I have a paper coming out soon, co-authored with Ren-Hao Xu, on the rise of Commonwealth supported places in postgraduate coursework degrees. It is another in our series on university decision-making under Job-ready Graduates. This post provides more general background on domestic postgraduate coursework trends.
Key points:
- Despite a return to headcount growth following a mid-to-late 2010s stall, domestic PG coursework enrolments are declining as a % of the main potential market, the bachelor-degree holding population.
- On a full-time equivalent student basis the largest domestic PG coursework enrolments by field are in education, business and health. Growth over the last decade is concentrated in health, social work and IT.
- PG coursework had a 63.6% female enrolment share in 2024. The large health and education fields are highly feminised. The female enrolment share is increasing in most other broad fields of education.
- Two-step bachelor/masters entry to professional occupations is making the PG coursework population younger.
- More PG coursework is being delivered online, a likely cause of increased rates of part-time study.
- In line with 2020s enrolment trends, course completions are increasing. Many migrants also have postgraduate qualifications. As a result the postgraduate share of the workforce is increasing.
Why do students enrol in postgraduate coursework degrees?
In the ABS work-related training survey students mainly give job-related reasons for taking a postgraduate coursework degree. Since 2017 more students take degrees for reasons relating to their current job, compared to seeking a career change or a better job.
Trends in overall domestic postgraduate enrolments
In the mid-to-late 2010s we saw a multi-year plateau in postgraduate coursework enrolments, at around 200,000. Then, in a likely example of higher education’s counter-cyclical relationship with the labour market, enrolments increased significantly in 2020 and 2021. As jobs returned enrolments eased off, but remained above 2019 levels.
Andrew Norton 