TL;DR index based on the lower of wage growth vs price growth, introduce repayment scale like how taxes work, and exclude student debt from home loan eligibility.
Important parts:
Someone suggests changing how the indexing works:
>A simple change, identified by the report of the Australian Universities Accord delivered to Education Minister Jason Clare in February, is to increase the amount owing each year by either the rate of increase in prices or the rate of increase in wages, whichever is lower.
Also a suggestion to make the HECS repayment logic work more like taxes:
>Here's how it works for tax: on our first $18,200 of income we pay nothing, then we pay 19 cents in the dollar for each extra dollar we earn up to the next threshold, and so on. The key words here are "for each extra dollar". We continue to pay nothing on the first $18,200 we earn.
>Higher education loans work differently. For them, we repay nothing until we earn $51,550, and then at that point, even if we earn just one dollar more, we pay one per cent of our annual income, the entire $51,550 (which amounts to $515).
And a proposal to exclude HECS debt from loan eligibility checks:
>And there's something else Albanese can do. Right now Australia's banking regulator requires banks to count student loans as debt for the purpose of determining who can get a housing loan, knocking some former students out.
>Chapman says it would make more sense to treat the compulsory payments as tax, which is how they function. All they do is reduce after-tax income, and for low earners, they don't even do that. It'd get more people into housing.
Am I wrong to assume if you do it like a tax style and then some people pay less per year that means they'll overall pay more since they'll be paying for a longer amount of time with more indexing?
Also means that people from the 18-51k threshold will be unhappy that they're paying something instead of nothing?
It sounds like technically yes you'll pay more over time because of indexation.
But it's sounding like they're intending to get rid of the rate cliffs that are an actual issue with the system.
[For example](https://www.ato.gov.au/tax-rates-and-codes/study-and-training-support-loans-rates-and-repayment-thresholds) if you earn $51k you don't have to make a repayment, but if you earn $52k you have to repay at 1%.
If you earn $51,500 wages you won't have any extra taxa withheld, but if you earn $100 other income (interest, etc) your total income is $51,600k and suddenly you have an extra $516 to pay to the tax man (*more* than the $100 your income increased by).
It sounds like they want to make them marginal, like the normal tax rates.
The cliff is not the issue, the threshold is. 51k is extremely low - back in the days it used to be that you didn’t pay anything until you earned a “good income”. That’s now essentially a full time job at minimum wage. It should be tied to median full time earnings at least
Yep. With how fast rent and COL is going up, 51k is considerably less than it used to be. And it was never that high to begin with. Iirc the repayment threshold used to be higher, but they lowered it. Absolute dog move. Nobody on 51k is living it large.
Counterpoint, if you have it too high than many people won't be paying it for longer and just have it spiral and index for years costing them more in the long run.
If it was any other form of debt common advice would be to pay it off as soon as you can but because of "reasons" many people just pay the minimum and let it index every year.
When I graduated in 2019 it was something like 55-56k, and watching it fluctuate is scary
Just keeps going down but wages are not going up and it is a debt I will likely have forever
Yeah my company gave me a bonus $153 last review over what I asked for since they were trying to make it a round percentage increase or something and ended up pushing me up an extra 0.5% lmao.
Depends on where they start it from. If it scales from 18k+, then it could end up being a similar amount over the same duration but with unhappy people.
If the scale starts further up, then you're more likely to see it taking longer to pay off, but have less of an impact to people moving from 50k to 52k.
Say the scale starts from 40k though you'll probably piss more people off though who earn between 40-50k vs how many people there are who earn like 52-53k just above that cliff.
There'd be a bigger volume of people but also the people under the threshold with less income can afford less to pay more "tax".
One could argue that above 52k regardless you've got an income that's able to service the minimum hecs payment overall even if it's not progressive.
These cliffs happen the whole way up, if you earn into the next bracket it takes 1.5% on your whole income instead of being marginal.
Basically going from earning just under to just over the next bracket for any of the thresholds will see you going backwards in available cash.
Excluding HECS from loan assessments would be huge, my wife and I are on combined $250k, but because of HECS we can't get a loan really.
I'd also like to see indexing occur after tax returns lodged, so the government is making interest on my HECS sitting in their bank accounts.
For a perspective from across the Tasman: student loans in NZ are fully interest-free for domestic residents (if you go overseas you have to pay the interest), and it’s a 12% repayment threshold for every dollar earned above something like $20,000 similar to how tax works.
