Australia’s new tertiary education steward may not have the power to devise a replacement for the much-criticised Job-ready Graduates (JRG) scheme of university fees and subsidies, a top higher education policy analyst has warned.

The Australian Universities Accord found that JRG had “failed” and should be replaced with “a student contribution system based on potential lifetime earnings”. The Australian Tertiary Education Commission (Atec) has been expected to take on this task, and the interim Atec has set up a working party to undertake preparatory research.

However, legislation to permanently establish Atec only empowers the agency to provide advice on “the Commonwealth contribution amounts for places” – not student contributions – and only if that advice is requested by the education minister.

“If Atec has…no function of advising on student contributions, does that just leave it to the government to devise a JRG replacement, which they’ve conspicuously failed to do for quite a number of years?” asked Monash University higher education expert Andrew Norton.

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The question is likely to feature during scrutiny of the bill, which has been referred for examination by a , with a reporting deadline of 26 February.

51�Թ� understands that the government expects Atec’s advisory responsibilities, particularly around the costs of teaching and learning, to be interpreted broadly.

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But Norton said Atec’s abilities to offer unsolicited advice appeared “quite constrained” beyond its annual “state of the tertiary education system” report. “Perhaps they’ll be bureaucratically creative in the way they present [the] report to at least impliedly signal something,” Norton said.

Numerous opportunities to overhaul JRG have been missed. The Morrison government, which introduced the package at the height of the coronavirus pandemic, committed to a review in mid-2022.

That appraisal never occurred after the Labor Party won government in May 2022. Instead, Labor included a review of JRG in the Universities Accord’s terms of reference.

The accord’s February 2024 report found that the package “needs to be replaced” and recommended a staged “remediation”. At first, fees should be reduced in areas most significantly affected by JRG, including the humanities and communications.

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In the longer term, the accord found, the government should introduce a student contribution system based on “projected potential lifetime earnings” while boosting support for STEM courses negatively affected by JRG, through a new higher education funding model.

None of these measures has so far been initiated. Pressed on the lack of progress, education minister Jason Clare has highlighted the “significant” cost of JRG reform.

“The accord recommended that we fix JRG, but it also recommended a whole bunch of other things,” Clare the Australian Financial Review’s Higher Education Summit in August. “We’ve implemented a lot of that but not all. It’s all about what you do first.”

Atec has been considered a natural vehicle for JRG reform. Accord chair Mary O’Kane described costing and pricing as “possibly the most important matter we wanted to get to and didn’t” in her review. As chief commissioner of the interim Atec, she has established a working party to investigate costing and pricing issues.

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“Without knowing the true or reasonable costs of offering various courses and carrying out other university activities, we can’t…tackle the complex JRG scheme,” she told a recent University of Sydney gathering.

JRG was framed as a politically achievable way of funding more higher education places after Covid depleted the government’s financial reserves. The package won the sector’s backing, despite reservations.

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In the years since, however, JRG has been blamed for saddling humanities graduates with huge debts and disproportionately affecting disadvantaged students.

john.ross@timeshighereducation.com