Posted on December 19, 2009 by by sayitlikeitis

Do you know anyone in higher education in Australia?  Please talk to them about this.

Education can be expensive as anyone with a HECS debt can attest.  Students who aren’t eligible for a HECS place may have to pay full fees for their degree.  That’s where FEE-HELP comes in.  Unlike HECS where some of the cost is covered by the government, FEE-HELP is simply a loan scheme.  You enrol, complete your study, and the full cost of tuition is delayed until your income reaches a certain threshold, and then you repay your debt through the tax system. It costs you a pretty penny, but FEE-HELP is a system that gets you that degree if you don’t have any other options. There are no discounts; it’s the full cost, plus a bit more.  DEEWR say there is no interest charged, and that’s true, but the debt is indexed each year, and the loan fee is a killer.  If you thought HECS-HELP was bad, consider the plight of students required to repay a FEE-HELP debt.

In addition to the tuition fees the government charges you a loan fee.  And this is my gripe.  The government adds 20% of the tuition cost to your tax bill.  That’s pretty steep.  And if you that wasn’t bad enough, this government wants to increase the loan fee to 25%.  There’s no fair play in that change.

The legislation has not been passed by the Senate at this point in time.  So if this affects you then there may be time to stop it by letting your local senator know you are not happy.  The fee increase is due to hit in July 2010 if the legislation gets through the Senate.

I have to ask myself why there is a loan fee on education at all; a loan fee for a service that should be free.  You should ask yourself why it exists.  There is no loan fee on HECS places.  Why does it apply to the one and not the other?  Is it to cover administrative services of setting up the loan?  Well, no.  The same government department that administers HECS administers FEE-HELP.  But in actual fact, when you apply for FEE-HELP it’s not the government that spends time on assessing applications, all that work is done at your local campus when you enrol but despite that the loan fee is kept entirely by the government.  All the government does is to accept the information provided by your university, and passes it on to the ATO.  And that’s all done electronically.  The computer systems that drive all this already exist for HECS.  So I have to ask again: why the fee?  I don’t know why there is a fee at all, and I have trouble trying to work out a rational for an increase.

And if you are going to lobby the odd politician, ask them why they have just removed the loan fee from OS-HELP.  Students who wanted and could afford to travel overseas to study for a short time as part of their degree could apply for a loan from the government.  OS-HELP was available to them, and the 20% loan fee was bundled into the loan.  Well, the government has just removed the loan fee from OS-HELP.  That’s very nice for them.  How come it isn’t needed anymore?  Oh, let me guess.  It was just money grabbing in the first place.  Both OS-HELP and FEE-HELP are administered in exactly the same way: that is, by your university who then passes on that information to the government electronically.

Students who want to flit around the world get an improved deal by the removal of the loan fee.  Local students who just want to study at home have to pay an extra five percent with this 25% loan fee.

Get out there and protest.  Ask your local MP  some pertinent questions.  Stop them from increasing the loan fee.  Better still make them remove it.

Higher Education just got tougher, 5.0 out of 5 based on 2 ratings

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