Australian higher education policy uses a geographic proxy to measure socioeconomic status. People living in the lowest 25% of areas by the ABS Index of Education and Occupation are deemed ‘low SES’.

The IEO is one of four SES measures devised by the ABS using census results. The other three are the Index of Relative Socio-economic Disadvantage (IRSD), the Index of Relative Socio-economic Advantage and Disadvantage (IRSAD), and the Index of Economic Resources (IER).

During the Senate inquiry into the new funding legislation Greens Senator Mehreen Faruqi, drawing on the University of Sydney’s submission which said it used IRSAD for awarding scholarships, asked witnesses about possible use of IRSAD instead. Senator David Pocock also asked about SES indicators for the ACT, which has few low SES students on the official definition.

I was one of several people to receive a written question on notice on equity definitions. This post draws on my response.

Predicting educational disadvantage

The chart below shows 2021 educational participation rates at age 20 by the four ABS SES indicators. Like the higher education version it uses SA1 areas, which on average contain about 400 people. I used census longitudinal data to capture SES when these students were aged 15 in 2016. This is a more reliable indicator of their formative years than current location, which could reflect a move closer to a university. A weakness of the funding bill currently in the Parliament is that its SES proxy is the student’s current address.

As a predictor of educational participation the IEO is the most powerful of the four. Parental education and occupation indicators show the largest high-low gaps. Young adults in the top decile are 4.2 times as likely to be at university than young adults in the lowest decile. The Index of Economic Resources is the least predictive, with top decile residents 2.3 times as likely to be at university as the lowest decile.

For outreach programs I can see merit in the IEO, to counteract absent university role models and possibly low parental expectations of higher education.

Read More »