Universities are Ripping off Students and the Country

Many graduates are asking whether attending university and getting a HECS debt was worth it.  For many, the answer is no.

With Vice-Chancellors earning over $1 million a year, degrees are costing more yet worth less.

One Nation would stop universities ripping off students and cut the HECS debt being accumulated. We’ll also require universities to publish the average salaries of graduates for each degree, so you know what you’re signing up for.

Transcript

I speak on the Universities Accord (Student Support and Other Measures) Bill 2024. The university degree system is failing our students and our country. Schoolies is happening right now on the Gold Coast and across the country. These school leavers are too busy celebrating finishing high school to be listening to this speech. Yet maybe their parents will be listening. To schoolies I say: this is the last break some of you will have before heading to university. Enjoy it. Be warned: universities do not have your best interests at heart. Today, they act like a greedy corporate business, and you’re their cash cow. For people heading to uni, please be aware that you’re taking on a very big HECS debt. That debt is meant to be in return for something. Uni is meant to give a good qualification that students can turn into a sound career. For many people, though, universities aren’t doing this any more. Instead, unis are loading up school leavers with millions in debt for degrees that aren’t worth the paper they’re printed on. 

Many people watching might wonder how they’re getting away with this. If a uni doesn’t give you a degree that can enable you to earn money, and you can’t pay back the debt, then the unis should go broke, right? HECS is completely different. The uni gets the money upfront from the government—from the taxpayers. Then you owe HECS to the government, seemingly forever for some students. The uni gives you a degree that doesn’t live up to its promises and immediately laughs all the way to the bank while you’re stuck paying HECS debt to the Albanese Labor government. The universities’ lust for money shows up in the data. In 2005-06, an average person with a HECS debt owed $10,400. Today, the average debt is an astonishing $27,600. That’s nearly triple in a bit under 20 years. 

The entire system needs a fundamental reset. One Nation believes that the future students at schoolies right now should be given all of the information to make an informed choice about their future. This bill does not help students do that. Every university should be forced to publish the average salary of graduates from each year and degree at one year, five years and ten years after completion as a form of accountability and quality control, putting responsibility back on the universities. This would break the university scam of treating students like cash cows to load up with debt for useless degrees. It would empower school leavers to make a choice that matches their goals based on real-world data, not leave them in the dark. This data is available. Every uni student is required to have a unique student identifier number—a USI. Everyone with a HECS debt has a tax file number. These have been going for years. It would be simple to match up tax file numbers with unique student identifiers and publish graduates’ average earnings, anonymised to protect identity. 

But the government won’t do this, because universities are powerful. They earn unfathomable amounts of money with amazingly overpaid vice-chancellors at their heads—and there’s the core. As the Australian Financial Review’s journalist Julie Hare reports: 

In 2022, Paddy Nixon, the then-vice chancellor of the University of Canberra, which was ranked equal 421st best university in the world, took home a salary package of $1,045,000—the same as Dame Louise Richardson who was running the world’s best university—Oxford. 

In South Australia, Colin Stirling, boss of Flinders University—which ranked 380th in the world—took home a pay packet of $1,345,000. That’s not bad, considering it was over $100,000 more than the salary of Lawrence Bacow, who was head of Harvard University! At the University of Queensland, the vice-chancellor earns over $1.2 million a year—more than double what the Prime Minister earns. 

Despite being defined as not-for-profit and exempt from tax on revenue, these universities are making billions of dollars. In 2023 the University of Queensland generated $2.6 billion in revenue. Half of that, $1.3 billion, was spent on employee expenses, like the vice-chancellor’s salary. The University of Queensland sits on a piggy bank of more than $4.1 billion in net assets alone. These universities are not simple little charities. They’re huge businesses rivalling the top 10 companies on Australia’s stock market. They have abused the social contract with our country and the generous guarantees that governments—taxpayers!—give them. 

This bill would make some minor changes to the indexation of HECS debt, bringing it down from 16 per cent over 2½ years to 11.1 per cent. But it only tinkers around the edges. This bill does nothing to address the fact that the average HECS debt has tripled in two decades. It does nothing to make sure that it’s worthwhile getting into debt for a degree. It does nothing to address the fact that many people going to university would be better off getting a trade qualification. It does nothing to address universities using prerecorded lectures, sometimes more than three years old, and playing them back once a week forever. There’s no expense, just lots of revenue. 

One Nation’s plan for HECS debt and universities would fix all the things this bill does not fix—all the things that this bill neglects. Inflation is compounding in a way that the original architects never expected. We need to stop the pile-on and give people time to pay down their debt. To do this, One Nation would freeze HECS indexation completely for the next three years. 

Secondly, universities must be made accountable for the degrees they’re delivering and the education they’re not delivering. One Nation would force universities to publish the average salaries of graduates from their degrees one year, five years and 10 years after graduation, so that students know what they’re signing up for. Is the debt going to be worth it? 

Delivering degrees is getting cheaper, so course fees should be getting cheaper too. One Nation would cut the fees for subjects that use repeated, prerecorded lectures and large numbers of group assignments. Our universities should be focused on delivering a good education for Australian students first. They should be focused on students first and on delivering good education. One Nation will enforce English standards for international students, so that universities aren’t sacrificing Australian educations to increase profit from international students—to the detriment of Australian students. We’ve discussed that in the past. I’ve raised it. 

Finally, having a HECS debt shouldn’t mean graduates are locked out of buying a house, which they are at the moment. In combination with our people’s mortgage scheme, offering five per cent fixed-rate mortgages, people with a HECS debt would be able to roll their debt into a home loan and pay it off together. Where they can’t get a loan from the bank because of their HECS debt, One Nation will get HECS debtors into a stable, clean, cheap home loan. 

Mr Andrew Norton, a professor in the practice of higher education policy noted during the inquiry into this bill: 

All parts of the system – the original fees charged, the indexation arrangements, and the repayment system – need to work together in a coherent way … 

The parts of this system are not working for the country. Instead, they’re working for highly paid vice-chancellors and the consultants in the education sector. 

One Nation believes in a university system that works for the students that choose to study there and in the same type of support for people doing a trade. Until we fix the core parts of the system, the Universities Accord (Student Support and Other Measures) Bill 2024 is merely tinkering around the edges. That’s all it’s doing. One Nation will make the changes needed to ensure a university system to serve students and to serve our country.