Submission 

to

Senate Employment, Workplace Relations and Education 
References Committee

Inquiry into higher education funding 
and regulatory legislation

		
Submission no:
	216	
Received:	15/8/03	

Submitter:	Ms Kathryn Wood	

Organisation:		

Address:
	withheld
	
Phone:

Fax:

Email:

		

14 August 2003

The Secretary,
Senate Employment, Workplace Relations
and Education References Committee
Suit SG.52, Parliament House
CANBERRA, ACT 2600

Dear Senators,

Re: Inquiry into higher education funding and regulatory legislation

I am a 22 year old student at the University of Sydney.  I have just finished my Bachelor of Engineering (Civil) degree and am planning on continuing to study next year.  This year, I have been employed as a tutor in 1st year classes even before I finished my degree.  This is just one example of how little funding my department has – there are not enough academics to teach classes, so 4th year students and post graduate students are employed as tutors.  I am writing to the committee to express that the federal government’s proposed changes to the higher education system must not be allowed to occur because of the damage that they will cause to the already crippled higher education sector.

Fundamentally our society needs to be educated to thrive.  Therefore the government must provide free quality accessible public education to the citizens of this country.  Because on average university educated people earn more, a person with a university education will pay more in taxes, enabling the government to continue funding education.  The current Coalition federal government’s plan will mean that education will not be available to all those who seek it.  Higher education will only be available to a wealthy elite section of the population.  The proposed loans scheme will not enable working class Australians to go to university because it will saddle them with an unacceptable amount of debt.  We will have a university system based on money not merit.  This is completely contrary to what government and society should do.  Government and society must seek to improve the lot of all within that society and education is the means to do this.

In my department (Department of Civil Engineering, University of Sydney) funding needs to be drastically increased.  The government’s proposal do not include the massive increases in investment that are desperately needed (the increases that are included in the proposal are tied to unreasonable and impractical demands for staffing and governance changes).  In the past ten years the budget of the civil engineering department has halved while the number of students being taught has doubled, so now students are taught with one quarter of the resources with which they used to be taught.  This means that tutorials have over fifty students in them, most classes do not have practical components (or only one or two experiments a semester), and there is only one computer lab with twenty five computers for five hundred students.  There are so few computers that first and second year students aren’t allowed into the computer lab.  The lack of resources in the department means that students do not get sufficient individual teaching or practical learning to make them into good engineers.  

As can be seen, the department needs more funding, but that funding cannot come in the form of student fees. Why? Because students are poor.  Students already have huge debts when they leave university which are making it harder for them to buy homes and start families.  Student debt cannot be increased because then people will have to choose between buy a house and getting an education.  Many students come from low-income families that cannot support them through university, so the students must support themselves.  It is the government’s job to give these people the chance to make their lives better through higher education, so higher education must be government funded.   University funding must come in the form of government investment, so that student fees are kept low allowing all people to have the chance to study at university.

The way to improve our society is through education, so we must invest in it as a society by having our government invest our taxes in the education system making education available to people based on their merit not on their money.

Sincerely,

Kathryn Wood
3/33 East Crescent St.
McMahons Point NSW 2060
Kathryn@woodfamily.net