Hon Steven Joyce
Minister for Tertiary Education, Skills and Employment

1 December 2015

Medical students’ borrowing limits extended

Tertiary Education, Skills and Employment Minister Steven Joyce has today announced changes to student loan borrowing for long undergraduate programmes in medicine, optometry, dentistry and veterinary science.

From next year all eligible graduate-entry students in these long undergraduate programmes will be able to apply for an extra 1 EFTS of student loan support on top of the 7 EFTS they can already access. This extra 1 EFTS was previously only available to help graduate students complete post-graduate qualifications.

Graduate-entry medical students will also be able to be paid the Medical Trainee Intern Grant as a lump sum at the beginning of their final year so that they can use it to pay their fees if needed. Up until now, this grant was available only as a monthly stipend.

“The Government has made these changes after monitoring carefully the impact of the seven EFTS limit on long undergraduate programmes, as we told students we would,” Mr Joyce says.

“Because of increases in the number of medical students being trained, there have been more graduate-entry students than was originally expected. While in 2016, fewer than 10 graduate-entry students in long undergraduate programmes will exceed the 7 EFTS borrowing limit, this number is expected to grow to over 100 by 2018.”

In 2010, the Government introduced student loan borrowing limits which provide seven years (7 EFTS) of borrowing for undergraduate study, up to a maximum total of around ten years (10 EFTS) to allow for completion of doctoral study.

“We introduced these limits to encourage students to make wise study decisions, perform well and take the most direct route through their studies,” Mr Joyce says. “The policy has worked well overall, discouraging study that is poorly focused or less likely to deliver good outcomes for individual students and taxpayers who subsidise the loan scheme. We have however acknowledged the challenge for graduate entrants in long programmes of study like medicine.

“Together, these two changes we announced today will greatly reduce the effect of the student loan limits on graduate-entry students,” Mr Joyce says.

“The Government will work with the sector to ensure that eligible students will have access to these new mechanisms of support and will continue to monitor the effectiveness of student loan limits.”

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