Its actually one of the big problems these days — people work too many hours, don’t learn anything, and then expect us to pass them (which of course we do). Then people wonder why undergraduate degrees are devalued.

Russell - No, I think it is all students. The numbers across the table add to 100, accounting for the activities of everyone.

The AVCC data on student finances did not have anything on socioeconomic background. It would seem intuitively likely that poorer students are more likely to being working excess hours, though not the poorest (family income <$30,000) who get the full Youth Allowance. However, this is an area in which intuition has often been shown to be wrong. Given the extraordinary lifestyles that some students appear to enjoy excess hours could be spread more evenly accross the SES spectrum than people think.

I was actually an opponent of the VSU legislation, as I oppose all price control in higher education. I wrote numerous articles opposing the bill. However, I doubt it will have any net significant negative effects on student welfare. Given the large amount of waste and rorting that was going on most students will gain more welfare by not having to pay a multi-hundred dollar bill at the start of the year and only purchasing services they want to use. And universities either already ran or picked up the running of many of the welfare services.

Russell - I slightly misread the table before. Of all students (including international) university offer rates were local Protestant school 80%, local government school 78% and local Catholic school 76%. Of Australian students only, the following percentages were at university or deferred: Local Catholic school 75%, local government school 72% and local Protestant school 67%. At least in my day the latter was very non-selective, deliberately taking ‘problem’ children as part of its Christian mission to turn them around (with some success at least; I remember one mother in tears expressing her gratitude for the transformation in her son). Whether this policy has survived into this more academically ambitious time I do not know.

We know that in universities there is a large and possibly growing under-representation of students from low social backgrounds and from government schools. If one accepts the results of this study, it is not because poor kids are disadvantaged once they get to university. Rather, the under-representation is principally due to the inability of poor young people to meet the ‘entrance’ qualifying scores required. So the problem should be principally traced back to the secondary education system - and going back further to pre-school and primary education - more than to universities per se. I accept the gist of this argument – which is why I have focused my main work on the former rather than universities.

Yet I find it hard to believe that poorer kids face no handicap at all once in universities. We have evidence indicating that low incomes and the stress of combining studies with long hours of paid work seriously hamper the education efforts of poorer Australian university students.

I also believe - and this may get you worked up a bit Andrew - that this particular problem may be set to get worse as a result of the Government’s ban on compulsory student unionism. Students from really low socio-economic backgrounds were by far the biggest users of the union facilities and subsidies; they are now the biggest losers and are being forced to rely on charities. The Vice-Chancellor’s Committee recently warned that “fifty per cent of students were neglecting their studies to work” and advocated an increase in the youth allowance and more financial assistance to those in lower socio-economic groups.