Nearly 20 percent fewer students from lower socioeconomic backgrounds are studying law since the Morrison government's "Job-Ready Graduates" scheme made humanities degrees prohibitively expensive, according to new data that reveals the policy's stark class divide.
Independent Senator David Pocock is calling for the scheme to be scrapped entirely, telling The Guardian it's creating a two-tier education system where working-class kids are priced out of fields like law, arts, and humanities.
The policy, introduced by former Prime Minister Scott Morrison in 2020, was sold as a way to steer students toward "job-ready" fields. The government slashed fees for STEM, teaching, nursing, and agriculture while doubling the cost of arts, law, and humanities degrees.
The logic? Australia needs more engineers and nurses, fewer philosophers and lawyers. Make the "useful" degrees cheap and the "useless" ones expensive. Market forces would guide students toward national priorities.
Except that's not what happened. Working-class students, already calculating whether university is financially viable, looked at $50,000-plus law degrees and walked away. Middle-class and wealthy students, whose families could absorb the cost, enrolled anyway.
Mate, this is textbook policy failure - and worse, it's predictable policy failure. Anyone who's spent five minutes thinking about class and education could've told you that doubling fees wouldn't just reduce overall enrollment. It would reduce poor students' enrollment while leaving wealthy students untouched.
The result? Law schools across Australia are becoming more elite, not less. The profession was already skewed toward private school graduates and middle-class families. Now we're actively engineering a legal profession that looks even less like the country it serves.
Pocock, the former Wallabies captain turned crossbench senator, has emerged as one of the sharpest critics of Morrison-era policies. He's calling for the entire Job-Ready scheme to be binned and for Australia to reconsider how it funds higher education.
The Albanese Labor government has been cautious about reversing the policy wholesale, despite union and student pressure. Unwinding fee structures is complicated, expensive, and opens the government to attacks about prioritizing "elites" over tradies and nurses.
But the data is damning. We're not just talking about a marginal shift - a 20 percent drop in low-income law students in just a few years represents a massive change in who gets access to one of the traditional paths to power and influence in Australia.
And it's not just law. Similar patterns show up in arts, communications, and humanities. The fields that teach critical thinking, policy analysis, and civic engagement are increasingly the preserve of those who can afford them.
There's a broader argument here about what universities are for. Are they job training centers that should be optimized for labor market needs? Or are they institutions of learning that develop citizens, thinkers, and leaders across all fields?
The Morrison government chose the former view. The consequences are now measurable. Fewer working-class kids studying law, arts, and humanities. More inequality baked into the professions that shape Australia's laws, culture, and public debate.
Pocock's call to scrap the scheme won't happen overnight. The government has other priorities, limited political capital, and complex budget constraints. But the evidence is clear: this policy is achieving the opposite of what Australia needs.
Because here's the thing about education policy - the effects compound over generations. The working-class kids who didn't study law in 2023 won't become judges in 2050. The students priced out of arts degrees won't be the journalists, policy advisors, and public intellectuals of 2040.
We're not just closing doors for individual students. We're reshaping what kind of country Australia will be decades from now. And it's looking less fair, less diverse, and less democratic than it should.
