The average student takes about nine years to pay off their degree. Some never do.

There’s two ways to get students to pay back their HELP debt sooner. Make them pay at a higher rate, or make them pay it back earlier. The government is trying to do both.

But there’s a third option. Pay it for them.

It was only a few generations ago that you could expect to walk out of high school and walk into a decent job. Those days are behind us. Increasingly, the jobs of the modern economy rely on post-school qualifications.

In 2017, the unemployment rate for people without a post-school education was more than double the rate for people with one. And people are responding to this trend the way you’d expect people to respond.

Today, 45% of women in their late 20s have a university degree, compared to 12% when HECS was introduced in 1989. And as any economist will tell you, an increase in supply will push down prices. For graduates, that price is your wage. In other words, in modern Australia, you don’t get paid much more for having a degree; you just have a hard time getting paid work without one.

We give everybody access to a free, publicly-funded school education because we’ve recognised that an school education is a necessity but not everybody can afford to pay for this necessity.

But we haven’t yet taken the next step in this logic by recognising that a post-school education is now a necessity as well, and should be treated the same way. That means making university fee-free.

When it comes to overcoming economic inequality, education is the closest thing we have to a silver bullet. It’s a proven means to prepare ourselves for the upcoming head-on collision with a labour market cleaved by the effects of automation and technology. Rather than letting kids from low-income families be the ones who fall into the widening gap between secondary and tertiary education – and with that, left at a disproportionate risk of long-term unemployment – we can funnel them into training and education.

Automation threatens up to a third of all existing jobs, but there are some jobs that can’t be replaced with robots. Future proofing our economy means future proofing our workforce. This brave new world is going to need trained nurses, aged care professionals and teachers. We don’t have enough people being trained for any of them.

Free university education does two things: it arrests the widening gap between the rich and the rest, and it gets our community and nation ready for the future of work.

Making university tuition free would boost enrolments, particularly among low-income families. It’s a furphy that because we give low-interest loans to students, they don’t actually mind about the price. The Department of Education’s own estimates suggest that students are responsive to price, and they’re not so naive as to think that, just because they put off paying it, doesn’t mean they won’t have to.

And using those estimates, fee-free university tuition would boost enrolments by an additional 8,100 next year. That’s 8,100 people who would otherwise not go to university because the cost of tuition is simply too high.

And for them, those low-income households are benefited with more jobs paying higher wages. A Deloitte study found, after controlling for innate ability and other attributes, full-time employed graduates in 2011 earned $24bn more in 2014 due to their university education than if they’d only completed high school.

And it’s not just university graduates who benefit. Everybody’s wages go up when we increase the number of graduates. One international study found that a 1% increase in graduates creates a 2% increase in wages for those who did not complete high school. In Australian terms, this would represent around $1.7bn more in annual wages for some of the lowest paid members of society.

Number of Australians with tertiary education qualifications to plunge Read more

Free university tuition would boost enrolments, strengthen Australia’s economic output, lift labour productivity and ultimately mean higher wages across the economy. It would make the country wealthier, healthier, more innovative and more resilient. But most of all, it puts us on a sure footing towards a “caring economy” that makes sure our vulnerable people are looked after, not left behind.

Today’s university graduates leave with decades worth of debt and enter an increasingly competitive job market, where you can’t afford not to have a massive debt hanging over your head. They’re not saving to start a family, put together a deposit for a house, or even save something for a rainy day. They’re paying for an education that’s become a necessity, but our old-fashioned thinking treats like a luxury.

We could give them a better deal. We could make university free. And if we did, we would discover that what goes around, comes around.