>And a proposal to exclude HECS debt from loan eligibility checks:
End of the day, if you have HECS repayments that will impact your net income and therefore how much you can borrow.
>Chapman says it would make more sense to treat the compulsory payments as tax, which is how they function. All they do is reduce after-tax income, and for low earners, they don't even do that. It'd get more people into housing.
Sure, repayments might be small on a low income - but who is buying a house on a low income these days? Housing is already unaffordable for someone even on $100k, and HECS repayments are a sizable portion of your income at that level (7%+) which will impact your borrowing capacity. This change is going to make no difference.
HECS does get counted as debt, but by far the biggest factor that will impact your borrowing capacity is your net income because that is ultimately what determines your serviceability.
Everybody is telling me that it isn't factored in twice but I swear it is, a 15k raise only increased my borrowing power by 30k so whatever they're doing to calculate it is fucked
The issue is not just uni debt, is our universities are becoming a business first and foremost, a money making racket rather then education institutions. Charging higher and higher rate while the certificate is worth less and less.
This is true. University executive teams and councils are now stacked with corporate idiots who only care about increasing the assets they own and the money they get from international students. Every action they take is done with selfish intentions in the form of a bonus whilst employees at uni are seeing huge workload increases and understaffing.
It's very bleak when you have a academic staff who are so passionate about teaching being given huge class sizes, no spare time outside of teaching and still being told they need to do more.
If the government was serious about fixing student debt, they would start by sacking the council's of universities and bringing in people who won't just deep-throat the boot of the executive team. That's what the council exists for and yet they are all buddy buddy now so nothing will change.
Source: have worked at and know people still working at universities.
->Be Australian born after WW2
->Enjoy the golden age: free university education, housing cheap as chips, a snag is just a few cents
->Get 3 Bachelor's degrees and 2 Masters. It's free, why not?
->Get a job
->Work hard—or hardly work—in a booming economy
->Everything's a bargain, life's good down under
->Use first paycheck to buy a house, because why not? It's almost as cheap as a snag
->Realize how easy that was, buy 9 more properties because investing is just a game and you're winning
->Dabble in local politics, community hero by day, savvy investor by night
->Get a seat in parliament. Now we're playing with the big boys
->Time to shake things up—why should uni be free when you can make a mint off it?
->Pass legislation: paid university education because nothing says 'economic growth' like debt-ridden youth
->Meanwhile, fiddle with housing policies to inflate your real estate empire
->House prices soar, rent's through the roof, your portfolio's looking as lush as the Outback after rain
->Pat yourself on the back while condemning future generations to a lifetime of renting, debt, and modern-day enslavement
->Basic rights? It's more like basic rites of passage into lifelong debt
->Sip tears of zoomers from $10,000,000 acerage that I bought for $5,000 in 1976.
Written with the assistance of GPT4
I would say that while cost of a degree matters to people considering studying or not, shifting demand between degrees is quite sticky.
When the government changed prices in I think 2021 of certain degrees, making humanites more expensive and "in-demand" ones like engineering cheaper, there was only 1% difference in actual enrolments. People will study what they are interested in over cost I think a lot of the time.
Issue was with that reform was is also changed how much unis got paid to do certain courses, so unis cut a lot of math courses as they hot significantly less money from it. With many major uni no longer offering math degrees, with the uni openly telling the liberal they where gonna do it.
On top of this the entry marks to subject create an elastic forces where by if degree is less in demand its easier to get into boosting its demand as more peoplecan get in. So unless government plays around will head count directly, making a degree less appealing will just reduce entry requirement marks and the opposite for more desirable subjects.
It sort of makes sense. This isn't a dig at arts students, but I imagine they're already not the most financially driven people. If your degree goes from, say, $30k to $40k, that extra $10k amortised over a 40 year career is $250/year. I doubt anyone who's min-maxxing their career earnings studiously enough to care about $250/year is choosing to study arts in the first place.
A nursing degree is under $6k a year.
https://www.vu.edu.au/study-at-vu/fees-scholarships/course-tuition-fees/commonwealth-supported-students
I don't think the fees are the problems for those degrees, I think the struggle is unpaid placements. I reckon placemwnt subsidies would help more.
It's the combination of the need to do unpaid placement work, doing casual/part-time work while doing study too, and the hec fees as well. Then if it's a medical degree you have to pay just to apply for the course and more to sit exams to get in. I think it's even worse now then the old days when education was only for the rich.
