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Architecture students and unis will be better off and I still think the proposed changes suck. Here’s why.
As Osman points out, universities will choose to increase their most ‘profitable’ courses. This will now include arts, as students contribution (which unis keep) will be 90% and therefore encourage over enrolment. https://twitter.com/oz_f/status/1273847129140674565
HECS or HELP contributions were traditionally linked to student income expectations. High income profession = high fees. That’s gone.
Higher cost courses were also often higher or mid tier. That rationale is gone to. [arts courses are cheap. Not as cheap as say 500 person math courses, but cheap. No labs- just ‘chalk and talk’].
But TAFE, which produces job ready skilled workers has also been decimated.
Colleagues who studied Cert IV programs pre-2000 talk of how intensive and thorough their training was. Hours of face to face teaching each week. Compare that to deregulated apprenticeships, where you’re assessed once every six months. Not the same.
Fee deregulation was in theory meant to make unis compete on price. In effect, no uni would admit to not being top tier and defaulted to charging max rates allowable. Huge information asymmetry between unis and prospective students (typically teenagers).