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So humanities and the power to dictate culture will be further reserved for the wealthy and privileged? Alternatively, humanity degrees fees should be quadrupl

So humanities and the power to dictate culture will be further reserved for the wealthy and privileged? Alternatively, humanity degrees fees should be quadrupled, but 3/4 of slots should be reserved for average income households who gets to attend for free.

zamfi 6y ago
Exactly. One way to think about this is as a "disincentive to study job-relevant fields". But another way to look at this is further entrenching the reality that only the wealthy and privileged can afford to be less vocational in their thinking about college. I'm not sure the outcome here is great.
- lopmotr 6y ago
  > only the wealthy and privileged can afford to be less vocational in their thinking about college. Isn't that perfectly reasonable? If you have the means to study as a hobby, then you should be able to enjoy that. If you haven't yet got the means for that, then earn it and maybe your children can do an arts degree off the back of your engineer's salary or you can do it yourself when you retire. The whole point of the government subsidizing education is to create useful workers that give more back to society with their useful work. Not to indulge people's pseudo-intellectual pleasures. It's not as if arts degrees make people somehow superior at understanding society and arts and culture. Those are things anybody can pick up even with no formal education. Understanding the scientific method, statistics and critical thinking would go further in making well rounded useful thinkers than knowing what some ancient person's opinion about his local society was or training to become an activist who refuses to allow themselves to think objectively.
  - totetsu 6y ago
    Society is like a big discussion that takes place in many different communities, groups, institutions, some using being specialists, using special language, some having more influence than others. If you can't take part in that discussion, your interests wont be represented. If many of the specialist, influential discussions can only be taken part in by people with wealth, then the interests of people without it will become marginalised. Generally people know what they need for themselves better anyone else. Not being able to voice needs leads to society not working for those people, and barriers to them gaining wealth, and doing work that is useful for themselves and all society. The humanities is not for the pursuit of the life of the mind, it is important for a functioning society. Many topics in maths and engineering are very intuitive to pick without formal education. To understand Humanities requires discussion with others. Writing and getting feed back on a lot of essays, listening to and explaining ideas in seminars, testing out an idea in a lecture. It can take a decade to start to understand someone like Foucault. It's hard to find a community of specialised discussion outside of formal education. Just picking up humanities from a few youtube videos or whatever is what I am convinced has led us to the kind of unobjective activism that is reacted against so much recently.
    - Caylio 6y ago
      "Many topics in maths and engineering are very intuitive to pick without formal education." Name me a single university level math topic that backs up this claim.
    - Caylio 6y ago
      "Many topics in maths and engineering are very intuitive to pick without formal education." Name one university level math topic to back up this silly claim.
    - MaximumYComb 6y ago
      >Many topics in maths and engineering are very intuitive to pick without formal education. To understand Humanities requires discussion with others. This is why years ago I watched the humanities students struggle endlessly with their first year statistics unit. The incredibly simple, first year statistics unit.
solresol 6y ago
As one of the other commenters mentioned, university in Australia is relatively affordable. The government subsidises most of it, and the bit that's left over is deducted from your salary by your employer until it's paid off. The news article is about the change to how much subsidy there is. Who gets the slots available in a course is dictated by the students' results in the final exams in high school. (This is approximately true: in NSW several exams before the end of high school also count. Some universities will offer places based on the "other" high school exams if they can predict what your final exam result will be with sufficient accuracy.) The student with the highest marks gets the place they want, and then the next student down gets their first preference, unless it is full, in which case they get their second, third, fourth, preference. And so on down through all the student candidature. Theoretically this whole system should let a sufficiently capable average income student study humanities (or whatever they want). In practice there are problems -- some schools have teachers who are very good at getting good marks for their students in the final exam; actually being intelligent and creative doesn't really help as much as it should -- but it's not an overly terrible system.
- deecewan 6y ago
  This is the entire point - people see this as a strict increase in out-of-pocket costs for people. It's a reduction of subsidies, to maximise the government's ROI. Plus, you still get a tax-free (although indexed) loan. If you want to do arts and/or humanities, you definitely can. Your loan, which you don't pay a cent of until a certain salary, and then only a percentage of your salary after that, will just be larger.
  - dragonwriter 6y ago
    > It's a reduction of subsidies, to maximise the government's ROI. Except, weirdly, the reduction in subsidy is less than the increase in fees, so institutions will get more money (fees + subsidy) for the not-job-ready degrees, while getting less for the job-ready degrees. Which makes no sense at all.

