NTEU Releases Report Arguing the Cost of University Degrees to HECS Students has Doubled Under the Federal Coalition. (July 19, 2004)

    In January 2003, the National Tertiary Education Union published a research report, Students Pay More, Universities Get Less. This cited data showing that government funding for subsidised university places fell per fulltime student place between 1996 and 2001,and that an average student was paying more for their government subsidised university education.
 

The NTEU has now provided updated figures to cover the period 1996 to 2003. The figures support their contention that students are paying even more and universities are receiving even less.

NTEU's Figure 1 (above) shows that in 2003 dollar values:

• students paid on average $2,137 per year more toward the cost of a government subsidised university place in 2003 than they did in 1996,

• over a four year degree this is an increase of over $8,500,

• the contribution students make to the cost of their education has almost doubled from 19.6% in 1996 to 38.0% in 2003, and

• while students were paying more, universities received $1,740 less per student in 2003 than they did in 1996.

In short students are paying more for government subsidised university places while university funding for these places has fallen under the Federal Coalition.

NTEU has made a copy of the updated report available in which it sets out the data from which its conclusions are drawn. It'll be interesting to see what response Dr Nelson makes to the NTEU assessment because as it stands, it is strongly supportive of the conclusion that the Federal Government is upping student fees not to improve Australia's universities but rather to divert public funding to areas it considers more worthwhile.