Executive Committee Statement, 23 June 2020
On Friday, the Australian government announced measures that will significantly harm Australia’s society, economy, and international reputation for educational excellence.1 The government proposes to more than double the cost of many social science, humanities, and arts degrees. A fee hike of 113% will increase the annual cost of courses in the social sciences and humanities to $14,500 a year. This is more than the cost of courses in medicine ($11,300), nearly twice as much as courses in IT, engineering, and science ($7,700 per year), and more than four times as much as what students will pay for courses in teaching, clinical psychology, English, maths, nursing, languages, and agriculture ($3,700 per year).2 Anthropology is one of the courses of study that will be hit hard by this ill-conceived policy.
This is a shocking attack on the social sciences and arts in Australia. The Australian Anthropological Society Executive joins our colleagues across the Australian university sector in expressing profound disappointment at this announcement. We affirm solidarity as we join forces to oppose these grossly unfair, divisive, and unjustifiable changes to Australia’s higher education sector.
This policy threatens to put social science, arts and humanities degrees out of reach of many Australians. It will discourage students from studying degrees that inculcate creative, socially engaged, critical thinking. It devalues degrees that foster communications skills. It ignores a wealth of research that empirically demonstrates that an arts-based education best prepares students for today's economy. Graduates in social sciences and humanities are essential to healthy universities, a productive society, and our international educational reputation.
Consider COVID-19. We need biologists to understand the virus, we need healthcare professionals to treat the sick, and we need engineers to create respirators. But viruses don’t spread themselves. Humans spread viruses through social interaction. So if we want to understand how to stop a pandemic, we need anthropologists to study human cultures and how we interact with each other. We need communications majors to get out the message about how to change behaviours that spread disease. We need journalists to report outbreaks. We need philosophers to examine how the pandemic is changing government intervention in our intimate lives. We need legal scholars debating the constitutionality of lockdown laws during protest movements. We need economists figuring out how to manage the biggest economic downturn since the Great Depression. All of these disciplines work together as part of a healthy society and economy.
The rationale for change is not evidence-based. The government claims that the new policy will encourage students to go into ‘job-ready’ majors, but Australian government research shows that students who major in arts, humanities, and social sciences are actually more employable than science graduates. According to the government’s own Graduate Outcome Survey, in 2019, 83.9% of the graduates in humanities and social sciences were employed, while 82.4% of graduates in science and mathematics were employed. The median salaries of arts graduates are also slightly higher than those with maths and science degrees.
This is not surprising. The skills taught in arts degrees are in high demand. The World Economic Forum has argued that the three most important skills needed by university graduates to ‘thrive in the fourth industrial revolution’ are ‘complex problem-solving’, ‘critical thinking’, and ‘creativity’. These are the foundational skills taught in arts degrees.3 As Professor Susan Forde has pointed out, ‘If the government listened to business leaders, they would encourage humanities education, not pull funds from it’.4
The misalignment of this policy with university course cost and employment market demand raises questions of political interference. As the Australian Academy of the Humanities has pointed out,
“Disincentivising studies in humanities courses will actually have the opposite effect to that intended by the government. It will directly and adversely impact the government’s future jobs agenda…. On the government’s own job projections, the top five destinations for humanities graduates (Education and Training, Public Administration and Safety, Professional, Scientific and Technical Services, Health Care and Social Assistance and Arts and Recreation Services) are all projected for substantial growth in the near future."5
On behalf of the AAS, we have signed a letter from the Council for the Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences to the Education Minister opposing the government’s ‘short-sighted and punitive’ decision.
6 We will continue to work with colleagues across disciplines to try to ensure that study of humanity and social sciences remain accessible to all students.