I’m not really one for pining for the good ol’ days, when things were splendid and now, they’re not. Apart from the clear lack of nuance in this sort of stance, it generally doesn’t progress discussion in a useful way. Some things were better; plenty were worse than they are today.

But when it comes to universities and the university experience for students, it’s clear that the good ol’ days were superior and a great deal has been lost.

When I first entered university, I had just turned 17 – too young to drink (officially), too young to drive. The term ‘gap year’ hadn’t been invented. A few of my pals did double degrees combined with law, but a single degree was the most common pathway for undergraduates.

Economics was not a particularly common choice for girls, but I don’t recall that bothering me too much. The contact hours were not too onerous: two lectures and a tutorial per subject was the typical combination. But everyone was expected to turn up for those hours and more.

Most of us spent a fair amount of time in the library while meeting up in the refectory for copious cups of tea and coffee delivered in cheap crockery. On Fridays, a trip to one of the local pubs was close to compulsory.

Most of us had jobs during the university holidays, but not during term. This was a time when part-time work was still relatively uncommon. The generally accepted arrangement was full-time study during term; work and play during holidays.

Now I’m not saying that the quality of my undergraduate education was outstanding. We had some ordinary lecturers, including some former high school teachers. But there were a few standouts – I had Geofrey Blainey as my tutor in first year Economic History, for instance. The staff knew many of the students and interaction was encouraged beyond formal office hours each week.

Fast forward to today and it’s like comparing the building of a Rolls-Royce with a large-scale production line churning out cheap electric vehicles in Chinese factories.

In the bachelor’s degree I undertook, at least half of the students would now be fee-paying international students. Their English language skills will vary from poor to non-existent, with a few exceptions. They stick together, understandably. At the same time, it is entirely possible for local students to make no new friends during their university studies.

Face-to-face lectures are optional – they are available to watch on streaming – and there are weekly tutorials with large numbers of students allocated to each one. Group assignments are commonplace, with the individuals in the groups assigned by the lecturer in charge. Typically, several international students will be mixed with local students.

In my day, there were no group assignments and quite rightly. After all, the individual is awarded the degree, not a group. Group assignments are just a sneaky way to give a hand-up to international students and to reduce the work effort of the markers. It is common for local students to do all the work but the overall mark for the assignment is shared by the group. Is this excellence in education?

If we look at surveys of student satisfaction, it is worth noting that the universities that seem to provide the best experience for local students are small, regional campuses with proportionately fewer international students.

Mind you, the overpaid vice-chancellors of the sandstone universities will kid themselves that local students get something out of the large swathes of international students, even though this is basically an evidence-free statement. Acting vice-chancellor of the University of Melbourne, Glyn Davis, makes this claim with a straight face.

Of course, the massive revenue surge from international students has been welcomed by the well-paid university administrators. The dollars have then been strategically deployed to play the international rankings game to ensure their university achieves a high score. (Employing a Nobel Prize winner garners a lot of points, even if said Nobel Prize winner doesn’t ever set foot in the institution.) A high score means more international student applications, particularly from China.

Into this toxic mix comes a series of bizarre government policy initiatives, including the Coalition’s ill-considered Job Ready Graduate scheme. The thrust of this scheme was to realign the relative prices that university students would have to pay to undertake particular courses according to the prejudices of the government of the day.

Forget about the strength of student preferences and the cost of delivering courses – that is, market forces through the interaction of demand and supply – the government would assume the role of higher education dictator.

The cheapest courses (Band1) were deemed to be Education, Mathematics, Statistics, Nursing and Agriculture. The most expensive ones (Band 4) were Law, Accounting, Economics, Commerce, Communication, Society and Culture. Yes, I’m not sure what Society and Culture means, but let me continue.

The price gap is very considerable: $4,700 for a full annual load for Band 1, $17,400 for Band 4. The basic idea was that we don’t want more people studying Band 4 courses and if arts and humanities faculties suffer as result, so be it. (The other areas are likely to be less affected by the high price given their vocational nature.)

But here’s the rub: even though Labor huffed and puffed about the Job Ready scheme, in four years they have done nothing to alter or dump it.

In the meantime, the Labor federal government under the deeply unimpressive Education Minister, Jason Clare, has embarked on a new set of policies designed to further undermine the right of students to select the course and institution that best suits them. It goes by the name of Managed Growth and involves 80 per cent of the post-secondary school population attaining a university or equivalent qualification.

Why the figure is 80 per cent is anyone’s guess, but the key here is that, given the advent of artificial intelligence, you have to think that this figure is way too high. Being able to unblock drains looks like an altogether better bet than having a degree from the University of Central Queensland.

A part of this Managed Growth plan is to direct students in particular fields away from popular universities towards less popular ones. This will be done by restricting the number of Commonwealth places for popular courses at popular universities, thereby pushing up the minimum ATAR or equivalent score required to be offered a place.

Clare’s idea is that students should be just as happy to do a commerce degree at UNSW as at the University of Western Sydney. Yeah, right. Of course, there is always the possibility that students might decide to give university a miss if they can’t get into their preferred course.

The bottom line is this: the quality of university education for many students, probably most, has deteriorated markedly over the years. Our universities are now vast – the new Adelaide University combining two universities has 70,000 enrolled students and this is just the fifth largest in the country. They are much bigger than the top universities overseas.

International students now make up around one-third of total enrolments; it’s close to 50 per cent at some – Sydney, UNSW, Melbourne, RMIT. In some courses, international students make up nearly all enrolments. Government higher education policy has gone from bad to worse.

So maybe the good ol’ days were better.