This is going to be particularily so given the rather fast move towards getting students to pay for their clinical training (direct, or indirectly by asking the university to pay for it), which has often been historically free in many areas. THis means that the actual costs of these courses is likely to increase dramatically, and I can imagine that particularily high fees in some of these courses are not going to be politically popular with the government (or the populace at large), and hence untenable (Melbourne University exluded), given the constant scare mongering which already goes on about these fees.

The 25% is not mentioned anywhere in legislation. I just so happened that the 3 bands of maximum student contribution amounts set by the government were 25% above the rates set by differential HECS when it was introduced in 1997. What is going to happen is that Commerce will move from band 2 to band 3, the highest band.

There is unlikely to be any substitution, as I explained in criticising Labor’s plan to cut HECS for maths and science. Students are primarily driven by their interests in choosing between disciplines. And if a prospective economics student can’t work out than an extra $3,000 is trivial in terms of their lifetime earnings then clearly they are not suited to economics in the first place!

The government sets a particular level of HECS contribution per student in a particular discipline of X. Universities are able to mark up this amount by up to 25 per cent. My understanding is that most universities have chosen the maximum markup, so that HR is equal to 1.25X.

Clearly the announced changes will alter TR. Do they do this by altering X or altering SR? It seems that they amount to a reduction in SR. However, what is the impact on X? Is there any impact on X? If X falls along with SR, then TR must fall. If X stays the same then TR must fall. If X increases, then the impact on TR will be ambiguous. It will depend on the increase in X relative to the decrease in SR. It will also depend on each universities choice about the size of the markup. My understanding is that this markup is still limited to be at most 25 % of X.

If X increases by enough to allow universities to potentially recover the decrease in SR, then the effective price facing the students for Economics degrees (and other degrees in the business area) will rise relative to other courses. This leads me to wonder about the extent of substitutability between courses.

Yeah, lawyers are great. I wish I was a lawyer.

Pity engineering sucked me in with it’s impossibly-high workload and (relatively) low wages.

Law is where the real future is, but no one seems to realise it.
We need more people to tell us what we should and shouldn’t do, and get paid lots to do it.

Damn people wanting to just be happy! Thank God the lawyers are here to introduce a bit of reality into their (now) process-driven lives.

Neither the current system, nor de-regulated models do that. The current system encourages unis to blow-out law numbers to make up for shortfalls in other disciplines (even though law is underfunded on the current metric). De-regulated models simply pander to the market. Demand for law is mostly arational: coming from students with little interest or aptitude, but certain socio-economic aspirations (often injected by their parents). Law is not alone in this.

“Bishop said the change reflected the higher salaries that graduates in those disciplines received over a lifetime. Universities were free to decide whether they would raise the fees for these disciplines.”

In relation to “the lifetime earnings of Commerce graduates” (say) above - does the distribution of lifetime earnings of Commerce graduates (or graduates of other disciplines) have a small variance” If the lifetime earnings has a large variance, what is the justification for linking supposed lifetime earnings with potential fees for those courses?