Should University Fees Be Abolished?
Before tackling the thorny issue of whether or not university fees should be abolished, it might be reasonable to wonder whether the university itself has, in some respects, been abolished and ought to be resurrected. Arguably, university conduct is much the same in all developed nations. If this is so, Australia shares with the United States some unfortunate dilutions of what a university education once meant; that is, a place where a universe of ideas might be examined in peace and with free inquiry ascendant. Today, certain ideas and issues have become unacceptable-politically incorrect-even in the one setting in which historically any idea was fair game, the university (Roche 1994). One of the most politically incorrect ideas is that students get lost within the university, spending four years as no more than a number to their instructors, whether those instructors are underpaid graduate assistants or full professors teaching two courses a year for astronomical compensation. Since it is politically incorrect to mention the meat-market aspect of most large colleges and universities, those same institutions go about proclaiming that they offer-for their rising fees-a small college atmosphere (Roche 1994). These days, mos
Roche (1994) notes that educators have, for years, been demanding discipline rather than expecting a work ethic; have substituted narrow and biased pedantry for broad intellectual inquiry, and substituted a "knee jerk" hatred of all things bourgeois for investigation of what the entire universe has to offer. By simultaneously reducing per-student funding, the government gave universities a powerful incentive to attract foreign students. By 2002, public funding for Australian universities was about half of what it had been fifteen years earlier (Marginson 2002). t incoming university students stand in long lines to pick courses that have been closed for hours before they even arrived, and looking in vain for someone to advise them about what to do. Supporting the idea that universities in developed nations are no longer upholding their proud tradition is the fact that Australian university student-teacher ratios have risen form 13 to 1 in 1990 to 19 to 1 in 2001, which has affected quality negatively and have driven both administration and faculty to look at the revenues of a department before they assess the quality of the education it provides (Marginson 2002). By 2001, however, the Australian policy of attracting foreign fee-paying students had worked very well, with a record increase in student visas that year, 146,000. The greater number of students came from the People's Republic of China, with student visas equaling almost 9,000; that was a 46 percent increase over the year before, dwarfing growth in Hong Kong and American universities which had 26 and 16 percent, respectively (Cameron 2001). The fact that Australia has no private universities, but yet students must pay for public ones, is problematical to many. However, it is more understandable if one considers Australian higher education to be a commodity with value in the global marketplace than an example of the old university ideal of intellectual freedom and learning for its own sake.
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Approximate Word count = 1742
Approximate Pages = 7 (250 words per page double spaced)
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