Month: October 2024

Mapping Australian higher education 2023 – October 2024 data update

Andrew Norton1 Comment

Update 20/12/2025: More recent data here.

An updated version of Mapping Australian higher education is not on the horizon, but to extend the life of the 2023 version I have updated the data behind the charts and some tables. An Excel file with these and the two further updates mentioned below is here.

Further update 6/11/2024: The 2023 Student Experience Survey results have been released. Some question changes have broken the time series but the replacement question results are recorded.

Further update 12/11/2024: A careful reader has identified the missing higher education provider mentioned below and identified other errors in my institutes of higher education appendix. Hopefully the list is now correct and complete. This update also includes 2024 bachelor and above attainment data.

The original pdf with explanatory text is here.

Some noteworthy changes since its publication:

  • We now know that domestic enrolments fell in both 2022 and 2023; enrolments last declined in 2004 (figure 3)
  • International students – although no regular reader of this blog needs this pointed out – recovered strongly from the COVID period (figure 10)
  • The source country skew of international students means that a top 15 source country does not necessarily send a lot of students, but for the first time an African country made it to the list, Kenya with 6,538 students in 2023 (figure 11) (and 7,330 onshore YTD July in 2024).
  • Higher education student income support recipient numbers continued to fall, to 156,710 in mid-2023, the lowest figure since 2009 (figure 18). While since 2022 falling income support recipients is partly due to fewer students, except for a COVID spike the number has been in structural decline since 2017.
  • Staff numbers recovered strongly in 2023 to be roughly what they were in March 2020 (figure 19)
  • HELP repayments increased increased significantly, from $5.56 billion in respect of 2021-22 to $7.8 billion in respect of 2022-23 (figure 31B). Most of this was due to voluntary repayments increasing from $780 million to $2.9 billion, as debtors sought to evade high indexation (some of which will be refunded if the indexation reduction bill passes).
  • Short-term graduate full-time employment rates improved, in 2023 reaching the best level since 2009 (figure 40)
  • The number of higher education providers continued to increase, from 198 in mid-2023 to 211 in October 2024 (appendix A and appendix B).

The Department of Education’s failure to release the 2023 Finance or Student Experience Survey publications means that the update is not as full as I would like.

Visa processing and international student policy

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Some universities and vocational education providers would prefer enrolment caps to ministerial direction 107, which consigned their offshore student visa applications to the end of the visa processing queue. 107 tells the Department of Home Affairs to give processing priority to applications for schools, postgraduate research, and higher education institutions with a low immigration risk rating.

The education minister has said that ministerial direction 107 will go if the caps bill passes.

While 107 should be repealed, as it unfairly penalises some student visa applicants and education providers, like Claire Field I think the sector over-rates the benefits that would follow. 107 is blamed for other things that happened around the same time that would not be affected if it went.

These other things include the resources Home Affairs allocates to student visa processing, changed practices in applying visa eligibility criteria, and new visa rules.

Student visa processing levels

From November 2022 to July 2023, Home Affairs put significant effort into clearing a student visa backlog. On my calculations, in those nine months they processed – counting both grants and rejections – 483,199 visa applications (primary visa holders only). That is 54% more than the equivalent number pre-COVID, between 2018 and 2019.

In the second half of 2023, shown in green in the chart below, monthly visa processing dropped back to levels that were similar to 2019. Ministerial direction 107 was announced in December 2023, but that was the fourth month of more normal pre-COVID visa processing volumes.

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The National Student Ombudsman and bureaucratic overreach

Andrew Norton3 Comments

With so much going on in higher education policy at the moment, the National Student Ombudsman legislation has not received much attention. But university submissions to the Ombudsman bill Senate inquiry raise important issues. I also put in a submission.

Academic judgement versus academic matters

University submissions make similar academic freedom objections to the bill as one of my blog posts on the National Student Ombudsman.

One issue is the scope of ‘exercise of academic judgement’, which is an ‘excluded action’ that the Ombudsman cannot investigate. The bill’s explanatory memorandum seeks to distinguish ‘academic judgement’ from ‘academic matters’, such as claims for special consideration and discipline for academic misconduct, which it thinks should be within the Ombudsman’s jurisdiction.

The QUT, Monash, University of Melbourne, ATN, Gof8, UA, UTS and UQ submissions all raise concerns about this aspect of the bill. As UQ says:

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Making the international student caps bill less bad

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Today is the likely final day of public hearings for the international student caps bill, ahead of a report due on 8 October.

Despite the strong campaign against this bill the political reality is that the Opposition supports provider-level caps. This gives scope for a compromise that will see the bill pass in some form.

In my final submission to the Senate inquiry I focused on ways to make the bill less bad, while still letting the government and alternative government achieve their migration-related policy objectives.

Remove the course caps provision

80%+ of international students do not stay in Australia permanently. In this context, the government’s position that international students should be stopped from taking courses that don’t align with Australia’s skills needs borders on the absurd.

With over 25,000 courses registered on CRICOS regulating at the course level is also beyond the government’s administrative capacity. As Claire Field has been reporting, there are numerous errors in the much smaller task of imposing about 1,150 provider-level caps.

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