Stephen
Judy Redman wrote:
Hi everyone,
Currently, the lower house of federal parliament is debating Brendan Nelson's proposed so-called reforms to higher education which, if they are passed, will have dramatic negative effects on students, their families and staff alike and a flow-on effect to society as a whole. Not only are they likely to result in wealth rather than ability determining who will be able to get a university education and what fields they're likely to be able to study. Students who get HECS funded places in disciplines of their choice are likely to end up with significantly higher debts than current students, and those in courses that last four years or more will only have an extra twelve months to complete their courses before they begin to be charged full fees. This is fine for those who don't become ill or suffer a family crisis which causes them to have to lighten their course load or repeat subjects or, like approximately 30% of first year students each year, discover that they have enrolled in the 'wrong' course (it's not always easy to decide from three lines in a handbook exactly what the course will cover or where the qualification it gives you will get you).
Despite the rhetoric from the government, universities like UNE that refuse to take advantage of the 'deregulation' to charge up to 30% higher than HECS fees will be worse off (our financial people calculate that we will have around $1.6 m/year less than we have now) and a number of the bonuses promised in the proposals can only come into force if every member of staff is on an individual contract - no enterprise bargaining allowed. Universities will no longer be allowed to take voluntary deductions from salaries for union fees and tertiary education staff will be declared essential services, thus removing their right to take industrial action.
More than a little peeved by our churches' failure to take a public stand on this issue, tertiary chaplains from across Australia voted to make a submission of their own to the Senate committee investigating the proposals when we met in Adelaide a week and a bit ago at our annual conference. The submission is confidential until released on the senate website, but the substance of it is available from the Tertiary Campus Ministry Association (Australia) Inc's (TCMA) website in the form of an extended press release (http://www.une.edu.au/campus/chaplaincy/tcma/pressreleaseext.pdf). The text is arguably not the greatest literature you've ever read because we had to put most of our energy into getting the submission in on time, but it outlines in more detail the problems we see with Nelson's proposals.
There seems to be a perception in at least some parts of the UCA that we can't object to the proposals with any level of credibility because we have high-fee schools, but the increase in the number of fee-paying positions is a very minor part of the proposed changes. Uni chaplains are more concerned about the effects on HECS paying students and university staff than that there will be more fee-paying places for Australian students at universities - after all, you still have to pass all your subjects once you get in in order to get a degree at the end! And high school students whose families can't afford to send them to independent schools are still all entitled to a place in a state school. University education just doesn't work like this.
We *are* concerned, however, that some students will just miss out on the entry cut-off in first year, do a year on full fees in the hope that they will get good enough marks to be given a HECS place that someone has dropped out of and if that doesn't happen be faced with the choice of having wasted a year's fees or needing to keep paying for another however many years to finish their course.
If anyone has any energy left at the moment, can I encourage you to contact your local federal pollies and other senators and let them know that you are not in favour of the proposals (you can find the full text on the senate website, but it's horrifyingly long and complex). Or you can read some of the submissions to the senate enquiry at http://www.aph.gov.au/Senate/committee/eet_ctte/highed2003/index.htm Please bear in mind that it's *not* just those who have tertiary qualifications who benefit from them. Doctors, nurses, physiotherapists, occupational therapists, dentists and other allied health professionals, engineers, architects, agricultural scientists, ecologists and many more all have tertiary qualifications and our society would grind to a halt pretty quickly without them (as it would if we lost those without tertiary qualifications, I might add)!
Regards
Judy
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