When Jess Nobleza was finishing high school, she had a decision to make — follow her heart and study arts, or choose the cheaper, more job-centric degree of psychology.
"At the end of the day, I thought it was best to choose what made me happy," she said.
Ms Nobleza chose to study arts, but it came at a cost.
Her HECS-HELP debt is set to be around $45,000 when she graduates — more than double what it would have cost if she began her studies in 2020.
Ms Nobleza started university in 2021, meaning she was in the first cohort of students impacted by the Morrison government's Job-Ready Graduates (JRG) package.
Brought in as a "carrot and stick" approach to funnel students into degrees that would correspond with Australia's skill shortages, the JRG package slashed the student contribution of some degrees while hiking others.
Humanities fees rose by 113 per cent for students, and government financial support for courses like science, education and maths dropped.
"It was more about second guessing, because I had to think about my future, and how this is really going to affect me," Ms Nobleza said.
Universities across Australia are calling for the JRG package to be scrapped, and replaced with a fee contribution structure that correlates with students' future earning potential.
Has price signalling worked?
Universities Australia chief executive Catriona Jackson said two years into the scheme, price signalling wasn't working.
"If a student is passionate about architecture, you can't make them do accounting instead, and if a student is passionate about English literature and being a teacher, it's very hard to convince them that economics is the course for them," she said.
An analysis of New South Wales university applications between 2014 to 2022 by Monash University, found little evidence of students responding to price signals.
Professor Andrew Norton, a higher education policy expert from Australian National University, said the JRG hadn't impacted pre-existing trends in student choices.
"In most cases these increases and decreases continued trends that started before Job Ready Graduates, leaving it unclear what effect, if any, changed student contributions has had on student choices," he said.
He said it was too soon to tell if the JRG package had affected Australia's skill shortage.
The Productivity Commission's Interim 5 Year Productivity Report from 2022 stated that, "there is little evidence that differential subsidies effectively address skills shortages".
Ms Jackson said giving students clearer advice and education about where jobs were and what skills they would need for them, would be a more effective tactic than manipulating their financial contributions.
In addition, Ms Jackson said higher costs often led to higher attrition rates.
"All the research indicates that if you elbow [students] into stuff they're not passionate about, they are much more likely to drop out," she said.
Associate Professor Nicholas Carah, who has been working in and teaching humanities at the University of Queensland for 15 years, said students' choice of degree was never entirely driven by cost.
"Particularly in Australia, the effects of the HECS system is that many of us mentally defer the cost," he said.
Female and First Nations students disproportionately impacted
Two years into her degree, Ms Nobleza is staring down a mammoth HECS-HELP debt, and she isn't alone.
Female students are over-represented in humanities and social science degrees, making up 65 per cent of all students enrolled in society and culture and creative arts courses in 2021 — as are First Nations students.
Forty per cent of all Indigenous students at university in 2021 were studying society and cultures or creative arts.
Nathias Warkill, a learning success officer in the Oodgeroo Unit at the Queensland University of Technology, said doubling the size of HECS-HELP debts had far-reaching consequences for Indigenous students.
"It could diminish their sense of belonging and sense of achievement about what they have once they've graduated," Mr Warkill said.
He said First Nations students already faced barriers to higher tertiary education, such as being "first in family" students, coming from a lower socio-economic standing, or living in regional or rural parts of the country.
"Adding further stress to that can be quite damaging," he said.
Are humanities graduates valuable?
Almost 73 per cent of humanities, culture and social science graduates had secured full-time employment within several months of graduating, according to the 2022 Graduates Outcomes Survey.
That is a 15 per cent increase on the previous year and on-par with the rate of full-time employment for science and maths graduates, which is 72.5 per cent.
According to Nick Bisley from the Australasian Council of Deans of Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities, this counter's one of the justifications for the JRG.
"The government made the fee changes on the spurious basis that students were less likely to get jobs and therefore, so if they wanted to do this, they had to pay for it themselves," he said.
In discussions with employers about what they look for in graduates, Mr Carah said they were overwhelmingly seeking skills that humanities and social sciences graduates possessed.
"It's often the ability to translate, to imagine, to create something, and to communicate between different groups of people," he said.
"Government needs these kinds of people; NGOs need these kinds of people; and they are what the humanities produces."
Ms Jackson said there had been an average 6 per cent decline in funding across the higher tertiary education sector since the 2021 change.
Under the JRG package, universities receive more dollars per humanities and social science student, but for courses like maths, science, nursing, and education, both student contribution and government subsidy decreased.
Mr Bisley said it created a "crazy situation", where students were receiving less money per student enrolling in the courses that were made cheaper under the JRG package.
The Universities Australia Accord was set up in 2023 to inspect a range of issues impacting the higher education sector with submissions wrapping up last month. The Accord panel is due to submit its interim report to government in June.
