Author: Andrew Norton

Reducing the number of ‘permanently temporary’ former international students

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While I agree with the goals of today’s big migration policy changes, they will make life more difficult for universities relying on migration-motivated international students. In most cases, former international students will be able to stay in Australia on temporary graduate visas for less time than now. Other options for remaining in Australia, such as returning to a student visa, will become more difficult.

These policy changes aim to reduce temporary migrant numbers. The pressure temporary migrants place on accommodation and other services made this an urgent policy and political issue. But prior to this there were also significant concerns about temporary migrants themselves, in their vulnerability to labour market exploitation and prolonging their time in Australia in the often false hope of eventual permanent residence, as ‘permanently temporary’ migrants. The Parkinson migration review, released in March this year, set out an agenda for change.

Future policy on permanent residence is still under development, with some signals discussed below. Whether the number of former international students getting PR will go down remains to be seen. But clearer rules will mean PR aspirants can cut their losses at an earlier point. Fewer will delay important career and family events and decisions due to uncertainty about their long-term country of residence.

Shorter-stay temporary graduate visas

In September 2022 the government announced its decision to add two years to the sub-class 485 temporary graduate visa for graduates with degrees in areas of ‘verified skill shortages’. In the critique I wrote at the time I was ‘far from convinced that a 485 time extension is a good or ethical policy’, and so I am glad that this policy will be abolished.

As the chart below from the migration plan shows, they will also cut the base time period for a masters by coursework from three years to two years, and for a PhD from four years to three years. The regional extension, however, will remain.

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The complex rules around admitting, funding and supporting higher education students

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[Update 18/12/2023: Some parts of this post have been revised as the enacted student support guidelines replaced the draft guidelines. The revisions are noted in the text.]

The support for students policy discussed in a previous post adds to an already complex system for admitting, funding and supporting higher education students. Universities have strongly argued against additional bureaucratic processes in areas covered by existing regulation. This is a positive sign – a much better strategy than taking under-funded nuclear submarine student places – and I hear that the final support for students guidelines will be at least somewhat better than the draft guidelines.

The content below is my attempt to understand how all the different rules in this space overlap, interact and potentially contradict each other. While the support for students parts may change soon (the legislation operates from 1 January 2024 [Update 18/12/2023: Now delayed until 1 April 2024]), some existing rules look redundant to me. A warning: this post contains mind-numbing details and distinctions.

Initial admission to a course

The most general rules apply on admission to a course, with TEQSA responsible for enforcement. These protect high-risk students and appear in the higher education threshold standards. They require that:

“Admissions policies, requirements and procedures are … designed to ensure that admitted students have the academic preparation and proficiency in English needed to participate in their intended study, and no known limitations that would be expected to impede their progression and completion”: Part A, section 1.1.

Order of funding priority

For Commonwealth supported students selection decisions must, in the “provider’s reasonable view” be made on “merit”: section 19-35(2) of the Higher Education Support Act 2003. The provider can, however, take into account “educational disadvantages that a particular student has experienced”: section 19-35(3).

As I noted last year, this requirement is in tension with university practices and government policies on admitting members of equity groups in preference to other applicants. The equity group categories are only proxies for educational disadvantage; membership does not say anything certain about a “particular student”.

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The 16 universities signing up to subsidise the nuclear submarine program

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Sixteen universities have, according to a media release today, been allocated places in 38 STEM-related courses intended to support the AUKUS nuclear submarine program. The government says it is investing $128 million over four years. In reality, however, universities will need to divert resources from other activities to support nuclear submarine training.

The 75% costing methodology

Universities will need to self-finance some AUKUS places due to what the program guidelines call ‘the standard 75 per cent costing methodology’. In the program’s second year its funding for the first year’s continuing students will be 75 per cent of their commencing year allocation, and so on in subsequent years until no money is left.

Some reduced funding to take account of student attrition is reasonable, but 25 per cent is not. Over the 2005 to 2020 period the proportion of domestic commencing bachelor students leaving their university after first year peaked at 18.4 per cent. Nearly half the nuclear submarine places went to Group of Eight universities, which have lower attrition rates than the national average.

