THE FRONT DOOR of the university building where I work looks like a wheelchair-accessible entrance. But that’s a lie. For most of its life, wheelchair users couldn’t enter because there was nothing to hold the door open.

Recently, the university installed a button that automates the door. Now, instead, lines of people wait to enter or exit while the door moves at the speed of continental drift. It doesn’t matter anyway. Despite the upgrade, the door is still too narrow for wheelchair users.

The door is a nuisance. Its only saving grace is its utility as a metaphor for the entire university system: well intentioned but incompetent, underfunded and poorly executed – the result of multiple strands of operational logistics attempting and failing to work together.

The arts and the university system aren’t a happy pairing. The corridors are empty. Students are disconnected. We’re at risk of losing everything.

THE NATIONAL ADVOCATES for Arts Education, a coalition of peak national arts education associations, has documented the closure of forty creative arts degree programs since 2018. Monash, Murdoch, La Trobe, Charles Sturt and Newcastle universities have also significantly reshaped their arts, creative arts and humanities programs. All have shrunk since 2020. The change is everywhere – and it’s accelerating.

In 2025, news of restructures and closures suddenly saturated the market. Macquarie University is cutting thirteen of its twenty-four arts majors, including full-degree programs in music and history. At the University of Canberra, thirteen creative arts and communication degrees – including journalism, sports media and industrial design – are being phased out or consolidated. Western Sydney University is planning to consolidate twelve schools into three faculties and forecasts up to four hundred job losses as a result. The Queensland University of Technology announced it was closing its dance major and was substantially reviewing its creative arts courses. The University of Tasmania is cutting thirteen arts and humanities positions and ceasing programs, including dedicated tourism courses. The University of Wollongong is reducing faculties and schools, with up to one hundred and eighty-five full-time-equivalent roles at risk. As I type, a significant protest has been launched against the Australian National University’s plan to dramatically downsize its School of Music and merge many of its existing arts degrees.

It’s a bloodletting. Degree by degree, program by program, arts courses are haemorrhaging. 

Most of these universities cite cost as the reason for cuts. For those courses hanging on, the pressure to tighten the budget is felt by all, including or especially by students.

Take Liz, for example. Liz took a gap year, then chose an arts degree in her hometown. She was awarded a scholarship and received a Centrelink payment; she was top of her class. Liz has moved between courses in theatre, social work and literature. She understands that the skills she’s acquired are invaluable, but she says she’s always felt her pattern of enrolment was on a knife’s edge. Liz’s degree appears safe, but she notes the entire sector is operating with a ‘scarcity mindset’. ‘For now,’ she says, ‘it feels like we’re only just getting away with it.’

At a national level, it appears that universities won’t be able to get away with it for much longer. The dire situation is the result of more than a decade of neglect and ineffective federal government policies that now threaten Australia’s broader relationship with the arts and culture.

THE MOST SIGNIFICANT government policy to tamper with tertiary education in recent years has been the Job Ready Graduates (JRG) package. Former Education Minister Dan Tehan announced it in 2020 as part of his tenure with the Morrison government. 

The package sets differential pricing for degree programs, supposedly funnelling more students into cheaper degrees that will lead them straight into jobs.

When the JRG package was implemented in 2021, humanities degrees suffered a sudden 117 per cent price jump. The annual cost of a communications degree increased from $6,684 to $14,500. English literature majors don’t get jobs – or so goes the theory.

Just four years on, analysis reveals the package has failed. Only 1.5 per cent of students changed their course choices under the JRG. Students still chose to study the arts, even with the added debt. For anyone who’s ever spoken to a seventeen-year-old school leaver, this choice is unsurprising. A student who excels in English or history isn’t going to be swayed into civic engineering or medicine simply because those degrees cost less.

A report released in early 2024 advised scrapping the JRG, calling for urgent reform. Federal Minister for Education Jason Clare described it as a ‘plan for the next decade’, leaving arts faculties and students lingering in uncertainty. When I spoke with Professor Kit Wise, a veteran educator and former chair of the Australian Council of Deans and Directors of Creative Arts (DDCA), he didn’t mince words: ‘We are marginalised in policy,’ he said. ‘We are also at the more expensive end of the spectrum to resource and fund.’

