While there is much that is contentious in the recently released Universities Accord report, Education Minister Jason Clare's commitment to ensuring 80 per cent of the workforce has a tertiary education by 2050 is commendable.
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Whether or not this ambitious target can be reached is dependent on many factors, not all of which are directly connected to the higher education sector. Significant fluctuations in the proportion of people with a university degree can occur from year-to-year as a result of changing immigration trends.
The largest year-on-year increase in the number of graduates was in 2021-2022 following the resumption of large scale migration.
That said, given domestic students still make up a significant majority of graduates in the workforce, the importance of a well thought through, and properly funded higher education policy cannot be overstated.
While the most obvious reasons to upskill the workforce for a new era in which knowledge-based industries, the advent of AI and technologies as yet undeveloped will continue to rewrite the nature of work are economic the narrative does not end there.
ACTU president Michelle O'Neill put it well on Q&A a few years ago when she observed: "We live in a society not an economy. If the government doesn't look after people, people can't look after the economy." In other words Margaret Thatcher could not have been more wrong when she said "there is no such thing as society".
Education, especially access to higher education, is the great social leveller. Equalising opportunity is the fastest way to transform a nation. The number of Canberrans whose lives and career trajectories were changed dramatically by the Whitlam government's decision to abolish university fees in the 1970s would run into the tens of thousands.
Even more would have taken advantage of the HECs revolution that, in Mr Clare's words, "blew the doors of the universities open in the late 1980s and early 1990s". He is right to describe initiatives such as those, and the achievement of the Hawke-Keating government in boosting the number of students finishing high school from 40 per cent to 80 per cent, as "nation-changing stuff".
Mr Clare, who funded his own way through university by cooking cheese toast at Sizzler, is more aware than most that despite the reforms and initiatives that have been rolled out over the past 50 years many in the community still find it very hard to access higher education and, even if they do, to then stay the full course and graduate.
He has highlighted the difficulties facing young people from the regions and the outer suburbs whose families don't have the resources to subsidise their study and the impact of often onerous unpaid "prac" work requirements on many students.
This can involve up to 800 hours of unpaid work for a nursing student and up to 600 hours for a teaching student over the course of a degree.
Students often have to ditch the casual or part-time job that has been keeping them afloat to meet this requirement and, in far too many cases, then end up having to drop out. That's one reason why almost half of those who enrol for a teaching degree fail to complete their studies.
This is also why the Universities Accord's recommendation that governments fund paid work placements for students doing on-the-job training in schools and hospitals is a no-brainer.
While this will obviously come at a cost, the potential to boost retention rates by allowing students to complete their degrees and then enter their chosen professions would more than make up for this.
This is a measure that could be rolled out in very short time frame.
