Update poverty data and widen student discounts, say universities

The representative body for Australian universities has called for an urgent stocktake of student finances, saying current welfare settings were designed before Covid-19, war and supply chain chaos caused runaway inflation.

A Universities Australia (UA) analysis has found that students’ rents have risen by about 40 per cent since 2021, with groceries up 27 per cent, utilities up 39 per cent and fuel up 43 per cent. Yet the last comprehensive survey of student finances was conducted almost a decade ago.

“We wouldn’t run Australia’s cost of living policy using household data last collected in 2017,” chief executive Luke Sheehy told the Australian Centre for Student Equity and Success (ACSES) policy symposium in Brisbane. “We shouldn’t run student policy that way either.

“Let’s find out what students have to say about rental pressures, how much they are working, whether work is keeping them out of class, what they’re cutting back on, whether they’ve moved to part-time study, why they defer, and why some leave.”

UA also wants all students to be granted eligibility for concessions cards entitling them to discounts on transport, healthcare, power, water, car registration and other services.  

While these concessions vary from state to state, they are generally only available to students receiving income support through Youth Allowance, Austudy or ABSTUDY. Only about 150,000 of Australia’s 1.1 million domestic higher education students qualify for these schemes.

“You can have two students sitting next to each other in the same lecture, paying the same rent, shopping at the same supermarket, catching the same bus to campus,” Sheehy said. “One gets access to those concessions; the other doesn’t. That doesn’t make much sense to me.”

Times Higher Education understands that UA is pushing the idea through the Better Regulation Working Group, which was convened earlier this year to track universities’ regulatory burden. Student concessions are generally handled by the eight states and territories, with great variability in what is discounted and who qualifies.

A uniform scheme open to all students could be easier to run and arguably fairer, given that the vast majority of students miss out on most concessions because they are not eligible for income support.

While such an approach would be untargeted, delivering equal benefits to disadvantaged and wealthy students, the government has displayed an appetite for untargeted measures by forgiving 20 per cent of all graduates’ outstanding student debt – irrespective of their individual financial circumstances.

But untargeted eligibility rules can lead to limited resources being spread too thinly. In 2008, higher education reviewer Denise Bradley engineered a complete overhaul of income support schemes she concluded were “inadequate” to meet the needs of struggling students, partly because they were drawn on by people living at home with wealthy parents.

While a universal concession card may be a bridge too far for the government, advocates want more focus on student poverty. Aanavi Raj, a psychology student at the University of Queensland, told the symposium that she often had to sacrifice meals to pay for the fuel she needed to ferry herself to work outside Brisbane.

Tertiary education consultant Claire Field said the emergence of university-run food banks was “one of the most visible indicators” of students’ financial stress. “There is now a widening divide between students who can rely on parental support and those who cannot,” Field wrote in ACSES’ Equity Insights report.

Education minister Jason Clare acknowledged the problem. “It’s not just the cost of degrees that’s important; it’s the cost of living while you’re getting [them],” he told the symposium. “There’s a lot more that we have to do to make our higher education system better and fairer.”

john.ross@timeshighereducation.com