The Job-ready Graduates reforms have increased student debt, failed to shift enrolments, and entrenched inequality across Australia’s higher education system.

The Morrison Government’s Job-ready Graduates (JRG) reforms were promoted as a pragmatic attempt to align university education with labour market needs. By adjusting student fees across disciplines, the policy aimed to steer enrolments toward areas of anticipated skills shortages while making higher education more “efficient” and “responsive.”

Five years on, the evidence tells a quite different story.

Rather than delivering a more rational and equitable system, JRG has failed on its own terms. It has not meaningfully shifted student demand, has increased debt burdens, and has introduced new barriers to participation – particularly for those already underrepresented in higher education. At the same time, it has intensified financial pressures on universities and contributed to a broader pattern of system instability.

The Higher Education Support Amendment (Reverse Job-ready Graduates Fee Hikes and End $50k Arts Degrees) Bill 2025, introduced by the Greens, should therefore be understood not as a radical intervention, but as a necessary corrective.

At the core of Job Ready Graduates was a simple idea: that students would respond to price signals. By making some degrees cheaper and others more expensive, the government could “nudge” students toward fields aligned with labour-market demand.

This assumption was always questionable. Decades of research have shown that student choice is primarily shaped by their interests, capabilities, and perceived career pathways, not by marginal differences in fees. The introduction of income-contingent loans further weakens price sensitivity, as upfront costs are deferred and repayment is tied to income.

Unsurprisingly, the policy has not produced the intended behavioural shifts. Enrolment patterns since 2020 have shown only modest changes, reflecting trends already underway. What JRG has done, however, is impose significantly higher costs on students in particular disciplines, especially in the humanities and social sciences.

In other words, the policy has proven effective at increasing costs, but ineffective at shaping behaviour.

The distributional effects of Job-ready Graduates are among its most troubling features.

Fee increases were concentrated in disciplines that enrol disproportionate numbers of women, low-socioeconomic-status (SES) students, and other equity groups. In some cases, fees more than doubled. This was not an incidental outcome:; it was an explicit feature of the policy design.

The result has been predictable. Evidence is now emerging of declining participation among low-SES students in high-fee disciplines such as law and commerce, alongside a significant contraction in arts and humanities offerings across the sector.

This is not a system that expands opportunities for a wider cohort of students and graduates.

Policies that increase financial barriers in disciplines that serve as entry points for disadvantaged students are not only inequitable, they’re also counterproductive. They undermine participation, distort choice, and reinforce existing social inequalities.

Job-ready Graduates has also exacerbated structural weaknesses in the HELP loan system.

Higher fees, combined with indexation and low early-career earnings, mean that repayment periods are now frequently extending beyond 40 years. For some graduates, particularly those in lower-paid professions, debt may persist for most of their working lives.

This represents a significant departure from the original design of income-contingent loans, which were intended to ensure that graduates would repay their education costs only once they had the capacity to do so.

Instead, we are seeing the emergence of what can only be described as quasi-lifelong debt.

These dynamics are not evenly distributed. Women, who are more likely to experience career interruptions and lower lifetime earnings, are disproportionately affected. So too are graduates in caring professions and other socially valuable but lower-paid fields.

The result is a system that penalises precisely those groups it should be supporting.

The consequences of Job-ready Graduates are not limited to students. Universities themselves are operating under increasing financial strain.

By reducing per-student public funding while increasing reliance on student contributions, the policy has intensified the sector’s dependence on cross-subsidies, particularly from international students. Domestic undergraduate teaching is now frequently loss-making, sustained only through revenue from international students and other sources.

This is not a stable or sustainable model.

As we have documented in previous work, these pressures contribute to course closures, reduced disciplinary breadth, and declining educational quality. They also reinforce a broader trend toward the corporatisation of higher education, in which universities are increasingly organised around revenue generation and financial metrics rather than public educational objectives.

The cumulative effect is a system that is both financially fragile and increasingly disconnected from its public mission.

Importantly, these concerns are no longer confined to policy critics. The Australian Universities Accord has identified JRG as a central but problematic feature of the current funding system, linking it to increased student costs, participation barriers, and distorted institutional incentives.

The Accord points toward a different model:, one based on student need, public investment, and long-term national capability rather than price-based individual incentives.

But such reforms will take time. Designing and implementing a new funding system is a complex task that is likely to take several years.

In the meantime, the existing policy continues to harm.

This is where the current  Greens’ bill plays a critical role.

By reversing the most regressive fee increases introduced under JRG, the bill would reduce student debt burdens, particularly in high-fee disciplines, and remove barriers to participation for disadvantaged students. It would also restore greater neutrality to the funding system and alleviate some of the immediate pressures on universities.

It does not, and does not claim to, resolve the deeper structural issues in higher education funding. But that is not its purpose.

Its value lies in addressing a clear and well-documented policy failure while creating the conditions for more comprehensive reform.

There is a tendency in policy debates to treat interim measures as distractions from “real” reform. In this case, that would be a mistake.

Maintaining the current JRG settings while waiting for a new funding model to emerge would mean prolonging the operation of a policy that is both ineffective and inequitable. The longer it remains in place, the more entrenched its negative effects will become.

The Greens’ bill should therefore be understood as a stabilisation measure, a necessary first step in a broader reform process.

If Australia is serious about building a public higher education system that is equitable, sustainable, and aligned with the public interest, then reversing the worst elements of JRG is not optional, it is essential.