Australia¡¯s new government should ¡°maintain and strengthen¡± the contentious Job-Ready Graduates (JRG) reforms to help sustain higher education¡¯s contribution to the ¡°momentum¡± of economic growth, according to the opposition.

Shadow education minister Alan Tudge believes that the Labor government, which ¡°outlined very little policy in higher education¡± before the May election, risks engendering inertia unless it pursues the previous government¡¯s reform agenda.

This includes maintaining efforts to boost commercial returns from university research, by guaranteeing funding support for schemes like?Australia¡¯s Economic Accelerator?and the?Trailblazer Universities initiative.

¡°With strong economic headwinds and an absence of Labor policy to ameliorate this and drive productivity, I suggest that continuing our higher education reforms is vital,¡± he was set to tell the Universities Australia (UA) conference in Canberra.

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In a prepared speech obtained by?Times Higher Education, Mr Tudge offers a spirited defence of the JRG package which ¨C among other things ¨C reduced fees in perceived skill shortage areas and raised them in arts and business courses.

¡°We know from enrolment data that students responded to these price signals. Witness the increased enrolments in courses such as teaching, nursing, engineering, IT, sciences and agriculture. It was not a perfect correlation because students choose courses for many reasons, not just price signals. However, it did have an impact,¡± he was due to say.

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¡°The Labor Party spent much of the last three years criticising our ambition in these reforms. They will be under significant pressure¡­to now reverse them.¡±

The speech says earlier changes to the funding of university places, which saw them bankrolled at the ¡°aggregate¡± rather than faculty level, made the reforms necessary. ¡°There was an absence of policy settings to ensure that national skills priorities were being addressed through course offerings. JRG¡­created this policy setting while still leaving flexibility to university administrations over which courses they offer,¡± Mr Tudge was set to say.

Mr Tudge received qualified support from former cabinet colleague Mathias Cormann, who was Australia¡¯s longest-serving finance minister before he left politics in 2020 to become secretary-general of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD).

In a televised address, Mr Cormann told the conference that the JRG reforms had been ¡°the first of their kind across the OECD. They will help attract students to fields with good employment outcomes linked to national priorities and skills needs.¡±

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But this had reinforced a trend of funding universities increasingly through student fees. Mr Cormann said that while Australia¡¯s pioneering introduction of income-contingent loans had delivered a ¡°socially just and now widely accepted form of cost sharing¡±, this system of funding was ¡°clearly reflected¡± in the OECD data.

¡°The total spending per student in Australia on higher education remains around 30 per cent above the OECD average, but only one-third of this comes from public sources compared to an average of over two-thirds in the OECD,¡± he said.

¡°No doubt the conversation about the appropriate long-term resourcing of higher education¡­which as a former finance minister, I remember well¡­will continue.¡±

UA chair John Dewar told the conference that while the JRG package had ¡°some good parts to it, like the return of grant indexation¡±, total funding for teaching had been reduced by an average of 6 per cent.

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¡°Conditions have changed,¡± Professor Dewar said. ¡°It¡¯s likely that changes to the policy framework will be needed to enable universities to keep delivering what students, employers and the nation need.¡±

Education minister Jason Clare, who has promised a review of JRG, made no mention of the reform package in his address to the UA conference.

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john.ross@timeshighereducation.com