Students were unfazed at a $40,000 HECS debt. Years on, reality has sunk in

When the Morrison government hiked arts degree fees in 2021, it was labelled by critics as an ideological attack on the humanities. If the aim was to discourage young people from studying arts, it did not seem to work – immediately at least.

Students flocked to arts degrees during the pandemic, seemingly unfazed by the idea of a $40,000 HECS debt. But almost four years on, alarm bells are ringing. Enrolments have fallen dramatically to a 10-year low, humanities departments have faced brutal cuts and scholars harbour deep concerns for the future of once-thriving faculties.

Whether the humanities in Australia are the victim of an anti-“woke” culture war – or, as conservative critics contend, suffering from self-inflicted irrelevance – remains contested.

In common with many of her fellow arts students, 20-year-old Layla Wang has been on the receiving end of more than a few diminishing remarks about her choice of degree. “You see so many jokes on TikTok like, ‘Oh, you do an arts degree, have fun being a barista’,” she says. “That sort of stigma has been around for decades.”

But Wang, president of Sydney University’s Arts Students’ Society, has no regrets about her choice, saying her studies so far have sharpened her critical thinking and allowed her to see and understand the world in a more nuanced way. And the study body is diverse with a range of political views and perspectives, despite stereotypes that suggest otherwise.

“I think it’s really important to be respectful, but saying that arts degrees are merely a form of ‘woke indoctrination’ is an extremely poor perspective,” Wang says.

Professor Simon Marginson, a former Melbourne University academic and now higher education expert at Oxford University, says the anti-humanities line is getting tougher and more critical. He says there is a clear student flight away from the humanities in Britain and Australia, a trend that is also emerging in the US.

In the face of falling demand and as universities face funding pressures, humanities and some social sciences faculties have been first in the firing line. “But the evidence that comes through is there are a bunch of students who are really passionate and committed to humanities,” he says. “And they defy their families and their friends and do it anyway. And they actually do OK in the labour market.”

‘Job-ready’ degrees

When the Coalition passed its controversial Job-ready Graduates legislation in 2020, then Education Minister Dan Tehan said students should be encouraged to do degrees that had clear vocational outcomes and were in areas of key skills shortages.

In practice, the legislation meant students wanting to study classical subjects such as history, politics and philosophy as well as communications faced fee increases of 113 per cent. It immediately increased the price of standard three-year arts degrees to above $40,000; next year, the cost will exceed $50,000. But not all humanities subjects were penalised. English and languages subjects, for example, moved to the cheapest category because they were seen as areas of skills shortages.

At the time, the reforms were slammed by a chorus of academics who saw it as punitive, and an ideological attack. “[The] proposals threaten to turn the study of history, politics, anthropology and philosophy into a vanity practice,” Clare Wright, a professor of history at La Trobe University, said after the announcement.

Despite the fee hikes’ intent of diverting students into STEM and more “vocational” degrees such as engineering, teaching and nursing, there was no immediate drop in demand. In fact, demand for society and culture courses – which include arts and communication degrees but also law – peaked during the pandemic, with 121,293 new domestic enrolments in society and culture courses in 2020 and 116,823 in 2021.

The most recent federal Education Department data tells a different story, revealing a dramatic decline in society and culture subjects since the pandemic. Just 97,313 new students started the courses in 2023, the lowest number in 10 years and a 20 per cent decrease on 2020. Overall demand for university has softened since 2020, but at a slower rate than the decline of society and culture enrolments.

The reasons for the decline in humanities students, Marginson suspects, are many. On the one hand, tabloids and governments are pushing an ever more vicious anti-humanities narrative.

“It’s part of the culture wars, the perception that humanities students are more left wing and critical and so on,” he says. “Those who are bearing down on the universities are saying they are too liberal, which is very much the Republican line in the US and coming through in the UK now on the critical right.”

He says there is also a broader cultural shift towards more utilitarian and vocationally focused degrees. As the world emerged from the pandemic and cost of living pressures began to bite, people became more focused on immediate employability and cost-of-living pressures. Marginson believes larger and established universities – among them Sydney and Melbourne universities and, in Britain, Oxford and Cambridge – will retain strong humanities programs. He says the big cuts have begun at mid-tier universities and will continue.

