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University of Sydney arts student Brynn Daly said she did not choose her course based on fees.Credit:Brook Mitchell

The latest Universities Admissions Centre data showed the proportion of year 12 students applying for society and culture courses in NSW increased 9 per cent between 2020 and 2022. Demand for the state’s most popular humanities degree,a Bachelor of Arts at Sydney University,increased 28 per cent in the same time period.

The Coalition government in 2020 announced an overhaul of university funding – dubbed the Job Ready Graduates reforms – with society and culture,communications,commerce,economics and law degrees attracting the highest annual fees of $14,630 per year. It resulted in a 110 per cent increase in fees for most humanities degrees.

Other degrees – including for education,foreign languages,nursing,maths and engineering – deemed areas of demand for the national economy,were reduced in cost.

Australia National University higher education policy professor Andrew Norton said it was an unnecessary policy as research showed student contributions had little impact on students’ course preferences.

Instead,students were driven by personal interest and broader financial implications such as employment prospects.

“Why would you do something that doesn’t interest you just to have $10,000 to $30,000[debt] over a lifetime?” he said. “Even though it hasn’t changed the choices of prospective students it does mean they’ll have many extra years of HELP repayments.”

University of Sydney arts student Brynn Daly said the cost of her course had little bearing on her choice of degree and she was unsurprised demand had risen despite the fee hikes.

“I was pretty set on wanting to study politics and French,” she said.

“The thing that has been frustrating as an arts student is that we’ve heard all these things about fee increases,but we’ve actually suffered a lot of cuts to subjects.”

Daly said introducing fee hikes as a way to discourage students from studying an arts degree was never going to work.

“Most people I know didn’t choose subjects based on fee costs,we picked our subjects based on interest or future career,but I know that does come from a bit of a privilege though,” she said.

“Humanities are so important,they have taught me so many critical thinking skills and different ways of approaching real-world problems.”

Professor Catharine Coleborne,president of the Australasian Council of Deans of Arts,Social Sciences and Humanities,said on top of passing the debt burden onto students the fee hikes had also created problems for funding of Science,Technology,Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) courses.

She said universities were receiving less income from STEM subjects under the changes,making it more difficult to deliver and maintain the expensive courses.

“Students are still choosing[humanities] because there is a large number of people in the workface who studied these degrees and that’s therefore evidence that workforces need these sets of skills,” she said.

“The reforms haven’t resulted in anything much at all except a reorganisation of budgets inside universities.

“It could end up having the kind of impact longer-term of swaying students but so far it hasn’t done anything at all.”

Norton said the new Labor government should quickly enact legislation to reduce the fees hikes.

“Unfortunately,it won’t be possible to do a simple reversal .... they can’t afford to in the current budget climate because of the additional subsidy it would require,” he said.

“But they can do a budget-neutral swapping around of courses.”

Education Minister Jason Clare said fee hike reversals would be examined as part of the review of the job-ready graduates package that was committed to by the previous government.

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