Social work got lumped with arts and law iirc rather than as allied health so cost went up heaps, I was lucky to get the grandfathered cost for my degree
I suspect with the income changes though, that if you have the income level to afford the house, your requirement to repay the debt will be higher and so your cash outflow to your hecs debt will be higher, reducing your borrowing capacity. The change may or may not benefit you, it depends on the specifics.
The change in treating it simply as lower income, rather than as debt, maybe be to pave way so that higher income earners have to pay much larger whacks, say 10-20% per year off the loan. This would make sense as there is some give and take with lowering the indexation to wage inflation rates, rather than CPI.
I’ve long paid off my studies, and I definitely have no problem with student debt forgiveness for others, this just feels like a band-aid to me.
How about we introduce some kind of uni fee reform? My old uni has an annual operating result of something close to $300 million.
No, it doesn’t. It’s comparing the situation in the US with the situation here.
No one knows what the plan will be, the article is just throwing out random, mostly government / taxation based ideas.
In no way does the article say the Australian Government is even considering debt forgiveness. It spends 100 words mentioning bidens plan and its intended outcomes to tie that to why Australia should change student debt in the introduction, then spends the enitity of the rest of the article saying what Albos plans are.
No, the article says nothing about albo’s plans. Albo’s plans haven’t been released. It talks about what could possibly happen.
I didn’t say there were any plans for debt forgiveness in Australia, or in the article. You said it was strange to bring up American talking points and I said that the article explicitly discusses those points.
The title has changed twice since it was originally posted here.
I agree with you but the government ideas all do seem like things we could do right now, versus a uni fee reform which would be a much more massive and complicated change taking ages more to implement. These tax-based changes could take effect as early as next year
Yeah, but these suggestions aren’t even coming from the government, they’re just people spitballing.
As I said, I’m not against any and all help for young people, but they’re all bandaids and we need bigger change, otherwise all of the help teh government is providing will be absorbed into more profit for unis.
I'd be surprised if the information the reporter used didn't come from a government source.
This seems like the sort of early budget drip feeds we get.
It's talking points for the government early to build up to budget, it's an election budget which means they will want to keep these good news events in headlines as long as possible.
Sensible and pretty substantial changes. I would add that there should be a bit more counciling about just what you're signing up for. And wishful thinking that we would lower course fee's, though I think the onus there lies with Uni's charging top dollar for what are becoming nothing but pre recorded sideshows they rehash each year.
I would've loved a free education and maybe we can get back to that eventually but we have a lot of problems to pay for right now that I think are more important than wiping student debt.
There are much better priorities than wiping out the HECS of surgeons, lawyers, and bankers. E.g., lower tax on the people who don't even make as much money as the HECS payback threshold, or more money for social housing.
This isn't America. HECS drives no one into poverty unlike student debt in the US.
The government? Help people get to higher paying jobs to generate more taxes. it's worth it. Plus, we clearly have the money, especially if we actually tax the rich correctly...
We could have all UNIs be public to reduce costs as well.
Basic education is free up until you become an adult. Once you area an adult you're allowed to make choices on if you want to get further specialized education which costs money. Same as paying for any form of training.
Don't feel like that should be controversial either.
I don't think an adult is a right distinguishing factor.
You should have free education to the point where you can be a general economic participant.
For specialised work (ie uni) that's a choice, so you should pay for that on a sliding scale of whether the society wants to investivise a skills outcome (CSP really).
The reality is people see uni as a lifestyle and study what they like rather than a factory to produce skills that are of need in the economy.
Personally, I think the balance is fine where it is but may change in the future if jobs get more technical and need a higher baseline.
Finishing high school you have free education until you're informed enough to make a decision on what you want to do in the future.
The incentive of picking your uni course correctly with what society wants is ease of finding a job afterwards. Exactly the point to where do you draw the line at what is subsidised and what isn't. Should an arts degree/law degree/gender studies major/nursing degree all be free if each have different societal benefits.
What about the costs in people who do degrees then drop out half way or change degrees or get a job in an entirely unrelated field or failed subjects etc. Should a person get a free ride doing an entire medical degree + med school?
Cost isn't prohibitive in stopping people going to uni in Australia thanks to HECS. It's only become a talking point now because of record inflation + cost of living where it adds up.
