Not All Beer And Skittles As Uni Students Pay The Price

The Age

Friday February 25, 2005

By ANGELA O'CONNOR and ORIETTA GUERRERA

JOSH Sheehan is paying full fees for his arts degree at Melbourne University - but even he thinks the system is not fair.

The Age yesterday revealed a big increase in the proportion of full-fee-paying students at Melbourne University.

At the university's orientation activities, Mr Sheehan was the exception to the popular view of students that no one would admit to being a full-fee-paying student.

At 26, Mr Sheehan said it was a long time since he had been at school. If he had to pay for his education, he'd pay with the help of a loan and supporting himself by working 25 hours a week.

But he doesn't agree in principle with the system that lets in students with ENTER scores below the cut-off, providing they pay full fees. "Education should be free," he said. "Or there should be more HECS places."

A law student, who did not want to be named, said it would be even less likely that students would identify themselves as full-fee-paying after the revelations in yesterday's Age.

The number of full-fee-paying places at universities was too high, according to Opposition education spokeswoman Jenny Macklin, who was on the lawn of the university cooking sausages at the ALP Club table.

"It was a large increase in a very short time," she said.

The revelation that there were at least four courses at Melbourne University where more than 35 per cent of students had paid full fees for their place showed that the Howard Government was hell-bent on introducing a US-style system where money came before merit, she said.

The architect of the HECS system, ANU professor Bruce Chapman, said figures showing an increasing number of commencing students taking up full-fee places were "completely unsurprising".

Professor Chapman had previously predicted that 10 per cent of local students would be enrolled as full-fee payers by 2008 - up from 2 per cent now - as full-fee students are eligible for a government loan for the first time this year. Yesterday he said his initial estimate was always a "fairly cautious" guess.

"The point I wanted to make was that when this discussion started a year or two ago, people were very much underestimating the potential for this to take off," Professor Chapman said.

A spokesman for Education Minister Brendan Nelson yesterday defended the right of local students to have access to full-fee courses.

© 2005 The Age

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