KyleTheAviator said:
I disagree with this. Its made it possible for anyone, no matter their personal financial circumstances, to follow their career dreams. Just like HECS makes it possible for anyone intelligent enough to become a doctor or lawyer. These professions should be achievable by all, not just the rich.
Kyle, I agree with your sentiment. However, the harsh reality is that providing a nearly $100,000 loan to a huge number of young Australians who will be competing for an incredibly small number of jobs, thus harbouring little chance of repaying said loan, is simply poor economic management. The unreasonably high number of VET-FEE HELP funded CPL students is a result of "education providers" peddling the idea to the government that fresh 150 hour CPLs are in demand by the industry... this is not true.
Yes, we are all entitled to follow our favoured path but government loans can not be indiscriminately allocated to individual dreams, there must be a competitive process of selection that maintains society's interests. For aviation, just like in medicine as you say, this has to be in the form of a strict number of government-funded student places that are allocated by merit. I guarantee you that producing more junior doctors right now will not improve specialist-level care, which is what we need, but will only bottleneck specialist training programs and impoverish hospitals with even larger junior doctor to specialist ratios. This is akin to providing so many fresh CPLs that nobody can get an entry-level job and progress professionally/technically to a point where their skills might be in demand.
This imbalance in government-funded cohort size to industry demand is a problem facing many areas of tertiary education from engineering to business; it is not just limited to aviation. Yet, the disproportionate cost of flight training to any other course, has created a unique bubble of funding for the big flight schools. Once the government awoke to this imbalance (which it just recently did after the VET-FEE HELP fiascoes in other fields), they began to limit the cohort sizes that they'll provide loans to. This effectively bursts the bubble that has protected AAA, Basair and others for so long... it was only a matter of time and now we see the consequences as RQAC group ceases trading. This is a sad event indeed.