Author: Andrew Norton

Job-ready Graduates – its effects on university Commonwealth supported places decisions

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The student contribution increases of Job-ready Graduates get regular media coverage, focusing on the plight of debt-laden arts graduates. Far less attention is given to how JRG affected university decision-making.

For universities JRG had multiple elements. Total overall Commonwealth supported student funding rates by discipline were changed, some increasing but most decreasing. The changes to student contributions altered incentives for over-enrolments. Previous separate allocations of sub-bachelor and postgraduate Commonwealth supported places (CSPs)were ended, merged into a single fund with bachelor degrees.

To explore these effects, Ren-Hao Xu from UWA and I interviewed 15 leaders and officials from five universities in 2024 and 2025. We chose universities with various sizes, locations, missions and rankings to find out how they interpreted the JRG incentives and how these affected decision making. An academic article reporting our methodology and findings was recently published in the Australian Educational Researcher journal.

Over-enrolment

One thing I was especially curious about was to what extent over-enrolment – taking students on the student contribution only – was deliberate and to what extent accidental, reflecting the inherent difficulties in hitting precise full-time equivalent enrolment targets.

For the over-enrolled universities in our study the answer was mostly deliberate.

Two universities in our study had mission-related reasons for over-enrolling. The vice-chancellor of an equity-focused university told us that ‘we’ve also felt that we should over-enrol based on demand due to the university’s mission to serve students from disadvantaged backgrounds.’ The vice-chancellor of a regional university was willing to over-enrol as there was no other local university students could attend.

Other universities took a more strategic approach. One noted the likely Accord system re-set, knowing that during past policy shifts enrolments as of a recent year were used at the basis of the new funding system. This was a chance to lock in a larger base funding amount (an approach that has so far only partly worked, with just $50 million allocated to convert over-enrolments to fully-funded places).

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Self-reported status by educational attainment, an update

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It’s common to hear concern about the ‘status’ of vocational education. An article yesterday in The Conversation reported a ‘stigma’ associated with school leavers choosing vocational education. ATEC’s recent discussion paper on a more joined-up tertiary system noted ‘a lack of parity of esteem’ between vocational and higher education. There was a parliamentary inquiry on status of vocational education a few years ago.

For the university-educated academics and bureaucrats who devise measures of status, such as the index of education and occupation used to determine higher education low SES, it seems self-evident that higher education ‘ranks’ above vocational education. In higher education policy the problem is not that educational hierarchy exists, but that access to its upper echelons correlates with family background.

But in a late 2010s blog post I argued that, outside this top-of-the-AQF bubble, educational status is present but seems less significant. The post reported on young people rating the ‘prestige’ of different qualifications and general social survey results of self-reported status by educational level. Although status-focused individuals seek the top educational brands, this does not fully transfer through to general status.

Self-reported status by education

The self-reported status measure asks survey respondents to rate themselves on a 1 (labelled ‘bottom’) to 10 (labelled ‘top’) scale. The chart below reports average results, comparing 2015 from the original post to the 2023 Australian Survey of Social Attitudes.

While survey sample problems may affect the results – with 1010 responses to this question in 2015 and 883 in 2023 – self-reported status declined across all broad qualification groups. Perhaps falling living standards are perceived as a loss of status.

Self-reported status fell by the most for people with a bachelor degree or above. A consequence of this is that the average degree holder status was in 2023 only 0.4 points higher than the average upper vocational qualification holder, down from 0.7 in 2015.

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Rule by email in higher education policy – over-enrolment and governance

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This post is about unlegislated higher education policies. The story starts last year with reports that the government was imposing caps on commencing Commonwealth supported places, which reached the media in November 2025. This sparked my interest, as the current funding legislation does not specifically authorise it.

By the end of the Universities Australia conference in February 2026 I was also hearing that governance conditions were being imposed on universities getting additional funds to reduce over-enrolment (taking students on the student contribution only). The policies were implemented via emails to vice-chancellors.

I decided to file a Freedom of Information request on the emails. I paid a $150 processing charge. This week the request was granted.

The minister’s letter

The FoI release shows that this process started with a letter from Jason Clare to the ‘interim ATEC’ dated 28 August 2025.

The letter reiterates the minister’s views on the impact of over-enrolments for the universities left with too few students. Its solution is to get over-enrolled universities to do three things:

  • ‘Agree’ to a plan to reduce or not further grow commencing Commonwealth supported students
  • Report on plans to support staff and students during this transition period (an implicit acknowledgement that fewer CSPs = fewer staff)
  • Early adoption of agreed actions from the Education Ministers’ consideration of recommendations from the Expert Council on University Governance

To do these things, universities were to be given two incentives and one threat.

