Tim Winton knows what it’s like to be the first in a family to go to university – “what a breakthrough that is, the kind of opportunities it provides”.
It was at the Western Australian Institute of Technology, studying arts, that he wrote his first novel, An Open Swimmer, launching a four-decade writing career.
This was the 1980s, when a Labor government temporarily made higher education free to all Australians.
“Earning a humanities degree was not only life changing, in terms of opening up a world of knowledge otherwise beyond my reach, it also turns out to have been enormously productive – for me and many, many people around me,” Winton said.
“My little arts degree has created jobs and cultural value for over 40 years.”
Flash forward to 2025, and arts degrees have ballooned to cost in excess of $50,000, thanks to the Coalition’s Jobs-Ready Graduate (JRG) scheme, introduced in 2021 to incentivise students into certain disciplines such as Stem (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics), education and health.
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While strongly condemned by Labor at the time, the Albanese government has deferred any reform to tuition fees to a newly established independent tertiary commission.
Winton is among more than 100 high-profile Australians who have signed an open letter by the Australian Historical Association (AHA) urging Anthony Albanese to abolish the JRG scheme and implement an equitable university fee system that “does not punish students who choose to study the humanities and social sciences”.
“That any Australian government should seek to make getting a humanities degree more difficult is upsetting … but the idea that a Labor government would do nothing at all to right this wrong is utterly mystifying,” Winton said.
“If Labor won’t act to defend equity in education, what is the point of them – I mean, what do they really stand for?”
The signatories of the letter speak to the diversity of arts degree outcomes: writers Helen Garner, Kate Grenville and Nam Le; professional cook Stephanie Alexander; former cabinet minister and representative to Unesco Barry Jones; and former Australian of the Year, scientist Tim Flannery have all signed on.
Grenville, who has authored 19 books, said her own studies in history and humanities were “absolutely essential” to the writing of her books, many of which take place in the early years of colonisation.
“Without those opportunities to explore both widely and deeply, I would not have written the books that have now become one of the ways general readers learn about our past,” she said.
Implicit in the introduction of JRG was the assumption students would be deterred from arts courses because of their price point, and attract them to cheaper degrees for “in-demand” courses.
But the Universities Accord report, released last year, said the JRG package had “failed”, finding only 1.5% of students applied to enrol in courses that they would not have under the prior contribution arrangements.
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“The job ready graduates package needs urgent remediation,” the report said.
“It has left some students facing extremely high student contributions and large Help debts that do not reflect their future earning potential, and it has tilted the overall cost burden of higher education further on to students.”
In its place, the review recommended a student contribution system based on potential lifetime earnings – the higher the future wages, the greater the student contribution.
Higher education expert Prof Andrew Norton said ideally graduates working full-time should complete repayments within similar ranges of years, regardless of which course they took.
“That is far from what happens under the current system … many arts graduates will struggle to ever get their debt under control,” he wrote in The Conversation on Wednesday.
Convener of the letter, AHA president Prof Michelle Arrow, said four years after its implementation the effects of JRG were beginning to play out in the numbers of staff being cut in humanities disciplines across the country.
Australian National University proposed cuts include the Humanities Research Centre, the European Studies Centre and the Australian National Dictionary Centre, as well as significant reductions in the Australian Dictionary of Biography.
“For a thriving humanities infrastructure, you need people in the community, but you also need academics,” Arrow said.
“We’re going to risk losing a whole generation of academics … these kinds of job cuts will continue while these fees are in place.”
