Here's an excerpt of me pontificating again, to someone on Blackboard who said that Australian universities would lose out if students were not to pay back their HECS-HELP debt in full. This is only very indirectly true,

But students don't pay back the loans to the universities; they pay the Australian Tax Office. Once you pass the census date on a unit, the university cash register goes ka-ching! and from then on, you owe the ATO. That's why, while supporting pretty much everything else in the Pyne plan, our vice chancellor objects to imposing market rates of interest on HECS-HELP, because that interest is paid to the government, not to the universities. Mind you, he's tactically stupid (as well as morally bankrupt, but that goes without saying) in his faith that the government, or his new fair weather pals in the Group of Eight (Go8) elite universities, will tolerate some warm-and-fuzzy system of cross subsidy for institutions operating in "thin markets" of "communities with concentrations of disadvantage". (Don't you love being described as a concentration of disadvantage in a thin market? Like a bug splat on the windscreen that stubbornly resists the wipers.) Exactly why the elite universities, or the politicians who graduated from them, should give two hoots for understaffed online diploma mills or the proles who are suckered into the "converged delivery" of "learning outcomes" they provide is unclear.

The main pressure on tuition fees will be a perceived correlation between price and quality. When the UK government recently raised the cap on university fees from ￡3,000 to ￡9,000 per year, only a handful of universities dared to keep their fees below the maximum, because to do so was to tacitly admit that your credentials were worth less than those of your competitors. What will happen under total deregulation is anybody's guess, as it's never been tried under conditions remotely comparable to our own. One interesting idea to consider, from a talk by the brilliant American sociologist Tressie McMillan Cottom about the situation in the US, is that at the bottom end of the market, universities aren't competing against other universities; they're competing against paid employment. SCU isn't competing against Sydney or Monash; it's competing against the hourly rate at Dominos or Woolworths by holding out the promise of a proper job. Which makes sense if you look at SCUs marketing material. It's essentially saying "If you want a job that doesn't involve a flouro vest and steel-capped boots, or a job with regular hours that lets you see your kids from time to time, this is your only hope." Education, as opposed to training, is the business of the elite universities. Education, which has intrinsic value and provides the means to understand the world, your place in it, and how to change it, is off the menu here. We are at the bottom end of the "diversified", "US-style" system which this most recent round of "reform" aims to set in stone.