  • A share of a $50 million over-enrolment fund for 2026, which would convert some over-enrolled places to fully-funded places (i.e. Commonwealth + student contribution)
  • A more attractive transition phase to a capped system, under which they could keep student contributions for over-enrolments while trending down to the caps (the ‘glidepath’)
  • And the threat that ‘actions they take now will be considered by ATEC when allocating growth places through mission based compacts for 2027’.

Emails to vice-chancellors of over-enrolled universities, dated 11 December 2025, mentioned that they had already agreed to ‘pursue a more modest growth strategy in 2026’ and told them that they had until 14 January 2026 to confirm student and staff support plans and agreement to governance actions.

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TEQSA’s response to the Australian National University’s governance issues

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Julie Bishop quit as ANU Chancellor last Friday, but not without a parting shot:

“Following unprecedented and co-ordinated interference, the ANU Council is no longer able to discharge its legal and ethical obligations,” she said. “The higher education sector is at a crossroads of regulatory overreach in the governance of our institutions or autonomy and academic freedom.”

The ANU needs to move on from the last few years of drama and disruption. The departure of controversial figures, including Julie Bishop, will help with that process. But her parting shot made a valid point. A TEQSA decision that Bishop is alluding to, while at least in part a by-product of weaknesses in TEQSA’s enforcement mechanisms, was an odd one. It was at most a partial solution to the ANU governance problems identified by TEQSA. Compared to other options it raised more serious legal compliance issues for members of the ANU Council.

The voluntary undertaking

The most prominent “unprecedented interference” is a voluntary undertaking the ANU made to TEQSA about the appointment of a new Chancellor. This was to happen in the lead up to Bishop’s term expiring on 31 December 2026, but will now be brought forward.

What the voluntary undertaking does is set a process by which the Council will accept or reject a recommendation for the new Chancellor.

The recommendation will come from a panel of TEQSA-approved members. The panel will have an independent chair nominated by TEQSA (announced as Peter Coaldrake), two TEQSA-nominated people with experience and expertise in higher education and university governance, an Indigenous person if neither of the earlier two nominees are Indigenous (who appoints this person is not stated, by inference TEQSA) and two members nominated by ANU Council who are “accepted by TEQSA in writing.”

So TEQSA will either appoint or have veto power over all five or six members of the panel.

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ATEC’s interim statement of strategic priorities

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Yesterday the Australian Tertiary Education Commission issued an interim statement of strategic priorities. This statement will guide university mission based compacts for 2027. This post covers the legal status of the statement, its apparent approach to management of the sector via compacts, and what it proposes in the areas of skills, First Nations, equity, teaching quality, VET-higher education relations, and research.

Decision-making under the ATEC system

When fully operational the ATEC decision-making process will operate in the sequence shown in the chart below.

Despite the ATEC Act 2026 officially coming into force on 29 April 2026, ATEC’s interim statement seems to be operating in the legal limbo the organisation has been in since being established as the ‘interim ATEC’ in July 2025.

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Treasury’s take on student debt repayment times under Job-ready Graduates

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Thanks to a Guardian story based on a FoI request we now know that Treasury has modelled changes to HELP debt repayment times under Job-ready Graduates. They are six years too late to influence the original policy, but better that than never as JRG remains a live issue.

Treasury used much more sophisticated methods than my own recent analysis of arts graduate repayment prospects. However, Treasury does not use the new student debt repayment system introduced in 2025-26, and so under-estimates current repayment times. I will return to this, but Treasury has produced a helpful conceptual and empirical guide to what the Morrison government should have considered prior to Job-ready Graduates being proposed, and the Albanese government should think about when redesigning the system.

Debt and income data

Instead of just using debt levels based on three years of the relevant student contributions for each course, Treasury put into their model actual subjects taken, with data from the Department of Education included in PLIDA. So the model captures extra debts caused by double degrees, changing courses or failing and repeating subjects. It also captures lower debts of people who never complete a course.

My analysis used Australian citizen median income by single year of age, as recorded using ATO and DSS income linked to Census records. For years 1 to 10 after university Treasury used a model based on actual debtor income in PLIDA (which also has ATO and DSS data). These are critical years for repayment for most debtors, so this is important. Treasury’s model uses Census data to estimate repayments after 10 years.

