COVER STORY
NEWCASTLE University students are in such dire financial straits that some a tiny number, it is true have even married to finish their studies.
"You have a registry wedding and take proof of your marriage to Centrelink which shows you're independent of your parents so you can get the student allowance," said a student whose friend, a male, took the marriage option but refused to discuss it with a journalist because "it's a loophole, and some people are that desperate they need it".
"I was approached to do it, too, but I couldn't, although I can see why some people do. I know of other people who've done it or considered it," the student said.
Centrelink confirmed marriage, or living in a "marriage-like" arrangement, overcomes the independence test but the marriage must be for 12 months, or six months in special circumstances.
Newcastle University vice-chancellor Nick Saunders laughed when asked if he knew about students marrying to beat the independence rule requiring students to earn about $18,000 in 18 months before they can qualify for a student allowance of up to $355 a fortnight while living away from home.
But he acknowledged many students face extreme financial difficulties while trying to complete degrees, only to enter the workforce with considerable HECS debts at the end.
"I do know the whole issue of availability of student allowances is a serious one, but I haven't heard of anyone marrying, no," he said.
"The biggest change we've seen is students increasingly taking fewer subjects per year. They're staying in the system but it's all about survival and having to take on more and more jobs to fund their study."
More than 60 per cent of Australian students fail to qualify for the student allowance and have no access to income support. Those who do receive income support must report any earnings and have their allowance reduced if they work. Students have lost their allowances because Centrelink has deemed they have taken too long to complete their courses.
Welcome to university, Oz-style.
Newcastle University offered places to more than 8000 domestic and 3000 international students on Thursday night.
But earlier in the week the architect of the Higher Education Contribution Scheme (HECS), Brian Chapman, repeated his long-held view that the tertiary education funding system is chaotic and student debt nudging $15 billion, with Newcastle University students owing a lot more than $250 million is out of control.
Private college and university graduates whose courses and debts are significantly higher than public university students are costing taxpayers much more than the original scheme in 1989 ever intended, Chapman said.
New ministers of religion, with church-subsidised housing but low incomes that mean they might never have to repay their HECS debt, are another unforeseen drain.
An apparent growing brain drain of students who graduate with big HECS debts and migrate to the US, the UK, Canada and Singapore to work has prompted Chapman to call for graduates to repay debts while overseas.
Other students, including retirees, might never be required to repay their HECS debts because they will never reach the annual income minimum of nearly $40,000 at which HECS must be repaid. It is not taken out of people's estates.
Vice-chancellor Saunders, and many others, are seriously concerned about the shift from public funding of universities to students that occurred over the 11 years of the Howard government, and are calling on the Rudd Government to make good its promises of dramatically cutting university fees by increasing overall tertiary education funding.
"If you look at university funding across the world, we are now a country where students are paying for a very high proportion of their education," Saunders said.
It's the inequities within the system that are of most concern.
"I feel pretty uncomfortable that a law student is paying for 85 per cent of their education while a medical student is paying for 30 per cent," he said.
Reduced federal funding, weighted government subsidies for certain courses and years of tinkering has meant "what we've ended up with, because of a piecemeal approach, often with good intentions, is a very strange beast", Saunders said.
The wider social and economic implications of having more than 1 million Australians with university debts prompted the Council of Australian Postgraduate Associations (CAPA) in 2003, and the National Tertiary Education Industry Union (NTEIU) in 2007, to call for urgent research in the area.
Both bodies cited a Senate report in 1997 when the new Howard government introduced a three tier, significantly more expensive university fee structure that said it was "crucial" that the social and economic impacts of the cost shift from government to students was monitored because of "uncertainty surrounding the impact of the new HECS".
The government subsequently disbanded the Higher Education Council, "effectively removing the only body monitoring the impact of HECS", the CAPA report noted.
Areas that needed to be investigated included how HECS debt affected the capacity of graduates to own a home, have a family and access private finance such as mortgages, personal loans and credit cards.
The CAPA and NTEIU reports found:
· While real Federal Government funding to universities doubled to $14 billion between 1996 and 2005, the government included HECS loans which are repaid by students in that figure so that the real purchasing power of the grants fell by 2.9 per cent over the period. This led the OECD to conclude in 2003 that Australia had the lowest share of public expenditure on tertiary education of all countries reported.
· Full-fee paying international students represented the most important source of revenue, jumping from $658 million (2005 dollar values) in 1996 to $2.135 billion in 2005.
· Australian Bureau of Statistics figures have shown the number of 25-34 year olds leaving the country to work in the US, Singapore, the UK and Canada was at record levels, leading CAPA to conclude that "increasing HECS debt will increase the disincentive for Australian professionals to remain in the country"; home ownership rates in that age bracket have dropped significantly, with the ABS concluding in 2002 that HECS had an impact on the national home ownership and rental markets.
· While Australian studies have found rising HECS fees have not had an impact on university enrolments, a British study on attitudes to debt found worrying differences between groups considering taking on debt. The most anti-debt were lone parents, people from low social classes and minority groups, while the least anti-debt were those who attended private schools, came from the highest social classes and men.
Nick Saunders this week said a "tipping point" beyond which students would not be able to see the benefits of taking on university debts was close to being reached.
BRYDIE Greedy, of Adamstown, will have a HECS debt of more than $20,000 when she finishes a five-year arts/science degree.
She is worried about feeling "trapped" into continuing the science portion of the degree after a year or two of study, because of the financial commitment she has already made.
"I don't come from a rich background in any sense so I'll be working and hopefully getting a student allowance," she said.
JONATHAN Moylan, a welfare officer with Newcastle University student union, is completing a three-year bachelor of arts degree, does not qualify for a student allowance, has no guarantee of a job when he graduates and often survives on $120 a week he earns as a tutor, with $90 of that paying for rent.
"I'm all the time hearing of students who've left university because they can't afford it anymore. That's why we call it student poverty, because it's real," he said.
The most disadvantaged students of all international full-fee paying students are often victims of unscrupulous landlords and employers, and face severe restrictions on their ability to work, he said.
"The message under the system we have is if you're a student, you really have no right to a standard of living," he said.
PHILLIPA Hutchings is an engineering student virtually guaranteed a $100,000 mining job when she graduates. Her HECS debt of $10,000, after paying for one year of study and receiving a scholarship for the second, is "not such a concern", she said. But friends without guaranteed high-paying jobs were obviously worried, she said.
CLAIRE Koller-Smith, 18, of Garden Suburb, has an invoice for an $8000 HECS debt after finishing her first year of a commerce/law degree. She hopes to do merchant banking, but knows she will almost certainly start her career as a relatively lowly-paid solicitor.
"It's a five-year course. It's a bit overwhelming to know that at my age I'm in that much debt already and it's going to get a lot bigger," she said. "I live at home. I wouldn't be able to study full-time if I didn't, and I know I have to get a good job at the end to be able to pay the debt back."
"Is it worth it? Hopefully, it will be."
"What we've ended up with, because of a piecemeal approach, often with good intentions, is a very strange beast." Nick Saunders
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