Fees free helping wealthy families
Derek Cheng reports:
The Government’s flagship fees-free policy appears to have seen a rise in high school students from wealthier neighbourhoods going to university, according to data released under the Official Information Act. …
According to the data, fees-free appears to have boosted the proportion of decile 6 to 10 students going to university, while the proportion of students from declie 1 to 5 schools attending non-university tertiary study fell.
Excluding students where the decile was unknown, decile 6 to 10 students made up 68 per cent of fees-free students, up from 62 per cent from the 2017 group.
This policy is projected to eventually cost $1.2 billion a year and the two things it has achieved are:
- Fewer people overall undertaking tertiary education
- The bulk of the fees free going to students from wealthy backgrounds