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The $1 billion spent on undelivered student places

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Last year I wrote about payments to universities under the Higher Education Continuity Guarantee, a Morrison-era program to compensate universities for ‘under-enrolment’. I then had data up to 2022. This can now be updated to 2024. Total expenditure on the Guarantee and its 2020 predecessor, the Higher Education Relief Program, now exceeds $1 billion.

How the Higher Education Continuity Guarantee worked

In simplified terms, the Higher Education Continuity Guarantee offset reduced payments to universities from the Commonwealth Grant Scheme.

Under the funding legislation, universities are supposed to receive the lesser of 1) The value of Commonwealth supported places delivered, calculated on a full-time equivalent place multiplied by the relevant Commonwealth contribution amount, or 2) the maximum grant amount that universities were entitled to receive under their funding agreement (how this maximum was calculated varied in the life of the Guarantee).

For universities entitled to receive only the amount calculated in option (1), the Guarantee topped them up to the amount in (2).

This is called ‘under-enrolment’ because universities did not deliver sufficient Commonwealth supported places to receive their maximum grant amount.

The cost of the Higher Education Continuity Guarantee

Guarantee funding peaked in 2022, at $346 million, before dropping to $298 million in 2023 and $218 million in 2024. Total cost since 2020 is $1.056 billion.

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Political compromise to end the worst of Job-ready Graduates

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Late last year the Greens introduced the Higher Education Support Amendment (Reverse Job-Ready Graduates Fee Hikes and End 50k Arts Degrees) Bill  into the Senate. Submissions for the Senate inquiry into this bill close on Friday.

Under the bill, the student contribution for most arts students would go down from $17,399 a year to $8,164, what it would have been if Job-ready Graduates had never happened. For business and law the student contribution would go down from $17,399 to $13,624, similarly what it would have been without Job-ready Graduates. Creative arts students contributions would go down from $9,537 to $8,164.

My submission to the inquiry is here.

Constitutional problems

While I agree with the broad direction of the Reverse Job-ready Graduates bill on student contributions, it cannot fix the JRG problem. Under section 53 of the Australian Constitution, a bill appropriating money cannot originate in the Senate. Offsetting reduced student contributions with higher Commonwealth contributions, as needed to maintain university funding, would require an appropriation. Due to this legal limitation, the bill contains only lower student contributions, without any changes to Commonwealth contributions.

If the bill passed we would be left with JRG Commonwealth contributions and pre-JRG student contributions. Total funding for a full-time arts student would halve, from $18,715 to $9,480.

Ending $50,000 arts degrees by ending arts degrees is too radical a measure.

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ATEC legislation amended in the Senate

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The ATEC legislation passed the Senate yesterday, after the government accepted amendments from the Greens and David Pocock. It now needs to be rubber-stamped by the House of Representatives [update 9pm 31/3 – done] and the Governor-General [update 3/4 -done]. Once that is done, it will become law after 28 days [update – 29 April].

The amendments improve the legislation while still in my view leaving major flaws.

This previous post of mine links to my ATEC Senate inquiry submission and earlier posts on aspects of the legislation.

Objects of the Act

One of my criticisms was the entirely utilitarian and philistine set of ‘objects’ in the Act. While arguably no government since the 1970s has genuinely cared much about the broader functions of universities, they at least nodded to them in legislative objects. Not this government.

But the Senate amendment improves things:

Research

The ATEC bill read like a rushed committee job with nobody in enough control to ensure internal coherence. One example of this was research appearing in the objects of the bill but then disappearing from ATEC’s functions and matters on which it can give advice.

This is now fixed.

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Needs based funding winners and losers

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Last month I wrote about the new equity and regional needs based funding programs. Back then I had the funding formulas but not total funding amounts. The Department’s funding determinations now show that $425.7 million has been allocated for equity needs based funding and $118.6 million for regional needs based funding. There is also $43.7 million for outreach programs. The total is $588.1 million, including $1.3 million in equity needs based funding going to NUHEPs and private universities.

These new programs were principally funded from abolishing the old HEPPP equity program, the old regional loading, and the NPILF program, which supported internships and other engagement with industry. The predecessor programs were allocated $515.9 million, so the increase is more than indexation. Real cuts to the Commonwealth Grant Scheme may have funded the gap.

Funding by university

The chart below shows funding by university. Charles Sturt University and the University of Tasmania get the most money while the two Canberra universities get the least funding. They suffer from a lack of official ‘low SES’ areas in the ACT; as I noted earlier this month the low SES definition is not fit for funding purposes.

A spreadsheet of public university funding levels is available here.

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