Accepting the interest in emmigration for personal and career reasons, Australian young are fairly locationally immobile. Regioanl students who study in the metros are far more likely to stay in the metros, regional students who study regionally to stay in the regions.

If you look at student numbers in the professions at metro universities, there is a stong bias towards overseas students, female students and those from Asian groups. Vet science or optometry are classic examples.

For a number of cultural reasons, female and Asian background students are less likely to consider regional possibilities.

It’s not a money issue. The last time I looked in optometry, there was a clear gradient in starting salaries from the inner city areas (low) through the outer metro and surrounding ring to the broader regional areas. In a profession now dominated by employed staff, the greatest end career returns came in regional areas.

There will always be some shifts in professionals between areas. Adelaide loses its higher fliers to other metro centres as an example. However, the current system does have bad structural skews.

If you look at the distribution

“Law doesn’t have people from overseas who can teach on the cheap – it just has desperate postgrad students like me who it can hire on contract”

Yep, that’s the way the social sciences work — it’s like a little industry of PhD students to the slaughter (I’m not sure if it is that bad in law). The engineers have woken up to that, which is why there almost no Australian born engineering PhD students anymore.

Law doesn’t have people from overseas who can teach on the cheap – it just has desperate postgrad students like me who it can hire on contract… sigh.

Pete: “As an arts graduate who began a law degree, I have a longstanding concern over exactly where my extra fees are going”

Perhaps you’re not aware of this, but you’re still not paying the full cost of a degree, even in law (assuming you are paying the Aus public student fee), thus you arn’t paying extra at all (you’re paying under the cost — which is why there are probably 25 other students in your tutorials, and why everything seems done on the cheap). I’ll also let you in on the obvious, which is that most universities in Australia already have staffing difficulties because they don’t have enough money in many fields (which are sure to become worse), and I imagine that is true in fields like law where you can’t get people from Iran/China to teach on the cheap. A second thing you might want consider is whether it would be wrong for universities to charge you more than the price of your degree if they wanted (assuming competition, unlike now). No-one at places like Harvard would even consider it wrong.

LDU – sure is – I think a lot of people think it’s all like the top of the pyramid, but that’s only part of the picture.