In a recent post, I argued that universities do not owe every doctoral graduate an academic job. Completing a PhD gives you the opportunity to compete for academic employment; it does not create an entitlement. Universities should be honest about the prospects, particularly when they train many more doctoral graduates than they will ever employ themselves. But an obvious question foundational to that argument is: If there are already far more PhD graduates than academic jobs, why keep training them? And once we ask that question about doctorates, there is no reason to stop there. Should we educate more lawyers than there are legal jobs, more teachers than there are teaching positions, or more graduates in any discipline than some model of the future labour market says Australia will need?
My answer, broadly, is yes. If a student is academically qualified to undertake a legitimate university course, wants to study it, and a university has the capacity to educate them properly, I think they should be able to. For domestic undergraduate students, that also means access to a Commonwealth-supported place; this is where the tension arises. Government has a legitimate interest in how public money is spent. If we need more nurses, teachers or engineers, we should make those options attractive. What I am not comfortable with is the reverse: making other pathways more expensive or less accessible because the government finds them less useful.
We have already experimented with that logic through the Job-ready Graduates reforms. The idea was: reduce student contributions in areas of national priority and increase them elsewhere, partly to encourage students towards the qualifications the economy was thought to need. The resulting price structure was bizarre. In 2026, nursing attracted a maximum student contribution of $4,700 while programs like philosophy, religious studies, business, economics and much of the liberal arts had a max student contribution of over $17,000. OK, maybe that isn’t bizarre, but then language and literature studies are back down with nursing at $4,700 – this seems a little inconsistent.
The issue is not that every university course should cost the same amount or that they all cost the same to provide. However, the government’s logic seems to work in reverse. Nursing is almost certainly more expensive to deliver than philosophy. It requires specialist facilities, laboratories and clinical placements. Philosophy requires a classroom, an academic and probably some books, most of which are likely available in the library. Yet the philosophy student is asked to contribute more than three times as much, not because the course costs three times as much to provide, but because government has apparently decided it is worth roughly a third as much. At that point, the fee is no longer about cost. It is a penalty for choosing the ‘wrong’ degree.
This is one reason I have always seen some merit in the broader undergraduate model used in the US and, in a more structured form, at the University of Melbourne. It preserves an idea that has become increasingly difficult to defend in Australia: that the purpose of a degree is not exhausted by the job it leads to. I am not suggesting we adopt either model, although I wouldn’t oppose it either. The underlying principle is worth preserving. A degree in history, philosophy or literature does not need a prescribed profession to have value. If we genuinely believe graduates develop disciplinary knowledge, judgement, analytical capacity and the ability to communicate and think well, then we should not be surprised when they take those capacities into occupations not specified in advance.
There are also good reasons to be cautious about assuming we can identify future occupations. Remember when coding was going to be the literacy of the twenty-first century? In 2015, Bill Shorten proposed coding in every Australian primary and secondary school, and the Coalition talked about coding and computing as preparation for the “jobs of the future”. A decade later, GenAI can produce, explain and debug code. Were they wrong about coding or the growing importance of digital technology? No. But identifying the direction of change and knowing what the labour market will eventually value are not the same thing.
A student entering a four-year degree today is being prepared for the labour market of 2030, not 2026. A child whose curriculum we redesign around the “jobs of the future” may still be working in the 2070s. Teacher education in NSW provides a much less hypothetical example. Great Teaching, Inspired Learning was introduced in 2013 with the ambition of lifting teacher quality and professional status. Among its instruments were tighter entry requirements for initial teacher education. Whether those reforms were good or bad is irrelevant to this discussion, but enrolments in ITE dropped from 9,620 in 2014 to 6,780 in 2019. While I’m not saying it was causal, the timing is difficult to ignore.
None of this means governments should ignore workforce demand, or that universities enrol unlimited numbers of students into anything they choose. Nursing can’t admit students for whom they cannot provide laboratories, placements and appropriate supervision. A medical school cannot simply double in size because applications double. Teacher education programs also need professional experience placements. There are limits on how many students a university can educate properly. But when demand exceeds those limits, we have mechanisms for deciding who gets in. That is, at least in part, what ATARs and selection ranks are for: they allow universities to select among applicants when there are more qualified students than available places. Saying “we can only educate 200 students well” is fundamentally different from saying “we predict there will only be 200 jobs, so only 200 people can study”. One is rationing a scarce educational resource; the other is rationing opportunity.
That said, students taking on years of study and substantial debt deserve honest information about their prospects. Universities should publish completion rates, employment outcomes, earnings and likely career opportunities. Someone contemplating a PhD should know that permanent academic employment is fiercely competitive. Someone studying law should understand that not every law graduate will practise law. The answer is transparency, not paternalism. Give prospective students clear information and let them decide what is worth pursuing.
This is also why the Commonwealth-supported places matter. It’s easy to say that government could fund only the number of philosophy, history or literature students it believes the economy requires and then allow others to pay full fees. Technically, this means anyone could study whatever they want, but this is a false narrative. In reality, we have simply decided that those with means can study whatever interests them while everyone else should choose from the courses the government finds useful. Public subsidy of university does not only affect the price of university; for many students it determines whether university is realistically accessible.
Government should incentivise nursing when we need nurses; make teaching more attractive when we need more teachers; invest in engineering, technology or languages when there is a national interest; regulate quality and limit universities enrolling students they cannot properly educate; require universities to tell prospective students the truth about outcomes. All of these are reasonable interventions and should be the expectation. However, what seems much less reasonable is telling an academically capable 18-year-old that philosophy, history or literature will cost three times as much as education, because there is no occupation called philosopher waiting at the other end.
If a student wants to study, meets the academic requirements and can find a university capable of teaching it well, I think our starting point should be encouragement. That choice carries risk, and it should. Education does not come with a guaranteed job, any more than choosing a profession guarantees a successful career. Government should help people make informed decisions and encourage them towards areas of need. It should be more reluctant to determine which ambitions are economically worthwhile.
Maximising Student Potential 