Author: Andrew Norton

Job-ready Graduates price effects?: An update with 2022 enrolment data

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The official release yesterday of the CPI-indexed Job-ready Graduates student contributions for 2025 has prompted questions about what impact the JRG price increases have had on enrolments.

With arts, business and law student contributions to hit nearly $17,000 a year in 2025 – with our bout of inflation having increased them from $14,500 in 2021 – students would be wise to think about whether this is a sensible investment. That’s $50,000 for a basic 3 year degree or $85,000 for common combinations like arts/law or business/law.

On the other hand, as I have argued, students follow their interests while keeping an eye on which courses within their cluster of interests would have the best employment and salary outcomes.

The most sophisticated work to date, using NSW data to 2021, found small effects in the expected directions.

Using simple trends in subjects taken, this post will look at domestic commencing EFTSL by discipline in the 2010-2022 period, drawing on the annual commencing load spreadsheet produced by the Department of Education. This does not distinguish between CSP and domestic full-fee students, but it is the best I can do with publicly available data.

Because I am comparing fields with very different absolute enrolments, I have converted them to an index, with 2010=1. So an index of 1.1 in a subsequent year would mean 10% more EFTSL, and an index of .9 would mean 10% fewer EFTSL.

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Accord implementation proposals, part #5: Needs-based funding that is not aimed directly at needs

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The Accord implementation consultation paper on need-based funding for equity group members was released late last week, although students with disability will be discussed in a later consultation document. That leaves low SES, Indigenous and students at regional campuses for this paper.

When the Accord interim report came out I rated the principle of needs-based funding as one of its better ideas. But turning it into policy faces significant conceptual, practical and ethical issues. The consultation paper does not resolve these issues.

Funding based on needs versus equity group membership

The basic conceptual problem, in the Accord reports and this consultation paper, is that it remains unclear why needs-based funding should apply only for students designated as equity group members. With the exception of people with disabilities that require adjustments for them to participate in higher education, none of the equity group categories identify personal disadvantage. As the Accord report itself notes, groups other than the equity four are ‘under-represented’ in higher education.

The higher education system should help all its students achieve success, not just those that for historical reasons are included in the equity group list.

Many of the outcome differences we observe are the by-product of mass higher education, which brings a wide range of people into the system. There are more people who were not especially ‘academic’ at school, more people who have trouble financing their education, more people who have major responsibilities other than their studies. In a mass higher education system these students are core business.

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The government’s own agencies doubt that international student caps are feasible & fear the consequences

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Submissions to the Senate inquiry into the government’s international student caps bill are now appearing online. The House of Representatives has also started debating the bill.

My submission

The online scanned pdf version of my submission is not a sharp copy, the Word version is here.

It expands on the arguments I made in my series of blog posts on the caps, starting with this one in May.

Government agency submissions – implementation and enforcement

Submissions from government agencies raise questions about what internal processes – or rather lack of internal processes – led to the bill being presented in its current form.

The Department of Home Affairs submission leaves its key point to the last two sentences:

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Accord implementation proposals, part #4: Managed demand driven funding for equity students

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When the Accord final report was published one recommendation that confused me was a policy to increase equity student enrolments that was “effectively ‘demand driven for equity’ but with planned allocation of places to universities”.

A demand driven system, under which universities can enrol unlimited numbers of students meeting set criteria, can sit alongside a system of allocated student places or funding. Current Indigenous bachelor degree demand driven funding, which would be retained in the Accord model, sits alongside a soft capped block grant for most other students. But for the same courses, or student categories, demand driven and allocated student place systems are mutually exclusive.

Any hope of clarity has been dashed by the Accord implementation paper on managed growth. It proposes “managed demand driven funding for equity students”.

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Accord implementation proposals, part #3: Distributing student places between qualifications & disciplines & the funding floor

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Part 1 of this series on the government’s Accord implementation plans looked at the proposed Australian Tertiary Education Commission. Part 2 examined how student places would be allocated between universities. This post considers Accord implementation plans for distributing students places within universities between qualification levels and disciplines. In this post, at least, I find that some of the government’s proposals have merit.

Some background: The government has often allocated higher education resources differently depending on qualification level, course, field of education and sometimes students. This practice can target and/or limit spending on a policy goal. The trade-off is less flexibility in moving resources where they are needed. As a result, prospective students miss out or pay much more than the student contribution rate in the full-fee market.

In the 2010s sub-bachelor, bachelor and postgraduate CSPs were funded separately. Since 2021 they have been funded together, with exceptions for Indigenous bachelor degree students and medical courses.

The distribution of student places between qualification levels – postgraduate

While the Accord final report supported more Commonwealth supported places at the postgraduate level, it wanted to focus them on areas of “national priorities and skills needs”.

