Doubtful debt: the rising cost of student loans

The Commonwealth Government could save more than $800 million a year by 2017, according to this report, if it recovers outstanding student loans from deceased estates and people living overseas. Overview: Student loans have helped millions of Australians finance their higher education since the Government introduced the Higher Education Contribution Scheme, HECS, in 1989. The successor to HECS — the Higher Education Loan Program, HELP — lends more than$6 billion a year. It has been a very effective policy. But it has become expensive. By 2017 the Commonwealth will have $13 billion of loans on its books that it does not expect to collect. Students and former students repay their education debt only if they earn more than a threshold amount — currently$51,309 a year. Income contingent loans cleverly help cash-poor students pay for their education when they can afford to do so. Some of them never earn enough in Australia to repay what they borrowed. About 17 per cent of new lending is now classified as doubtful, meaning it is not expected to ever be fully repaid. This expense, which appears each year in the Commonwealth Budget, is projected to be $1.1 billion this financial year. With student numbers rapidly increasing, and new uses being found for income contingent loans, doubtful debt costs will continue to rise. This report investigates several ways of reducing doubtful debt while still protecting against financial hardship. One reason for doubtful debt is that HELP debtors leave Australia. Because HELP is repaid through the Australian income tax system it is not collected from people living elsewhere. England and New Zealand have similar student loan schemes and both require debtors in other countries to pay. This report recommends the New Zealand policy of requiring a flat annual repayment from student loan debtors living overseas. For debtors staying in Australia, some never earn more than the income threshold or do so for too few years to repay all their debt. Because the threshold is linked to average weekly earnings, it is increasing in real terms. Over time, this means that fewer debtors are obliged to repay. Linking the threshold to inflation would maintain its real value while increasing future repayment levels. Although these reforms would reduce HELP’s costs, on their own their effect on doubtful debt is modest. Its main cause is that HELP debt in deceased estates is written off. This is not a good use of scarce higher education funding. Most beneficiaries of the HELP write-off will not be financially dependent on the HELP debtor. Partnered HELP debtors earning less than the threshold are not usually the household’s main income earner. Their children will be adults by the time the estate is distributed. Introducing asset contingent HELP repayment for estates over$100,000 would radically improve HELP’s finances. If all these reforms were implemented now, they would save $860 million a year by 2016–17, and remove the need for planned cuts to teaching and research expenditure. HELP’s repayment system was never designed for lending on the scale we see today. With the reforms in this report, we can achieve the goals of HELP at a much lower cost

Mapping Australian higher education 2013 version

Over the last 40 years, higher education has moved from the periphery to the centre of Australian life. As recently as the mid- 1970s, only three out of every hundred working-age Australians had a higher education qualification. By 2012, the proportion had increased to 25 per cent. If current policies are successful, by 2025 40 per cent of young Australian adults will hold a bachelor degree or above. Many people study out of interest. But the main factor in this shift towards greater degree attainment – and the main reason governments give for their involvement in higher education policy – is a structural change to the labour market. More jobs require, or are more easily carried out, with the knowledge and skills higher education courses set out to teach. These professional and managerial occupations are now a third of all employment

Keep the caps off! Student access and choice in higher education

This paper argues that the Commonwealth Government should reconsider any plan to end its university open access policy.OverviewAfter just 18 months of operation, Australia’s radical experiment in uncapping undergraduate university enrolments is under threat. According to its critics – which include the higher education minister and a leading vice-chancellor – it admits academically under-prepared students and consumes higher education funding that could be better used elsewhere.This report, Keep the caps off!, shows that the new system is achieving its goals. It is lifting the supply of graduates to Australia’s economy, increasing student choice, and improving access to higher education for disadvantaged groups.The old system of government allocating student places to universities was unresponsive to student demand. With uncapping, universities are responding to demand trends in science, health and engineering by providing new student places. The last two fields are also areas of labour market shortage. Across most other disciplines, university applicants’ chances of admission to their first-preference field of study have increased.With their new freedom to offer more places, universities now offer Commonwealth-supported students innovative new options. Several new online ventures have started, ensuring that Australia is not left behind in this global trend. Universities are collaborating with TAFEs to meet the needs of new students.Uncapping has meant that more students with lower ATARs (Australian Tertiary Admission Rank) are admitted to study. A minimum ATAR of 60 has been suggested. But degree completions data show that 60 is an arbitrary cut-off point. It would exclude the more than half of low ATAR students who successfully complete a qualification.An ATAR cut-off of 60 would hit low socioeconomic status university applicants hard. In 2012, 8,000 low SES applicants would have been rejected without further consideration. With eased enrolment restrictions, the number of students from low SES backgrounds grew by 40 per cent after years of stagnation.University is not for everyone. Universities have an ethical responsibility to advise applicants who are at high risk of not completing a degree. Information about completion rates should be much more easily available to people considering further study. But there is too much variation between courses and individual applicants for a national policy on university admission.There are many hidden costs in capping university enrolments. Student places get misallocated between disciplines, because universities cannot easily adjust supply to demand. New higher education initiatives are hard to start. People miss out on their preferred careers. Social mobility suffers. There would be a high price to pay to offset $300 million in university funding cuts.It would be a policy tragedy to recap university places now. It would make Australia’s higher education system less fair, less efficient, and less productive

Adversarial-Playground: A Visualization Suite Showing How Adversarial Examples Fool Deep Learning