zamfi 6y ago

Exactly. One way to think about this is as a "disincentive to study job-relevant fields". But another way to look at this is further entrenching the reality that only the wealthy and privileged can afford to be less vocational in their thinking about college. I'm not sure the outcome here is great.

lopmotr 6y ago
> only the wealthy and privileged can afford to be less vocational in their thinking about college. Isn't that perfectly reasonable? If you have the means to study as a hobby, then you should be able to enjoy that. If you haven't yet got the means for that, then earn it and maybe your children can do an arts degree off the back of your engineer's salary or you can do it yourself when you retire. The whole point of the government subsidizing education is to create useful workers that give more back to society with their useful work. Not to indulge people's pseudo-intellectual pleasures. It's not as if arts degrees make people somehow superior at understanding society and arts and culture. Those are things anybody can pick up even with no formal education. Understanding the scientific method, statistics and critical thinking would go further in making well rounded useful thinkers than knowing what some ancient person's opinion about his local society was or training to become an activist who refuses to allow themselves to think objectively.
- totetsu 6y ago
  Society is like a big discussion that takes place in many different communities, groups, institutions, some using being specialists, using special language, some having more influence than others. If you can't take part in that discussion, your interests wont be represented. If many of the specialist, influential discussions can only be taken part in by people with wealth, then the interests of people without it will become marginalised. Generally people know what they need for themselves better anyone else. Not being able to voice needs leads to society not working for those people, and barriers to them gaining wealth, and doing work that is useful for themselves and all society. The humanities is not for the pursuit of the life of the mind, it is important for a functioning society. Many topics in maths and engineering are very intuitive to pick without formal education. To understand Humanities requires discussion with others. Writing and getting feed back on a lot of essays, listening to and explaining ideas in seminars, testing out an idea in a lecture. It can take a decade to start to understand someone like Foucault. It's hard to find a community of specialised discussion outside of formal education. Just picking up humanities from a few youtube videos or whatever is what I am convinced has led us to the kind of unobjective activism that is reacted against so much recently.
  - Caylio 6y ago
    "Many topics in maths and engineering are very intuitive to pick without formal education." Name me a single university level math topic that backs up this claim.
  - Caylio 6y ago
    "Many topics in maths and engineering are very intuitive to pick without formal education." Name one university level math topic to back up this silly claim.
  - MaximumYComb 6y ago
    >Many topics in maths and engineering are very intuitive to pick without formal education. To understand Humanities requires discussion with others. This is why years ago I watched the humanities students struggle endlessly with their first year statistics unit. The incredibly simple, first year statistics unit.

solresol 6y ago

As one of the other commenters mentioned, university in Australia is relatively affordable. The government subsidises most of it, and the bit that's left over is deducted from your salary by your employer until it's paid off. The news article is about the change to how much subsidy there is. Who gets the slots available in a course is dictated by the students' results in the final exams in high school. (This is approximately true: in NSW several exams before the end of high school also count. Some universities will offer places based on the "other" high school exams if they can predict what your final exam result will be with sufficient accuracy.) The student with the highest marks gets the place they want, and then the next student down gets their first preference, unless it is full, in which case they get their second, third, fourth, preference. And so on down through all the student candidature. Theoretically this whole system should let a sufficiently capable average income student study humanities (or whatever they want). In practice there are problems -- some schools have teachers who are very good at getting good marks for their students in the final exam; actually being intelligent and creative doesn't really help as much as it should -- but it's not an overly terrible system.

deecewan 6y ago
This is the entire point - people see this as a strict increase in out-of-pocket costs for people. It's a reduction of subsidies, to maximise the government's ROI. Plus, you still get a tax-free (although indexed) loan. If you want to do arts and/or humanities, you definitely can. Your loan, which you don't pay a cent of until a certain salary, and then only a percentage of your salary after that, will just be larger.
- dragonwriter 6y ago
  > It's a reduction of subsidies, to maximise the government's ROI. Except, weirdly, the reduction in subsidy is less than the increase in fees, so institutions will get more money (fees + subsidy) for the not-job-ready degrees, while getting less for the job-ready degrees. Which makes no sense at all.