
However, the Coalition is concerned that Labor’s plan of encouraging higher Indigenous enrolment numbers does nothing to address the low completion rate.
Just over a quarter of Indigenous students complete their undergraduate degree within four years, while 37 percent will drop out within the same period.
Darren Chester, Nationals MP for Gippsland in Victoria, also said that he wasn’t convinced that the government’s expanding the scheme to all Indigenous people was about addressing actual disadvantage.
“You could sustain an argument that an Indigenous student living in a metropolitan area, say, Melbourne, actually experiences less disadvantage than a rural and remote student living some distance from a university centre,” he told Parliament.