Australian National University higher education academic Professor Andrew Norton says humanities’ enrolments were declining before Job-ready Graduates. “I think it’s probably partly to do with the fact that students just don’t read as much any more,” he says. He says any rise in arts enrolments that occurred during the pandemic was likely linked to the job market and the countercyclical nature of the university sector. “If there are fewer jobs, people study,” Norton says.

And, if anything, the recent decline in arts may be more precipitous than the data suggests. Norton says law subjects, which are included in society and culture cluster, are more resilient due to their more clearly vocational nature and may to some extent be masking the downward trend in the arts. “Law has had some volatility but [has] never entered a major decline like humanities subjects.“

Faculties cut

Last month, staff at Wollongong University were shocked by the scope of proposed cuts: 90 full-time academic roles in 25 disciplines were being made redundant as part of a major overhaul of degrees. History, foreign languages, geography and mathematics are among departments facing major cuts. For foreign languages, the proposal was brutal. The university wants to wipe out its foreign language and linguistics department altogether.

Languages and linguistics discipline leader at the university, Dr Rowena Ward, says the university regards the department as unviable because of declining enrolment trends – a claim she rejects. Ward says the study of languages in Australia is generally not valued as it should be, and some people even believe apps like Duolingo are interchangeable with a university-level course.

Languages are labour-intensive and require a lot more face-to-face learning time than other subjects, she says. They are funded at a high rate by the federal government, which makes them among the cheapest subjects for students to take. “Recent upper management is so focused on dollar signs they’re not really looking at things in a broader sense,” she says.

University of Wollongong interim vice chancellor and president John Dewar says the draft proposal is necessary for the long-term viability of the university and to address a $35 million drop in revenue this year.

A spokesman said the proposed closure of the languages department came despite significant efforts to improve viability, for example through a compulsory language minor in the bachelor of international studies.

The National Tertiary Education Union says the degree overhauls will massively reduce subject choices and flexibility, with students forced to take eight generic subjects and to limit choices within majors.

Wollongong University humanities academic and branch president Fiona Probyn-Rapsey cites “cutting Languages, cutting the only subject at [the university] that focuses on feminism, cutting history and areas of environmental humanities, climate change and sustainability”.

“These are all the areas that empower students and enact the social licence that university managements so desperately seek,” the professor says. “The outcomes are perverse, but they reflect a general hollowing out of education as a political good and community right.”

Australian Catholic University, under former vice chancellor Greg Craven, embarked on a bold plan to strengthen its humanities research. Between 2016 and 2020, it set up Melbourne-based specialised research institutions and programs in philosophy, theology and history.

It headhunted top academics from Oxford and Yale and quickly became a powerhouse of humanities scholarship. But in 2023, the university announced it wanted close one of the new programs as well as one whole institute, causing outrage among philosophy, theology and medieval studies academics around the world.

Australian Historical Association president Professor Michelle Arrow, a Macquarie University academic, says the ACU cuts were a turning point for humanities in Australia. She says the current mood among history academics is bleak, with a general feeling that the sector is in decline.

“It’s pretty tragic,” she says. “There’s long been a sense among university management that humanities research doesn’t bring in as much money as science research does. And we don’t frame humanities discoveries in the same way as we would STEM.”

Arrow believes the publicity about the high cost of arts degrees is starting to affect student choice. The cost, she says, is especially worrying parents, who are concerned children will carry a large debt without viable job prospects. “What Job-ready Graduates did was pick up on an insidious stereotype that arts and humanities are not job-ready, which doesn’t actually correlate with the data,” she says.

Arrow believes sandstone universities will continue with humanities degrees. But cuts will be acutely felt in the regions. “We will really end up with a two-tier system ... if you can afford to, and you are in a city, you’ll get access to a good arts and humanities education, but if you’re in the regions you won’t,” she says. “That’s something that we should be concerned about.”

A war within

But not everyone thinks politics or broader social forces have caused a decline in the once thriving world of the humanities.

John Carroll, retired academic sociologist and Emeritus Professor at La Trobe University in Melbourne, blames the decline on the politicisation of humanities and advocates for a return to a pure study of the classics.

“The culture wars came out of this steady loss of nerve among the majority of academics teaching in the humanities,” he says. “The basic task is to take up the best works of the culture and introduce students to them, including ways of thinking and analysing and writing.