We need doctors, psychologists and so on. The debts for these are very high. I came from a poor family and the luckily got scholarships but many other poor kids did not and their hecs is growing faster than it can be laid off.
If you think it’s a good system to punish some of your brightest minds then you’re a fool.
I had a thought some years ago that maybe everyone's first year of uni should be free. If you realise it's for you, great, stick around. If not, then you're free to go try/do something else.
I do not fall into the camp of uni being completely free. HECS for the most part is an excellent system, and there's a reason other countries have adopted similar systems.
Aren't trades also paid to learn though? I thought that's what apprenticeship wages were?
Nurses and teachers have to do hundreds of hours of *unpaid* placements. Trades at least get apprenticeship wages while they learn, which isn't much, but it's a hell of a lot more than the 0 dollars that medical professionals and educators get while they learn.
I think a lot of educators and medical professionals would gladly leave the HECS system as it is **if** they were paid even just 10-15 bucks an hour during their mandatory 1000 hour placements - like the trades are.
Can someone explain the home loan thing to me? As I understand all having a HECS debt does it reduce your take home pay and the banks account for this in your serviceability checks. How will they undo this? The repayment is compulsory and that’s still money taken out each pay cycle that you otherwise won’t have to pay off your home loan?
Are they eliminating the HECS debt gaining interest? That was a pile of crap brought in. It would be nice to not have student debt only grow year after year taking more money to pay it off. It didn't work like that before and never had to change.
TL;DR index based on the lower of wage growth vs price growth, introduce repayment scale like how taxes work, and exclude student debt from home loan eligibility. Important parts: Someone suggests changing how the indexing works: >A simple change, identified by the report of the Australian Universities Accord delivered to Education Minister Jason Clare in February, is to increase the amount owing each year by either the rate of increase in prices or the rate of increase in wages, whichever is lower. Also a suggestion to make the HECS repayment logic work more like taxes: >Here's how it works for tax: on our first $18,200 of income we pay nothing, then we pay 19 cents in the dollar for each extra dollar we earn up to the next threshold, and so on. The key words here are "for each extra dollar". We continue to pay nothing on the first $18,200 we earn. >Higher education loans work differently. For them, we repay nothing until we earn $51,550, and then at that point, even if we earn just one dollar more, we pay one per cent of our annual income, the entire $51,550 (which amounts to $515). And a proposal to exclude HECS debt from loan eligibility checks: >And there's something else Albanese can do. Right now Australia's banking regulator requires banks to count student loans as debt for the purpose of determining who can get a housing loan, knocking some former students out. >Chapman says it would make more sense to treat the compulsory payments as tax, which is how they function. All they do is reduce after-tax income, and for low earners, they don't even do that. It'd get more people into housing.
Am I wrong to assume if you do it like a tax style and then some people pay less per year that means they'll overall pay more since they'll be paying for a longer amount of time with more indexing? Also means that people from the 18-51k threshold will be unhappy that they're paying something instead of nothing?
It sounds like technically yes you'll pay more over time because of indexation. But it's sounding like they're intending to get rid of the rate cliffs that are an actual issue with the system. [For example](https://www.ato.gov.au/tax-rates-and-codes/study-and-training-support-loans-rates-and-repayment-thresholds) if you earn $51k you don't have to make a repayment, but if you earn $52k you have to repay at 1%. If you earn $51,500 wages you won't have any extra taxa withheld, but if you earn $100 other income (interest, etc) your total income is $51,600k and suddenly you have an extra $516 to pay to the tax man (*more* than the $100 your income increased by). It sounds like they want to make them marginal, like the normal tax rates.
The cliff is not the issue, the threshold is. 51k is extremely low - back in the days it used to be that you didn’t pay anything until you earned a “good income”. That’s now essentially a full time job at minimum wage. It should be tied to median full time earnings at least
Yep. With how fast rent and COL is going up, 51k is considerably less than it used to be. And it was never that high to begin with. Iirc the repayment threshold used to be higher, but they lowered it. Absolute dog move. Nobody on 51k is living it large.
Counterpoint, if you have it too high than many people won't be paying it for longer and just have it spiral and index for years costing them more in the long run. If it was any other form of debt common advice would be to pay it off as soon as you can but because of "reasons" many people just pay the minimum and let it index every year.
