The Greens are calling on the Turnbull government to abandon any plans to deregulate higher education, demanding it should learn its lesson after course fees almost doubled in the demand-driven VET system.
Under the current VET FEE-HELP system introduced by Labor in 2012, the price of courses was fully deregulated allowing private colleges to charge whatever they wanted and make a huge profit.
The cost of VET student loans blew out from $325 million in 2012 to $2.9 billion in 2015. Over four years, student numbers grew by an alarming 400%, fees almost doubled and loans increased by 792% as colleges exploited the system’s loopholes.
In the last year, 4.5 million students were enrolled in VET courses, with 3 million in the private sector.
Tens of thousands of students enrolled in over-priced courses, leaving them with mammoth debts and slim employment opportunities. State and territory data shows only 40% of graduates who pay for vocational education and training go on and work in the industry they studied.
Education minister Simon Birmingham's proposed crackdown to the Vocational and Education Training (VET) sector would see a cap on the size of student loans, a limit to the number of courses eligible for taxpayer funding, and a ban on soliciting and inducing prospective students, saving the budget bottom line $25 billion over the next 10 years.
But the Greens don't think the proposal goes far enough.
Greens education spokesperson Sarah Hanson-Young has told the government it should rule out introducing any form of university fee deregulation, saying it should "learn a lesson" from the explosion of deregulated fees under the vocational education system.
"The government's deregulation and privatisation agenda is taking Australian education backwards," Hanson-Young said.
She thinks the meltdown of the VET sector after privatisation should give the government pause for thought when it comes to its plans to deregulate our universities, describing them as "a recipe for disaster".
"The education minister needs to bring an end to the haemorrhaging of public money to private, for-profit VET providers and should give up on university deregulation once and for all."
Jeannie Rea from the National Tertiary Education Union (NTEU) agrees, arguing history proves the market can't be trusted to regulate the cost of education.
“The whole VET experience has no doubt rocked Senator Birmingham’s faith in the market, especially as it became increasingly obvious that the actions of some private providers were not hindered by any sense of ethical or moral behaviour toward their students, but driven by opportunism and greed," she said.
"More importantly, we hope that the minister has learnt from this faith-shattering experience and will abandon his plans to open the demand driven system in higher education to for-profit private providers.”
The Greens are also calling for an end to all taxpayer funding for private, for-profit colleges, with all public money instead filtered to public education providers.
"The government should be properly funding our TAFE colleges, making education and training available to everybody, not using public money to prop up private education providers," Hanson-Young said.
"Experts warned that funnelling money into the private education sector would have disastrous results and that is exactly what has happened."
The government did not take a higher education policy to the election, but Malcolm Turnbull has confirmed he plans to pursue partial deregulation of fees. No legislation has been drafted, and the education minister says he's currently reviewing submissions on the matter, despite a majority of universities declared they're against any form of fee deregulation.