The chief of Australia’s top-ranked university has called for tuition fees to be discarded, describing the idea as “one of the most important radical changes” to make higher education equitable.

In his annual address to staff, University of Melbourne vice-chancellor Duncan Maskell decried fees as a “recent” fashion that has fostered a “gravely mistaken” perception of university education as a primarily private rather than public good.

“Numerous innovative countries even today make the policy choice that higher education should be largely free for their citizens,” Professor Maskell said in a prepared copy of the 20 June speech. “Since the introduction of student fees we have not solved the problem of disadvantaged people having access to higher education.

“It is unequivocally true, coming from my background, that if I had been required to take out a loan I would not have gone to university, and I suspect that the prospective burden of significant debt is still a big factor in people choosing not to go to university.”

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Fee-free education is an article of faith for Australian groups including the National Tertiary Education Union, the National Union of Students and the Greens. It would entail a revamp of university financing, with domestic student loans, fees and charges generating 15 per cent of Melbourne’s A$3 billion (£1.6 billion) revenue last year.

Policy analysts tend to consider such a change unfeasible, saying the removal of fees would leave the sector impoverished while disproportionately benefiting wealthy people who attend university in high numbers.

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Instead, analysts back income-contingent loan schemes – an Australian invention – which defer fee payment until graduates attract reasonably high earnings.

Recent experience in other anglophone countries has not demonstrated great support for free university education. US�����Ի���UK leadership aspirants failed to convince their electorates to support policy platforms that included the jettisoning of tuition fees, while New Zealand’s government abandoned a plan to expand its fees-free scheme beyond first-year students.

But Professor Maskell contended that the extra taxation receipts from a high-earning, university-educated populace “easily outweigh” the costs of fee-free education. “This is in fact a point made by successive ministers for education, usually in defending student debts against criticism that they are too burdensome to students,” he said.

“The year-on-year public revenue at stake in funding student learning is not the main issue. This is fundamentally about the kind of population that we want to shape for the future in this country.”

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Professor Maskell said he was proposing a return to fee-free education “in the spirit of thinking radically”, after education minister Jason Clare  “ideas that can help reshape and reimagine higher education”. Mary O’Kane, who chairs the Universities Accord panel, invited people to “think outside of the box” and “be bold and lateral in your suggestions”.

Professor Maskell also criticised the conceptual separation of direct and indirect research costs as a “misleading” distraction that has contributed to the cumulative underfunding of research.

“It should not be beyond the capacity of governments and universities to agree to a methodology to arrive at a transparent estimated full cost of research that can be used as a benchmark for research funding policy,” his speech said. “We should have clarity about the full cost, so that government can decide to what extent they will fund the nation’s research effort.”

john.ross@timeshighereducation.com