Universities have undergone major change in recent years, from a time when campus life was vibrant to today when most students leave campus as soon as their classes finish.
This week at Monash University is “Green week” — the infamous drinking week where the beer is plentiful and the stories legendary. Turnout however has decreased in recent years, bringing cynics like myself to believe that if free beer can’t invoke student participation, nothing can.
Much of the decline of student life can be attributed to student poverty. Student Centrelink allowances are between $194.50 and $355.40 a fortnight — a measly sum given the rising costs of rent, fuel and food. And that’s before students fork out up to $1000 a semester on textbooks.
On top of this, not all students qualify. Simone Morrissey, the LaTrobe University student union’s Welfare Officer maintains that Centrelink payments are half the amount considered to be the ‘poverty line’. She says that “one in eight students regularly go without necessities due to poverty (and by necessities I mean food, study materials or paying bills).”
Not only that but she’s been hearing stories of friends getting married to qualify for Centrelink benefits. Morrissey also notes that the free toast the student union gives out on Wednesday mornings is the “only meal some students eat that day”.
International students are in the same boat, with a staff member at the Monash University International Student Society musing that “not all international students are well off and many take out loans from their governments or families. And of course international students aren’t eligible for concession cards and are only allowed to work 20 hours a week.”
As a result, 85% of undergraduate students in 2006 worked part-time during their degrees, compared to only 50% of students in 1984. Additionally, more than half of students today work more than 13 hours per week, nearly triple the 1984 average. An alarming 22.7% of students regularly miss class or study for paid employment.
Extra pressure is felt by the students to undertake unpaid compulsory work placements as part of their courses. Some placements are hundreds of kilometres from home, forcing students to literally ‘save up’ to fund their accommodation, transport and food for their placement. A friend of mine spent a month on a teaching placement in Bendigo (more than two hours from his Melbourne home) at his own expense, having to commute back and forth to Melbourne to work on weekends in hospitality just to earn money to stay afloat for the week.
Also affecting student life is the increased competitiveness of graduate employment, with students expected to have exceptional grades and work experience. Law, engineering and financial firms offer highly-coveted vacation work, ensuring students constantly have their heads down, battling it out for positions to plump up their resumes or get a ‘foot in the door’ over the summer holidays.
Jason Leigh, the 2007 Monash Student Association Activities Coordinator believes that “there has been a cultural shift on campus from students treating University as a second high school and their last opportunity to get reckless, to a vocationally focussed and competitive environment. The culture that thrived during the free education of the 1980s is unsurprisingly struggling in a time where it is extremely difficult to get into courses that you end up paying through the teeth for.”
There is little wonder why we don’t hang around on campus. No one has the time or the money to be students anymore.
Well-written article, with a lot of relevance to say. However, I must strongly disagree. True, campus life is dying a sow, gurgling death and no-one has the guts to stick a knife in it to shut it up. True, students live on absolutely nothing and no, it’s not cute or funny any more. I literally ate celery from a Coles bin when I was too busy working for free for News Ltd to do my paying job that enabled me to buy food, given Centrelink went on rent and not much more.
But I became editor of my uni mag, Entropy, as well as editorial assistant at the more high-brow uni circular, freelance design, organising rallies and fryups for starving kids and co-hosted a uni radio show. No matter how much we cajoled, bullied, threatened or offered free CDs, we couldn’t get people involved in the mag or student radio for love nor money. People Just. Don’t. Care. Saying it’s down to poverty is a copout. I was eating out of bins and still managed to be active on-campus. Kids these days think a career will just happen for them with nil extra-curricular effort and they already have mates so why make more. There’s no excuse for plain old raw sloth and I think that’s what we’re dealing with here.
The way students are financed to attend universities is a disgrace and a huge waste of human talent. It is insane to stick the costs of education (in the form of part time work and student loans) to individuals at the beginning of their working lives when they have negligible experience and education. Stick it to them later through higher rates of tax when they are capable of generating much higher economic value
University education should be free and students should be studying full time. Part of that education experience should involve wide reading and study outside subjects that students are enrolled in as well as large volumes of socializing, extra-curricular activities, travel, loafing around, thinking and dreaming.
The quality of our civilization rests fundamentally on the quality of the education that university students receive. To spend the equivalent of two or more days at work cuts deeply into the quality of the learning that people get, wasting not just their own time but also that of the academics teaching students. The pressures of juggling study, part time work and student loans must also increase the drop out rate leading to further waste. And to impose student loans on young people must be a bar to people from more straightened economic circumstances undertaking university study and is therefore socially regressive and wasteful of human potential.
In my own case I earned a mediocre degree despite attending a fine university (Sydney) and being taught by some brilliant people such as Professors John O. Ward and Frank B. Tipton. The problem was not my ability but simply that I had to put a huge amount of effort into keeping body and soul together through part time work (30 hours a week).
Australia is a rich country and getting richer. We can afford free tertiary education, grants to cover living expenses, wide participation and full time study which will yield a stronger economy and a more advanced civilization. A highly educated work force will generate higher economic value and will be able to fund full time high quality university education through higher tax payments. If we assume a full time four year degree costs $160,000 and the reciepient has a forty year working career then that person only has to pay an extra $4,000 in current year dollars to fund the cash costs of the degree. The economic value created for our society by a unversity education is much higher.