Fifty years after Gough Whitlam abolished university fees, opening up higher learning to all, educational equity is in retreat. Students from a socioeconomically disadvantaged background comprise just 16.2 per cent of all domestic undergraduate university students, down from 17.1 per cent five years ago.

Education Minister Jason Clare has prioritised redressing this imbalance in a major university reform package set for release in the coming months. An interim paper has proposed a “workforce-wide higher education attainment rate of 55 per cent by 2050”, up from the current 32 per cent.

Universities are ramping up their focus in anticipation of the reforms, and to arrest the national equity slide.Credit: SMH

Not a very ambitious goal if you look, for example, at North Sydney, where that target has already been comprehensively surpassed by the area’s entire adult population.

The reform target is a different proposition entirely if we consider, say, Fairfield, where only 13.3 per cent of adult residents hold a degree. Just a 35-minute drive separates North Sydney and Fairfield. They may as well be different planets. This scale of access inequity would not be tolerated in health outcomes, yet it is deepening in education.

And that’s the rub of Clare’s reforms. “Parity” of university qualification attainment, no matter where a potential student lives, is the underpinning objective. That reform goal is being floated for 2035, ahead of the longer-range targets for the wider population. Ambitious doesn’t even begin to describe it. But the urgency is real.

The minister put it plainly at a National Press Club address in 2023. “If you’re a young Indigenous bloke today,” he said, “you’re more likely to go to jail than to university.”

He also spoke of his own experience. “Almost one in two Australians in their 30s have a university degree today. But not everywhere,” he said. “Not where I grew up. Not in the outer suburbs of our big cities. Not in the regions. Not in poor families.”

Education Minister Jason Clare at the National Press Club. Credit: Martin Ollman

Looking at the practical measures required to reach the proposed targets, researcher Andrew Norton predicts “equity group participation parity will not be achieved by 2035”. Decision-making for prospective students, he observes, on the “risks and rewards of different qualification levels” will cruel this mid-point of the reform agenda. He’s right – if we don’t change.