Bruce Chapman (Australian economist)

Bruce Chapman AO is an Australian economist and academic known for being the founder or architect of the HECS system.^[1] HECS is the Higher Education Contribution Scheme loans system. He is currently a professor at the Crawford School of Economics and Government, Australian National University.^[2] He received an Order of Australia in 2003.^[3]

Education

He was awarded a Bachelor of Economics at the Australian National University for his undergraduate degree.^[3] He earned his PhD in Economics from Yale University.^[3]

Career

In 1989, the Australian Federal Government led by Bob Hawke introduced the Higher Education Contributions Scheme (HECS),^[4][5] which was first intimated by Professor Murray Wells (The Australian, 15 April 1987, page 15). Bruce Chapman further developed the policy with the support of the then Education Minister John Dawkins (see Dawkins Revolution). He was also an advisor to the Keating Government in 94-96.^[3]

In the original HECS, an $1,800 fee was charged to all university students, and the Commonwealth Government footed the bill. It was a first of its kind loan scheme that used the tax system to collect repayments.^[6] The scheme has influenced other countries like the United Kingdom, Ghana, New Zealand and Hungary to introduce their own model of a higher education contribution scheme.^[7][8][9]

Since then he worked with governments on policies such as the Working Nation and the 2010 changes to Youth Allowance.^[3] The Abbott Liberal Government came into power in 2013 and tried to introduced reforms into the higher education sector.^[8] This included fee deregulation which Chapman has been gobsmacked that allows universities to raise fees in excess to the cost of teaching students.^[8] If the federal government does decide to uncap fees, he proposes a mechanism of capping of fee increases whereby the government subsidies tapers off when fee increases breaches a certain level.^[10]

In 1993, Chapman was elected the Academy of the Social Sciences of Australia.^[11]

Publications^[12]

• “Reforming the German Student Loans System” (with Mathias Sinning) (forthcoming 2013), Education Economics.
• “Revenue Forgone from Unpaid HECS When Graduates go Overseas to Work” (with Tim Higgins), (forthcoming 2013), Australian Economic Review.
• “What’s love got to do with it? Homogenous preferences and dyadic approaches to understanding marital instability” (with Rebecca Kippen, Peng Yu and Kiatanantha Lounkaew, (forthcoming, 2013), Journal of Population Research).
• “How many Jobs is 23,510, really?” (with Kiatanantha Lounkaew) (forthcoming, 2013), Australian Journal of Labour Economics.
• “Introduction” (with Kiatanantha Lounkaew) (forthcoming, 2013), Economics of Education Review (Special Issue on Education Policy).
• “Repayment burdens with Vietnamese student loan policy” (with Amy Liu) (forthcoming, 2013), Economics of Education Review (Special Issue on Education Policy).

References