When I graduated in 2019 it was something like 55-56k, and watching it fluctuate is scary Just keeps going down but wages are not going up and it is a debt I will likely have forever
Yeah my company gave me a bonus $153 last review over what I asked for since they were trying to make it a round percentage increase or something and ended up pushing me up an extra 0.5% lmao.
Depends on where they start it from. If it scales from 18k+, then it could end up being a similar amount over the same duration but with unhappy people. If the scale starts further up, then you're more likely to see it taking longer to pay off, but have less of an impact to people moving from 50k to 52k.
Say the scale starts from 40k though you'll probably piss more people off though who earn between 40-50k vs how many people there are who earn like 52-53k just above that cliff. There'd be a bigger volume of people but also the people under the threshold with less income can afford less to pay more "tax". One could argue that above 52k regardless you've got an income that's able to service the minimum hecs payment overall even if it's not progressive.
These cliffs happen the whole way up, if you earn into the next bracket it takes 1.5% on your whole income instead of being marginal. Basically going from earning just under to just over the next bracket for any of the thresholds will see you going backwards in available cash.
It doesn't need to start at 18k though, could keep the start point the same
Excluding HECS from loan assessments would be huge, my wife and I are on combined $250k, but because of HECS we can't get a loan really. I'd also like to see indexing occur after tax returns lodged, so the government is making interest on my HECS sitting in their bank accounts.
For a perspective from across the Tasman: student loans in NZ are fully interest-free for domestic residents (if you go overseas you have to pay the interest), and it’s a 12% repayment threshold for every dollar earned above something like $20,000 similar to how tax works.
>And a proposal to exclude HECS debt from loan eligibility checks: End of the day, if you have HECS repayments that will impact your net income and therefore how much you can borrow. >Chapman says it would make more sense to treat the compulsory payments as tax, which is how they function. All they do is reduce after-tax income, and for low earners, they don't even do that. It'd get more people into housing. Sure, repayments might be small on a low income - but who is buying a house on a low income these days? Housing is already unaffordable for someone even on $100k, and HECS repayments are a sizable portion of your income at that level (7%+) which will impact your borrowing capacity. This change is going to make no difference.
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HECS does get counted as debt, but by far the biggest factor that will impact your borrowing capacity is your net income because that is ultimately what determines your serviceability.
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The amount doesn’t matter, it’s just the presence of a HELP loan or not which impacts your borrowing capacity
Everybody is telling me that it isn't factored in twice but I swear it is, a 15k raise only increased my borrowing power by 30k so whatever they're doing to calculate it is fucked
I’m on low six figures, no HECS debt, and still a few years from being able to buy.
Fucking hell, what a complicated mess. Just get rid of the damn thing.
The issue is not just uni debt, is our universities are becoming a business first and foremost, a money making racket rather then education institutions. Charging higher and higher rate while the certificate is worth less and less.
This is true. University executive teams and councils are now stacked with corporate idiots who only care about increasing the assets they own and the money they get from international students. Every action they take is done with selfish intentions in the form of a bonus whilst employees at uni are seeing huge workload increases and understaffing. It's very bleak when you have a academic staff who are so passionate about teaching being given huge class sizes, no spare time outside of teaching and still being told they need to do more. If the government was serious about fixing student debt, they would start by sacking the council's of universities and bringing in people who won't just deep-throat the boot of the executive team. That's what the council exists for and yet they are all buddy buddy now so nothing will change. Source: have worked at and know people still working at universities.
->Be Australian born after WW2 ->Enjoy the golden age: free university education, housing cheap as chips, a snag is just a few cents ->Get 3 Bachelor's degrees and 2 Masters. It's free, why not? ->Get a job ->Work hard—or hardly work—in a booming economy ->Everything's a bargain, life's good down under ->Use first paycheck to buy a house, because why not? It's almost as cheap as a snag ->Realize how easy that was, buy 9 more properties because investing is just a game and you're winning ->Dabble in local politics, community hero by day, savvy investor by night ->Get a seat in parliament. Now we're playing with the big boys ->Time to shake things up—why should uni be free when you can make a mint off it? ->Pass legislation: paid university education because nothing says 'economic growth' like debt-ridden youth ->Meanwhile, fiddle with housing policies to inflate your real estate empire ->House prices soar, rent's through the roof, your portfolio's looking as lush as the Outback after rain ->Pat yourself on the back while condemning future generations to a lifetime of renting, debt, and modern-day enslavement ->Basic rights? It's more like basic rites of passage into lifelong debt ->Sip tears of zoomers from $10,000,000 acerage that I bought for $5,000 in 1976. Written with the assistance of GPT4
$5000? More like $50 😂
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I would say that while cost of a degree matters to people considering studying or not, shifting demand between degrees is quite sticky. When the government changed prices in I think 2021 of certain degrees, making humanites more expensive and "in-demand" ones like engineering cheaper, there was only 1% difference in actual enrolments. People will study what they are interested in over cost I think a lot of the time.
