Get Ready For Uni Fees To Go Through The Roof

Bad news for anyone who wants to go to uni in two years.

The Turnbull government has flagged a series of new measures to make university degrees cost more and to make students pay back their loans sooner in the 2016 Budget.

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They’re calling it an “alternative model of flexibility” but that’s just spin for partial deregulation where universities would be able to set their own fees for a few courses but lose out on public funding.

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For example, say a university chose to deregulate a three-year Arts degree and charge $40,000.

As the dollar amount of the degree goes up, the dollar amount the Commonwealth contributes to that university would go down.

The deregulated degrees would be called "Flagship Courses" and would start in 2018. So it's bad news for anyone who wants to start uni in two years.

To make sure fees don't blow out to $100,000, the sector would be monitored by a group like the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission.

And after you graduate, the government wants you to start paying back your HECS debt sooner… so they might include how much your parents earn in the income threshold.

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At the moment you don't have to start paying your HECS debt back until you start earning more than $54,126 a year.

The government has proposed introducing a "household income test", which means they would include the total income of everyone in your household when deciding when you should start to make repayments.

This is bad news for graduates who can't afford to live out of home and have parents with a joint income of more than $54,126 a year.

The government has also flagged creating a baseline ATAR result needed to enter a bachelor’s degree.

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Universities only offer a small fraction of places to students with low ATARs, but the government wants to change that to ensure the "high quality" of higher education.

They'd do this by setting a base ATAR mark you'd need to get admitted into any university course.

If you didn't get a high enough score, you could only study a sub-bachelor degree, or enrol in TAFE or a private college.

The government says they want to reform higher education because it says too many people are going to uni and they can't afford to pay for all of them.

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And instead of tax payers shouldering the loan, they want students to.

But the government's claim that "the cost to taxpayers has grown enormously" doesn't pass a fact check.

If you compare how much the Commonwealth spend on education as a percentage of gross domestic product, it's only risen from .8 per cent in 1989 to 1.0 per cent in 2014.