I've got to heartily disagree with that. There was a time when making a decent living in life was as black and white as working very hard and being persistent. You know the story, "I was 17 and left school, put a letter in to the manager of X company, and they have me a job on the spot. I worked there for 35 years and now I'm a partner". It's a vicious cycle. You need experience to get a job, but you need to work to get the experience. You can't go into any sort of job anymore without some form of qualification, and you certainly can't do well financially in life without some form of education. If I went to get a job now, as a technically reasonably uneducated person, I'd be working shifts in fast food, maybe a part time or full time role if I was lucky. Maybe I could spend years working up to a manager role, but even then you are required to obtain qualifications and receive training along the way. I certainly can't see my family living comfortably, owning a home etc as non tertiary educated. Of course, that is just my opinion, but for me, having a degree means a much better chance at success, both personally and financially. The budget worries me a lot for this reason. Education should be one of the very, very last things to receive cuts.
I agree and disagree with it. I thought it would be a good discussion point. One one hand I see it as optional because there are many, many people who do extremely well without a degree and from my own experience, DH and I own our farm, have very little debt (far less than the $79000 that was quoted ) and live quite comfortably and can afford to send our kids to boarding school - without a uni degree. It's only now at 40 that he's started his diesel fitters trade cert II and only then because he wants to do it, not that he needs to. I chose to do a uni degree because I wanted to become a teacher. I could have done other jobs that didn't require me to have a degree, but it's something I wanted to do so I was willing to pay the $20000+ for it.

On the other hand I know that some people can't do their jobs without a degree like nursing/medicine, teaching, accountancy, law etc. So in those situations you do need a degree. Doesn't mean that without it you won't do well in life, it just means that with it, you can do the job you really want to do and not settle for something else.

I don't think it helps anyone to make tertiary education unattainable because of the cost, but I don't think it should be free either. For that level of education there should be a fee attached to it because it's a specialised education.