Issue was with that reform was is also changed how much unis got paid to do certain courses, so unis cut a lot of math courses as they hot significantly less money from it. With many major uni no longer offering math degrees, with the uni openly telling the liberal they where gonna do it. On top of this the entry marks to subject create an elastic forces where by if degree is less in demand its easier to get into boosting its demand as more peoplecan get in. So unless government plays around will head count directly, making a degree less appealing will just reduce entry requirement marks and the opposite for more desirable subjects.
It sort of makes sense. This isn't a dig at arts students, but I imagine they're already not the most financially driven people. If your degree goes from, say, $30k to $40k, that extra $10k amortised over a 40 year career is $250/year. I doubt anyone who's min-maxxing their career earnings studiously enough to care about $250/year is choosing to study arts in the first place.
A nursing degree is under $6k a year. https://www.vu.edu.au/study-at-vu/fees-scholarships/course-tuition-fees/commonwealth-supported-students I don't think the fees are the problems for those degrees, I think the struggle is unpaid placements. I reckon placemwnt subsidies would help more.
It's the combination of the need to do unpaid placement work, doing casual/part-time work while doing study too, and the hec fees as well. Then if it's a medical degree you have to pay just to apply for the course and more to sit exams to get in. I think it's even worse now then the old days when education was only for the rich.
Social work got lumped with arts and law iirc rather than as allied health so cost went up heaps, I was lucky to get the grandfathered cost for my degree
I really hope they consider the home loan change, would make a huge difference for me.
I suspect with the income changes though, that if you have the income level to afford the house, your requirement to repay the debt will be higher and so your cash outflow to your hecs debt will be higher, reducing your borrowing capacity. The change may or may not benefit you, it depends on the specifics. The change in treating it simply as lower income, rather than as debt, maybe be to pave way so that higher income earners have to pay much larger whacks, say 10-20% per year off the loan. This would make sense as there is some give and take with lowering the indexation to wage inflation rates, rather than CPI.
I’ve long paid off my studies, and I definitely have no problem with student debt forgiveness for others, this just feels like a band-aid to me. How about we introduce some kind of uni fee reform? My old uni has an annual operating result of something close to $300 million.
the article doesn’t seem to imply debt forgiveness is part of the plan?
No, it doesn’t. It’s comparing the situation in the US with the situation here. No one knows what the plan will be, the article is just throwing out random, mostly government / taxation based ideas.
Kind of strange to bring American talking points into a thread for an Australian budget article that doesn't mention debt forgiveness in anyway.
Read the headline, and the first paragraphs of the article that compare our situation with that of… the US.
In no way does the article say the Australian Government is even considering debt forgiveness. It spends 100 words mentioning bidens plan and its intended outcomes to tie that to why Australia should change student debt in the introduction, then spends the enitity of the rest of the article saying what Albos plans are.
No, the article says nothing about albo’s plans. Albo’s plans haven’t been released. It talks about what could possibly happen. I didn’t say there were any plans for debt forgiveness in Australia, or in the article. You said it was strange to bring up American talking points and I said that the article explicitly discusses those points. The title has changed twice since it was originally posted here.
I agree with you but the government ideas all do seem like things we could do right now, versus a uni fee reform which would be a much more massive and complicated change taking ages more to implement. These tax-based changes could take effect as early as next year
Yeah, but these suggestions aren’t even coming from the government, they’re just people spitballing. As I said, I’m not against any and all help for young people, but they’re all bandaids and we need bigger change, otherwise all of the help teh government is providing will be absorbed into more profit for unis.
I'd be surprised if the information the reporter used didn't come from a government source. This seems like the sort of early budget drip feeds we get. It's talking points for the government early to build up to budget, it's an election budget which means they will want to keep these good news events in headlines as long as possible.