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The growing threats to academic decision making

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Update 18/12/2023: The enacted student support guidelines remove the interference in academic judgment discussed in this post. The changes are highlighted in the relevant parts of the text.

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The current government, and the Accord review that it commissioned, have – with the exception of ministerial approval of ARC grants – taken an interventionist approach to higher education policy.

My commentary has focused on micromanaged allocations of student places (eg here and here). While these policies are misguided, the allocation of funding is within the historical scope of the Commonwealth’s higher education powers. However there is also a pattern of actual or proposed interference in matters previously left to academic or university judgment. This is unusual in a country where university autonomy over academic matters has mostly been respected.

Curriculum matters

Next year a new loan scheme will begin for business start-up programs, STARTUP-HELP. Unusually, its legal guidelines include detail about required course content. Normally universities are self-accrediting within standards enforced by TEQSA, an organisation deliberately designed to be at arms length from government.

The content requirements (below) don’t seem unreasonable in themselves, and were perhaps necessary to identify what exactly STARTUP- HELP was supposed to cover. The bigger practical problem here is that this loan scheme is unnecessary. But the precedent of the government directly regulating course content is not one I like being set.

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The dangers of single point of failure higher education systems

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When the entire Optus network went down last week – knocking out mobiles, landlines and internet connections – my new paper Job-ready Graduates 2.0: The Universities Accord and centralised control of universities and courses was in the late stages of production. If the Optus incident had happened earlier I might have included more on the risks of the Accord interim report’s proposed Tertiary Education Commission as a single point of failure.

A Tertiary Education Commission’s role in allocating student places

My new report builds on my earlier explainer of the Accord interim report’s proposals for distributing student places, focusing on how this would affect the relationship between higher education and skills needs.

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Mapping Australian higher education 2023 – official release

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

Mapping Australian higher education 2023 is now available from the ANU Centre for Social Research and Methods website.

Update 30/10/2024: There is a later version of Mapping 2023’s data here.

Update 26/10/23: A reader has pointed out that list of FEE-HELP NUHEPs is incomplete. A column of names from the original Excel file was omitted during production. The full list is available here. This list also includes three non-FEE-HELP providers registered by TEQSA since the pdf version was finalised. A corrected version of Mapping with the full list of NUHEPs, as of mid-2023, is here.

If anyone has noticed other errors please let me know.

Mapping Australian higher education 2023 – semi-release

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Note: Mapping with revised and updated HELP repayments can be downloaded here.

The chart data with updates is available here.

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Future Campus this morning has a story on Mapping Australian higher education 2023. I’m delaying other publicity efforts due to a methodological error I made when updating HELP repayments last year. This is in the process of being corrected in the pdf version.

People not likely to cite Mapping on HELP repayments can download the report here.

I only noticed my mistake when working on another problem, which is that the report dates quickly. Its production was outsourced and so it is not easy to update the text (which we occasionally did for the Grattan Institute editions of Mapping). At a point during production I made a call to only fix errors.

However I can more easily update chart data, and it was when doing this for new HELP repayment data that I noticed a problem with the earlier update. The repayment time series with later data, along with data behind the other charts and some other updates or additions, is available here.

This is the sixth edition of the Mapping Australian higher education series. The first five were published between 2012 and 2018 when I worked for the Grattan Institute.

The series aims to provide an overview of higher education policy and trends. Most information in each Mapping is from publicly available sources, but (I hope) Mapping makes it easier to understand.

Unlike with the later Grattan editions, this one has no special chapter covering one topic in more detail with new research. However it has new sections on work-integrated learning, student finances, student mental health, and international student migration.

The Accord equity target that cannot, and perhaps should not, be achieved

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The Universities Accord terms of reference asked the review panel to recommend higher education equity and attainment targets, and in their interim report they offer suggestions.

