Australia's universities like to brand themselves as "knowledge hubs," but the reality is they've become billion-dollar bureaucracies selling glossy degrees of dubious value to overseas Asians (who become migrants), while hoovering up taxpayer subsidies. We spend $18 billion a year keeping the system afloat, while student debt now tops $80 billion, much of it in degrees that lead not to jobs but to lifelong underemployment. The question almost nobody in Canberra wants to ask is simple: what if we stopped paying for it? What if an Aussie DOGE took the sledgehammer to Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences, the sprawling empire of cultural studies, sociology, and critical theory, and forced universities to get back to basics: STEM, skills, and productivity?
The numbers are not trivial. AHSS degrees account for 40 per cent of enrolments, 40 per cent of staff, and billions in annual grants. The average philosophy lecturer on $140,000 a year is effectively subsidised by a nurse or tradie on PAYG tax. Strip back these departments and the savings could run to $5–10 billion annually, money that could build hospitals, subsidise apprenticeships, or even chip away at the trillion-dollar national debt. At a time when we need 200,000 nurses, 50,000 engineers, and 100,000 tradespeople, why are we bankrolling armies of gender theorists, feminists, and cultural deconstructionists?
The deeper problem is that universities are no longer content to simply teach or research. They have metastasised into woke ideological citadels, each with a diversity office, a marketing bureaucracy, and endless niche programs designed less to serve the economy than to serve themselves. Billions flow into research grants for projects that critics say are little more than political manifestos dressed up in academic jargon. The Group of Eight alone spends over a billion dollars a year on AHSS research, much of it on topics so abstract they make no difference to national productivity. A DOGE wouldn't waste time politely recommending efficiencies; it would impose them, stripping out departments that don't pay their way and cutting the bureaucratic ballast that keeps universities fat and unaccountable.
Of course, defenders will cry cultural vandalism. Arts and Humanities, they argue, provide critical thinking and preserve our national story. But Australia's creative industries already generate their own revenue streams, film, music, literature, without needing armies of tenured academics to justify their existence. And as for "critical thinking," tell that to the barista with a $60,000 anthropology debt or the Uber driver with a master's in gender studies. For too long, "cultural value" has been the fig leaf covering an unsustainable system.
Would there be risks? Absolutely. Thousands of academics would lose jobs. International students, who flock to AHSS because the courses are easier and cheaper, might choose Canada or the UK instead. Campuses would erupt in protests, as they always do when funding is threatened. But the alternative is worse: a higher education system that keeps expanding like an unchecked empire, demanding more taxpayer cash while delivering less real value.
An Aussie DOGE would not end universities; it would reset them. Prioritise engineering over ethnography. Nurses over narrative theory. Cybersecurity over critical race theory. Instead of pumping billions into "woke" faculties that act like ideological finishing schools, redirect that money into the fields Australia actually needs to survive in the 21st century. The payoff is obvious: billions in savings, a workforce that matches our labour shortages, and the end of the university gravy train as we know it. And a massive reduction in migration, as Australia supplies its own workers.
The question is not whether we can afford to defund Arts and Humanities. It's whether we can afford not to. Because every dollar spent propping up a bloated, inward-looking campus is a dollar not spent on hospitals, skills, or national security. It's time to call the bluff: ditch the woke, fund the workers, and give taxpayers a university system that finally earns its keep.