Humanities classes require intensive class time and tutoring. Creative arts are even more cost-intensive, with courses of fewer than thirty students requiring hours of personal contact time over several years. To make the cost more manageable, almost all universities have reduced their reliance on casual staff. That’s a vast and complicated gear shift, as a third of all academic teaching in Australian universities is undertaken by casual staff. This distribution is particularly prominent in arts and humanities courses, which often rely on casual staff members who split their time between working in a given industry and teaching. It helps tutors out in the short term, allowing them to diversify their income with teaching work while navigating a volatile freelance portfolio or small arts business.

More than half of Liz’s teachers were casual staff. ‘Those are the ones with industry experience,’ she says. ‘I liked all my teachers, but the ones who were actively working in the industry had a point of view that was always the most useful for the students.’

Casual staff often mentor students and then end up hiring them, particularly in regional universities. But a university’s attempts to cut costs may make its graduates less employable in the long run and cut the broader industry off at the knees.

TONY BURKE IS the current federal arts minister. His portfolio also includes infrastructure, transport, regional development, communications and sport, which demonstrates how much of a priority the arts seem to be for the Albanese government. Burke has spent much of his tenure differentiating himself from the federal Liberal parliamentarians who came before him. The centrepiece of Labor’s National Cultural Policy is titled Revive – a deliberate acknowledgement of the sector’s need for support in the shadow of the previous government’s moves to gut federal funding for the arts sector.

The government has provided $2.6 million to support arts-rich education in schools. In the 2024–25 Budget, they provided an immediate boost of $115.2 million over four years to secure the ongoing operation of the nation’s premier arts training organisations, collectively known as the ARTS8. These include institutions such as NIDA, WAAPA and the Australian Ballet School – elite metropolitan training grounds for future performers.

A scoping study built to identify workforce issues in the creative sector was released in March 2025. Beyond this boost, however, the federal government is not providing any support for tertiary arts and humanities education, particularly in regional Australia.

Several reports have demonstrated that women and regional students are disproportionately affected by the cuts to arts programs. It’s a cruel irony, given these degrees often provide one of the only pathways to cultural participation outside the capital cities, particularly for First Nations students.

Every organised body that can lobby is lobbying for more support, including the National Tertiary Education Union, the DDCA and the National Advocates for Arts Education.

So far, their calls have gone unanswered.

CUTTING ARTS EDUCATION isn’t just a budgetary issue. This decline comes despite the arts contributing $17 billion annually to the economy, a figure that dwarfs the support received by other sectors from the federal government. Why, then, is arts education so poorly resourced?

Arts, creative arts and humanities courses teach critical thinking, civic discourse, emotional literacy and storytelling. Most students are grappling with rent, menial work and advanced study. In a world that seeks to destroy their attention span, arts courses teach young people to read, think critically and provide historical context and sensitivity to complex issues. ‘The need for the arts has arguably never been stronger,’ says Professor Wise. ‘I have students who went on to be amazing human rights lawyers, social workers, curators, therapists and more. These are skills that directly help social cohesion, wellbeing, equity and diversity.’

Burke’s Revive policy punctuates more than a decade of conservative policies that have frequently harmed the arts and creative sectors. With fewer students now able to access arts and innovative education, Australia is at risk of an intergenerational drought in arts excellence, scholarship and cultural thought. For Wise, it’s an existential, national crisis. ‘It comes down to what we value as a country,’ he says. ‘We do need something radical.’

LIZ OFTEN FACES opposition to her arts studies among her extended family. ‘People always talk about the arts like they’re just a hobby, or something you do on weekends. But for me, it’s how I make sense of everything,’ she says. ‘When someone dies, we don’t read out a job application or a report. We read poems. We play songs. We tell stories. That’s what sticks. That’s how we remember. And yet the government is telling people like me that this isn’t worth investing in. It’s heartbreaking. It’s not just about jobs – it’s about meaning.’

Australian universities are the canary in the coalmine. They warn of a drastic loss to our country’s ability to connect, share stories and experience meaning together. Without support, we will be a much poorer nation.


_{^{Image courtesy of Sandra Seitamaa via Unsplash}}