The general goal is equity group parity in higher education participation by 2035 (pp. 18, 20). There is some ambiguity about whether this applies for all equity groups. A few times only three of the main four – low SES, regional, and disability – are specifically mentioned for the 2035 target (pp. 9, 42, 43). For Indigenous students a target is referred to but not specified on p.43. The Indigenous contribution to the 2035 target is however, mentioned at pp. 40-41.*

Other potential equity groups such as first in family, care leavers, people from single parent families and children of asylum seekers may be added (p. 42)

The equity targets interact with an overall target of 55 per cent attainment by 2050. It is unclear whether this target is for people aged 25 to 34 years (pp. 9 & 36), employed persons (p. 33, distinguished from the 25 to 34 cohort), or all people/unspecified base (p. 22).

Whatever the exact 2050 target, it is well above current levels. Equity group parity is not just achieving the overall population participation and attainment rate now. It is chasing a rate that will, if other Accord policies work, be moving up.

This post discusses the practical obstacles to equity group targets that apply regardless of the precise targets set. It also questions whether a large increase in higher education participation would reliably be in the best interests of the additional students.

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Should funding be partly based on student characteristics?

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Australia’s higher education teaching funding system is primarily based on subjects rather than students. Subjects taken are converted into ‘equivalent full-time student load’ (EFTSL), the amount of study a full-time student does in an academic year. The funding rate per EFTSL varies by field of education, assuming that subject characteristics drive costs.

Various supplementary programs calculate funding on headcount equity students, but with trivial resources compared to the subject-driven funding programs, the Commonwealth Grant Scheme and HELP.

Funding on headcount?

One interesting idea in submissions to the Universities Accord review, especially suggested by regional universities, was to base more funding on the student. For part-time study one EFTSL could be two or more individual students. While their combined classroom time matches one full-time student, a student with 50 per cent of an EFTSL could put similar or even greater demands on other university services as a student at 100 per cent of an EFTSL.

In RUN’s submission they report a member university’s finding that, on average, their part-time students utilised eleven services compared to five for full-time students.

Older students are more likely to enrol part-time (chart below). Given the high rates of upper ATAR students going to university soon after school older first-time students must disproportionately be people with weaker school results. They plausibly have above-average needs for academic support to complete their courses successfully.

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How would student places be allocated under the Universities Accord?

Andrew Norton1 Comment

The task of interpreting the Universities Accord interim report is like that of a biblical scholar trying to extract meaning from fragmentary and sometimes contradictory texts. But building on my post on a universal learning entitlement, in this post I try to understand what kind of student places allocative system the report proposes.

Existing and possible Accord allocative systems

All funding systems need methods for determining total resources and then allocating them between institutions, courses and students. The chart below has the three allocative models currently in use – what I call technocratic, block grant, and demand driven – and the Accord model, which on my reading has elements of the technocratic and demand driven models. However these models are in tension with each other – technocracy puts experts in charge while demand driven funding is based on decentralised decision making.

DecisionTechnocratic (current system for medical students)Block grant (current system for most students)Demand driven (current system for bachelor degree regional Indigenous students with likely extension to all Indigenous students)Accord model?
Total number of places/dollars for each year (system level)Government decisionGovernment decisionUniversity and student decision. Aggregate outcome of student decisions (especially if universities have less control over who they admit).
Or aggregate of Tertiary Education Commission university allocations.
Total number of places /dollars for each universityGovernment decisionGovernment decisionUniversity and student decision.Aggregate of student decisions with full learning entitlement model, possible voucher system.
Or as negotiated/allocated by the Tertiary Education Commission.
Total number of places/dollars for each course or disciplineGovernment decisionUniversity and student decision.University and student decision.Target allocations for courses determined by Tertiary Education Commission.
Possible caps via aggregate voucher allocations/university-level enrolment caps on low priority courses.
Student-level allocative criteria, such as academic results or equity group status.Can be a government decision, but for medical students a university and student decision.University and student decision.University and student decision.Possibly a government decision through Tertiary Education Commission/national admission centre. Or keep current system but use targets to push unis to enrol more students, in general and from priority groups.
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