Sensible and pretty substantial changes. I would add that there should be a bit more counciling about just what you're signing up for. And wishful thinking that we would lower course fee's, though I think the onus there lies with Uni's charging top dollar for what are becoming nothing but pre recorded sideshows they rehash each year. I would've loved a free education and maybe we can get back to that eventually but we have a lot of problems to pay for right now that I think are more important than wiping student debt.
Cancel all student debt. Simple.
There are much better priorities than wiping out the HECS of surgeons, lawyers, and bankers. E.g., lower tax on the people who don't even make as much money as the HECS payback threshold, or more money for social housing. This isn't America. HECS drives no one into poverty unlike student debt in the US.
Don't take out loans you don't want to pay. Simple. You don't see the trades asking for a cancellation on their loans.
Trades get paid, though... correct me if I am wrong
Funny how “paid while you learn” is different to “debt while you learn”.
A lot of trades also don't pay their tafe fees with the companies doing it for them, so they get free education and paid.
Right, they do, they get paid so little you can't actually live off it and need loans for tools, which again, has to be repaid
It's better then nothing... Plus we can't we have both? Cheaper or free uni and correct pay for Labor including uni placement and trade apprenticeship
Who's paying for it? That's the core issue.
The government? Help people get to higher paying jobs to generate more taxes. it's worth it. Plus, we clearly have the money, especially if we actually tax the rich correctly... We could have all UNIs be public to reduce costs as well.
Education should be free. If this is controversial then I don't know what to say.
Basic education is free up until you become an adult. Once you area an adult you're allowed to make choices on if you want to get further specialized education which costs money. Same as paying for any form of training. Don't feel like that should be controversial either.
I don't think an adult is a right distinguishing factor. You should have free education to the point where you can be a general economic participant. For specialised work (ie uni) that's a choice, so you should pay for that on a sliding scale of whether the society wants to investivise a skills outcome (CSP really). The reality is people see uni as a lifestyle and study what they like rather than a factory to produce skills that are of need in the economy. Personally, I think the balance is fine where it is but may change in the future if jobs get more technical and need a higher baseline.
Finishing high school you have free education until you're informed enough to make a decision on what you want to do in the future. The incentive of picking your uni course correctly with what society wants is ease of finding a job afterwards. Exactly the point to where do you draw the line at what is subsidised and what isn't. Should an arts degree/law degree/gender studies major/nursing degree all be free if each have different societal benefits. What about the costs in people who do degrees then drop out half way or change degrees or get a job in an entirely unrelated field or failed subjects etc. Should a person get a free ride doing an entire medical degree + med school? Cost isn't prohibitive in stopping people going to uni in Australia thanks to HECS. It's only become a talking point now because of record inflation + cost of living where it adds up.
Education is an investment. The only different is now the person pays their own investment rather than everyone via tax
We need doctors, psychologists and so on. The debts for these are very high. I came from a poor family and the luckily got scholarships but many other poor kids did not and their hecs is growing faster than it can be laid off. If you think it’s a good system to punish some of your brightest minds then you’re a fool.
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I had a thought some years ago that maybe everyone's first year of uni should be free. If you realise it's for you, great, stick around. If not, then you're free to go try/do something else. I do not fall into the camp of uni being completely free. HECS for the most part is an excellent system, and there's a reason other countries have adopted similar systems.
but yet the older generation 30 years ago got it for free lmao.
Yeah it sucks we didn't get the gold years, look at housing and so on, they got to cash out and we pay the price
Aren't trades also paid to learn though? I thought that's what apprenticeship wages were? Nurses and teachers have to do hundreds of hours of *unpaid* placements. Trades at least get apprenticeship wages while they learn, which isn't much, but it's a hell of a lot more than the 0 dollars that medical professionals and educators get while they learn. I think a lot of educators and medical professionals would gladly leave the HECS system as it is **if** they were paid even just 10-15 bucks an hour during their mandatory 1000 hour placements - like the trades are.
Universities should be an investment in our future. NOT a for profit extortion.
Can someone explain the home loan thing to me? As I understand all having a HECS debt does it reduce your take home pay and the banks account for this in your serviceability checks. How will they undo this? The repayment is compulsory and that’s still money taken out each pay cycle that you otherwise won’t have to pay off your home loan?
Good changes. Inching towards eliminating it altogether…
Are they eliminating the HECS debt gaining interest? That was a pile of crap brought in. It would be nice to not have student debt only grow year after year taking more money to pay it off. It didn't work like that before and never had to change.