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Accord implementation proposals, part #2: The distribution of student places to universities and the folly of hard caps

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An earlier post looked at the government’s plans for the Australian Tertiary Education Commission. This post examines the government’s proposals for setting the number of student places and distributing them between universities. This includes a hard institution-level cap on student places, so that universities would get zero funding for enrolments above their allocated level. This post explains why a hard cap is unnecessary and counter-productive.

Overall number of CSPs

The government will determine the total number of CSPs. For ‘fully funded’ places – places for which universities are paid both a Commonwealth and student contribution – this is similar to the current system of the government deciding on total CGS funding, other than the small demand driven system for Indigenous bachelor-degree students (which will be retained). However,

  • because universities will have flexibility in moving EFTSL between disciplines (discussed in a later post) the maximum dollar amount the government pays will be less predictable than now.
  • because of the first point and hard caps on student places at each university (discussed below) the maximum number of CSPs the system provides will be more predictable than now.

It is not clear whether ATEC will advise the government on the number of CSPs, as opposed to contextual factors such as demographics, demand, and skills needs.

And if ATEC does provide advice on system-level numbers, it is not clear whether this will be published or not. The consultation paper mentions the state of the sector report recommended by the Universities Accord final report, but this is framed as a ‘report on higher education outcomes’, not future higher education needs.

Former higher education commissions provided detailed public advice on likely student demand and the sector’s capacity to meet it. For an education minister there is a trade-off. Public and quality advice gives leverage in Cabinet when arguing for money and a semi-independent justification for the government’s overall policy direction. But if the minister does not get the money the sector, and opposition MPs, will use ATEC reports against the government.

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Accord implementation proposals, part #1: Setting up ATEC

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The government has released ‘implementation consultation’ papers on the Australian Tertiary Education Commission (ATEC) and how its system of managed growth in Commonwealth supported places would work. This post looks at some features of the ATEC paper. A subsequent post looks at how ATEC would distribute student places between universities.

ATEC legislation

ATEC would have its own legislation. A new funding act would replace the current Higher Education Support Act 2003. Its suggested name is the Higher Education Funding Act, the same name the funding legislation had between 1989 and 2004 (HESA 2003 started in 2005).

A performance metric for the government: keep the HEFA 2 legislation below the 592 pages of the latest HESA 2003. The original HESA 2003 was only 220 pages.

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Did bachelor degree enrolments decline significantly between 2016 and 2022?

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This is a post I started writing several months ago, before the Accord final report and other major higher education policy announcements pushed it aside. I have completed it as a companion to my census attainment post on data issues in higher education.

Late last year several media outlets, using data from the ABS Education and Work survey, reported declining bachelor degree enrolments. In November 2023, bachelor degree enrolments were said to be down 12 per cent between 2016 and 2022. Another newspaper rounded the drop to 13 per cent. In December 2023 bachelor degree enrolments were said to be at their lowest level since 2011.

This post explains why these media stories exaggerate enrolment decline. The most important reason is that Education and Work does not count offshore international students. But comparing Education and Work results with enrolment data shows that it typically undercounts onshore international students and overcounts domestic students, particularly those in bachelor degrees. It also has occasional rogue surveys that produce misleading comparison years.

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What’s new in the funding agreements, part 4: revised equity plan rules

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As discussed in a blog post last week, the revised 2024-25 Commonwealth-university funding agreements add new restrictions on early offers. The revised agreements also rewrite the rules on a novel feature of the original December 2023 2024-25 funding agreements. These rules cover a new policy to spend unused Commonwealth Grant Scheme allocations on activities set out in equity plans.

The May funding agreements improve on their December 2023 versions by potentially making the equity plan requirement optional. However a change to how the equity plan amounts are calculated reduces how much money universities could receive.

The revised funding agreements also include some minor funding increases.

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How much difference will stopping student visa applications from people on visitor visas make?

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The bad news for international education keeps coming. On Wednesday the government announced that onshore visitor visa holders would no longer be able to apply for a student visa. It also announced a 1 July 2024 implementation date for the ban on temporary graduate visa holders applying for a student visa. The temporary graduate visa policy was announced last December.

How big is the visitor visa change?

The government’s media release says that 36,000 onshore visitor visa holders applied for a student visa in the financial year to May 2024. However the number of visas granted will be much lower than that. As of the end of April 2024 13,733 primary applicant student visas had been granted to onshore visitor visa holders in 2023-24. Secondary visa holders – partners and children – take the number to 17,729.

These numbers are for all levels of education. Higher education primary applicants are about a quarter of the total for this time period. In 2023-24 up to April 3,332 higher student visas grants were made for primary applicants, with secondary applicants taking the total to 4,742.

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