“Since the 1960s, I think the humanities have steadily become politicised [and have lost] ... touch with their basic mission. They’ve turned to political action. It’s trying to change the world, which is not the job of humanities: it is to train students to understand themselves and the world they live in.”

Carroll says the content taught at universities has become too boring for students, who want to study the classics but are forced to analyse them through the “imagined political bias” of the authors.

“If a student is doing an arts degree studying English, they’ll find it very difficult to find courses on say, Shakespeare and Jane Austen, and they’ll find that most are politicised on feminism or colonialism or whatever the political fad of the moment is,” he says.

“I don’t think there’s anything wrong with those studies, but that’s not the fundament of what humanities should be doing.

“As a result, it’s hard for students going into university to find things that interest them.”

Carroll is an advocate for the controversial Ramsay Centre for Western Civilisation, funded by a multimillion-dollar bequest from late healthcare magnate Paul Ramsay.

It funds degrees, with generous scholarships, in the great works of Western Civilisation, featuring generous scholarships and small class sizes conducive to in depth and dogged discussions.

But the bequest led to a culture war, with failed negotiations to take the program to the Australian National University and Sydney University, amid concerns about academic autonomy and accusations that it was a training centre for the next generation of right-wing ideologues.

Eventually, the centre reached agreements to roll out the degrees at Australian Catholic University, Wollongong University and Queensland University.

Carroll thinks that if there is a future for humanities in Australia, it’s through the Ramsay Centre’s approach of going back to the basics of teaching the classics.

“I think it’s a grim period in the short to medium term of humanities. Faculties in Australia are withering away, almost disappearing,” he said.

“But history goes through cycles … people want to understand themselves and the societies in which they live. And if they’re going to do that, they need the humanities.

“It’s a basic need that will come back.”

Arrow does not agree that Australian universities have rejected the conventional core of humanities scholarship, with topics such as the foundations of Australian democracy still fundamental to curriculums.

“But, of course, you can’t understand that story without understanding the people it historically excluded as well,” she says. “I don’t think we can return it to [just studying] 10 Great Books, and that’s all we do, but there is definitely room for that kind of thing. A pluralism of approaches is always really important.”

She thinks the humanities have been squeezed at both ends of the political spectrum. The Liberals “were very anti humanities even though a lot of them have arts degrees”, she says. On the Labor side, “there’s a really instrumentalist view of higher education, which is very much about training people for jobs in the workplace not helping people expand their understanding of arts and culture and humanities”.

The $50,000 arts degree

From next year, the cost of the average arts degree is set to exceed $50,000 – a direct result of the Morrison government increases. The impact of these on student choice is still up for debate. Most agree that broader societal views about humanities, as well as a post-COVID-19 focus on vocational pathways, have played into the decline in enrolments.

First-year arts student Tanisha Kurleka, 19, doesn’t think that the high cost of the degree is much of a demotivating factor – especially at a university with prestige value. “I don’t think the fee discourages people, especially when you start straight from high school,” the Sydney University international relations student says. “But how other people view arts and look down on it does, that might discourage them.”

She said her studies had changed her view of the world – but not necessarily how people might think. “I know I was super ‘woke’ when I came to uni, but it helped me see other sides to debates and the spectrum,” she says.

Kurleka and Wang want to study law eventually, a key factor being the clearer professional pathways from that degree.

Western Sydney University vice chancellor George Williams believes the Morrison-era reforms are now having an impact on student choice, but not in the way it was intended. “What we are seeing is students who are deciding not to study at all, they’re not coming to university,” he says. “We’ve seen a very significant decline in undergraduate enrolments.”

Williams says he is concerned about the decline in humanities education and the cuts universities had made as a result. In a world full of misinformation, he believes the critical thinkers humanities create and nurture are more important than ever.

“This is the type of education we really need at the moment,” he says. “Humanities is one of the most important building blocks of a prosperous, fair inclusive country.

“I think in the world in which we live things like history and philosophy are vital skills. We need to understand where we’ve come from to understand where we are today.”

Williams says the messaging of the Job-ready Graduates scheme was clear and damaging. “It says, as a community we don’t believe students should be studying this in the same way, we don’t value it, and we’re actively asking students to do something else,” he says. “That’s a powerful political symbol. It’s wrong, and needs to be called out, but it’s undeniable.”

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