Why students are still flocking to humanities degrees at university despite huge fee increases & More Trending News

University of Sydney arts pupil Brynn Daly stated the price of her course had little bearing on her selection of diploma and she or he was unsurprised demand had risen despite the fee hikes.

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

“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 stated introducing fee hikes as a approach to discourage students from learning an arts diploma was by no means 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 stated.

“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, stated on prime of passing the debt burden onto students the fee hikes had additionally created issues for funding of Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) programs.

She stated universities had been receiving much less earnings from STEM topics underneath the adjustments, making it harder to ship and keep the costly programs.

“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 stated.

“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 stated the brand new Labor authorities ought to shortly enact laws to scale back the charges 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 stated.

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

Education Minister Jason Clare stated fee hike reversals can be examined as a part of the evaluation of the job-ready graduates bundle that was dedicated to by the earlier authorities.

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