Recent studies have shown that attackers can force deep learning models to misclassify so-called "adversarial examples": maliciously generated images formed by making imperceptible modifications to pixel values. With growing interest in deep learning for security applications, it is important for security experts and users of machine learning to recognize how learning systems may be attacked. Due to the complex nature of deep learning, it is challenging to understand how deep models can be fooled by adversarial examples. Thus, we present a web-based visualization tool, Adversarial-Playground, to demonstrate the efficacy of common adversarial methods against a convolutional neural network (CNN) system. Adversarial-Playground is educational, modular and interactive. (1) It enables non-experts to compare examples visually and to understand why an adversarial example can fool a CNN-based image classifier. (2) It can help security experts explore more vulnerability of deep learning as a software module. (3) Building an interactive visualization is challenging in this domain due to the large feature space of image classification (generating adversarial examples is slow in general and visualizing images are costly). Through multiple novel design choices, our tool can provide fast and accurate responses to user requests. Empirically, we find that our client-server division strategy reduced the response time by an average of 1.5 seconds per sample. Our other innovation, a faster variant of JSMA evasion algorithm, empirically performed twice as fast as JSMA and yet maintains a comparable evasion rate. Project source code and data from our experiments available at: https://github.com/QData/AdversarialDNN-PlaygroundComment: 5 pages. {I.2.6}{Artificial Intelligence} ; {K.6.5}{Management of Computing and Information Systems}{Security and Protection}. arXiv admin note: substantial text overlap with arXiv:1706.0176

University fees: what students pay in deregulated markets

Overview For more than a year Australia has debated deregulating university fees for domestic undergraduates. The issue is controversial, but for many years fees have been deregulated for international students and domestic postgraduate coursework students. This report looks at how much these students pay for their courses, and analyses differences between these fees. Australian universities responded enthusiastically to the deregulation of the international and domestic postgraduate coursework markets. Although the fees charged are often high, strong enrolment growth shows students are willing to pay them. Last year, for example, 312,500 international students were enrolled in Australian universities, nearly twice as many as in 2001. They comprise nearly a quarter of all enrolments. Student fees from deregulated places are important to university finances. They provided a fifth of public university funding, or nearly $6 billion, in 2013. Public universities earned at least$4.3 billion from international students in 2013, while most of the remaining amount came from fee-paying domestic postgraduates. For both international and domestic students, fees vary by discipline and especially by university. International students usually pay significantly more, and never less, than domestic students in the same course. Their fees are set in a global, commercially-oriented market in which prestigious universities charge international students a substantial fee premium over less well known universities. In some disciplines, students at the most expensive university pay more than twice as much than students at the cheapest university. Despite the cost, many international students prefer expensive universities. In most disciplines high-fee universities enrol more international students than low-fee universities. Australian students are less willing than international students to pay a large prestige premium. They and their prospective employers understand the strengths of local universities. They know that research-driven international university rankings are an imperfect guide to the quality of graduates. Many Australian postgraduate students already have a foothold in the labour market. They have less need to impress employers with university prestige. Even so, in several disciplines domestic students, like international students, prefer the more expensive universities. In some postgraduate courses, the market is affected by price-controlled government-supported places. This is especially true of education and nursing degrees. These places help keep fees down for domestic students without a government-supported place. Many universities offer full-fee places at less than what they receive for a government-supported student. A future Grattan report will explore what profits universities make on fee-paying students and the policy implications of what happens to the money

Review of the demand driven funding system

In 2012, the Australian Government lifted previously imposed limits on the funding of bachelor-degree students at public universities. This new system was called ‘demand driven’ because it allowed universities to respond to student demand and allowed more students to benefit from higher education. On 12 November 2013 Minister for Education, the Hon Christopher Pyne, appointed a review panel to look at and make recommendations in relation to the demand driven funding arrangements. The review panel comprised the Hon Dr David Kemp and Mr Andrew Norton and is known as the Norton-Kemp review. The panel looked at the impacts of the demand driven system and whether it is increasing participation, improving access to students from poorer backgrounds and rural and regional areas, and meeting the skill needs of the economy. It explored whether there were any adverse impacts on quality and considered the long term sustainability of the system. The report found that public universities have responded well to changes under the demand driven system and improved access for all students. It found the new system has allowed universities to be more responsive to student needs, driven innovation and lifted quality. The reviewers made 19 findings and 17 recommendations, including extending the demand driven system to diplomas, advanced diplomas and associate degrees, and to private universities and non-university higher education providers such as TAFEs. The reviewers believe that extending the demand driven system will expand opportunities for students, and lead to further innovation in courses and modes of delivery, and in the quality of teaching and graduates

HD 306414, the optical counterpart to the Peculiar X-Ray Transient IGR J11215-5952

HD 306414 is the optical counterpart to the transient X-ray source IGR J11215–5952, characterised by short flares occurring every 165 days. In order to improve our understanding of this source, we obtained high-resolution spectroscopy of HD 306414 around the time of the February 2007 X-ray outburst. Large variations in the shape of the H? emission feature and the radial velocities of metallic lines are seen around the time of the X-ray emission

Neutron star masses in X-ray binaries

We discuss the determination of neutron star masses in X-ray binaries and explain the importance of such measurements. Examples are given of two of our recent neutron star mass determinations, in Cen X-3 and Vela X-1. We then discuss prospects for improving such measurements with SALT and the possibility of determining only the seventh neutron star mass in such a system by measuring the radial velocity curve of the recently discovered counterpart to the X-ray pulsar OAO1657--415

ESTIMATING THE EFFECTS OF PESTICIDE USE ON BURLEY AND FLUE-CURED TOBACCO

Crop Production/Industries,