Category: Higher education admissions

The proposed new funding system, part 5: What has happened to effectively demand driven funding for equity groups?

Andrew NortonLeave a comment

In his second reading speech for the Universities Accord (Opening the Doors of Opportunity) Bill 2026 education minister Jason Clare said that it will ‘help more people from poor families and the regions and the bush to get into university. In simple terms, if you get the marks, and you’ve got what it takes you will get a place.’  Later in the speech, he described the new policy as ‘effectively uncapping the system for these students’.

This is the latest iteration of a concept first announced as ‘effectively demand driven’ funding in the Accord final report and then described by the Department of Education as ‘managed demand driven funding’.

Whatever its name, how this policy would be implemented remained unclear. The policy implies eligibility criteria – ‘if you get the marks’ – that do not exist at the system level. It raised questions about the coherence of the government’s position. Does it make sense to impose tougher caps on enrolments generally while claiming to ‘effectively uncap’ a sub-section of students? Isn’t this just a part-solution to an avoidable problem caused by hard caps?

The silence of the bill

Anyone hoping that the funding bill would provide clarity will be disappointed. There is no uncapping of places for any category of student that isn’t already demand driven. But another feature of the system gives ATEC some flexibility to allocate additional places late in the enrolment period.

A recap on the new system

First a recap on how the new system will work. The first step is for the minister to set a total allocation pool of places, which will cover all coursework places other than medicine and the demand driven programs for Indigenous students.

The second step is for ATEC to allocate those places to universities. This will be a combination of ‘core student load’, a historical figure, and an ‘additional growth allocation’. Together these are the ‘domestic student profile’ of each university.

On top of the domestic student profile universities will have an over-enrolment buffer, of 750 places or 5% of the domestic student profile, whichever is lower. As part of transition measures some universities can have total places exceeding these levels but caps on commencing students.

Read More »

A recovery in undergraduate higher education demand

Andrew NortonLeave a comment

A media release from Jason Clare today reports that 2026 university applications from tertiary admissions centres, other than in Western Australia, are up 4.6% on 2025. Offers are up 2.5%. This comes after 2025 data was quietly released on the Department’s website last week. I will draw on that 2025 data to outline trends.

Overall application trends

If the 2026 TAC data is an accurate guide to application overall trends, it comes on top of a 5.4% increase between 2024 and 2025. In absolute numbers 2025 is still below the 2014 to 2021 period, but with a clear upward trend.

While aggregate applications are up, eight universities had fewer applications in 2025 than 2024. Other universities had major applications increases between these years, nine with double-digit percentage growth. The disconnect between these fluctuations and the proposed ‘managed growth’ enrolment system will be a policy problem of the coming years, presuming the required legislation passes (which of course I hope it doesn’t).

Read More »

Despite an increase in applications for the 2024 academic year, school leaver interest in higher education remained below mid-2010s levels

Andrew NortonLeave a comment

University applications statistics for 2022 to 2024 were finally released late last week, giving us another data source on demand for higher education.

This post focuses on recent school leavers. The chart below shows that applications for this group were up in 2024 on 2023, but that the slump in applications since the late 2010s remained evident – other than the spike for academic year 2021, which is only apparent for teenagers who finished school prior to 2020. This is consistent with people deciding to sit out the COVID recession at university.

That COVID spike meant that in 2021 an unusually large share – 35% – of the 19 and under applicant group were not people who had finished school the year before. This share was 32.5% in each of 2023 and 2024, higher than any year 2012 to 2020, when it averaged 28.4%. This could mean that we are seeing more young people delaying higher education. This data source does not, however, distinguish between people who delayed applying until one or two years after finishing school, and people who enrolled but reapplied to change university and/or course.

Read More »

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

Andrew Norton3 Comments

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”.

Read More »

What’s new in the university funding agreements, part 3: new rules on early offers

Andrew Norton1 Comment

Earlier this year I wrote a couple of blog posts on the 2024 university-Commonwealth funding agreements signed late last year. Revised agreements were signed in May 2024. These agreements include new rules on early offers. This post argues that early offers rules should be legislated separately and not included as a condition of Commonwealth Grant Scheme funding.

Restrictions on school leaver early offers

As foreshadowed by the minister in February, university funding agreements now restrict school leaver early offers. The basic rules are 1) No offers to Year 11 students; 2) No offers to Year 12 students prior to September; and 3) Offers must be conditional on successful completion of a senior secondary certificate of education.

Read More »

Creating a better integrated education system – some notes on Rethinking Tertiary Education, a book building on the work of Peter Noonan

Andrew Norton1 Comment

Peter Noonan was a rare person with expertise across vocational and higher education, and an even rarer person who made significant policy contributions to both. Sadly he passed away in 2022 at the age of 67.

Rethinking Tertiary Education, co-edited by Peter Dawkins, Megan Lilly and Robert Pascoe, with sixteen others as co-authors, is billed as ‘building on the work of Peter Noonan’, and does so by exploring ways of making the component parts of Australia’s formal education sector – especially higher education and vocational education, but also schools – work together more smoothly than now. Pascoe also contributes an interesting biographical chapter on Noonan.

For historical and political reasons the vocational and higher education systems in Australia have quite sharp dividing lines in the nature of the qualifications they deliver, how they are funded, how they are taught, and with some exceptions the occupations they support. The book also looks at school credentials, especially the idea that they don’t measure all they should.

Read More »

What’s going on with domestic undergraduate numbers? Part 1, Demographic differences

Andrew Norton3 Comments

Higher education enrolment data for 2022 was released on Monday. Overall enrolments fell 3.2% in 2022 compared to 2021. A 1.9% increase in international student numbers partly offset a 5.1% decline in domestic numbers. In 2021 overall enrolments also fell, with the opposite dynamic – an increase in domestic students partly offset a decline in international student numbers. The 2021 and 2022 enrolment decreases were the first total enrolment reversals since the early 1950s.

Domestic undergraduates

This post focuses on domestic undergraduates, the subject of many media inquiries and much speculation. The chart below shows that enrolments started growing in the late 2000s, at a fast rate during the demand driven funding era, before entering a more subdued phase in the late 2010s and then the decline discussed in this post. Sub-bachelor courses are a larger share of the total more recently than in the 2000s.

Overall domestic bachelor enrolments decreased 4.9% in 2022 compared to 2021. Despite a 2 percentage point increase in attrition rates for commencing 2021 students into 2022, the continuing cohorts offset a larger fall in commencing bachelor-degree students of 8.6%. That’s more than double the previous largest commencing student decline this century, in 2003, when the then-minister cracked down on over-enrolments. Sub-bachelor numbers are down around 4% for both commencing and total.

Read More »

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

Andrew Norton1 Comment

[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”.

Read More »

Mapping Australian higher education 2023 – official release

Andrew Norton2 Comments

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.

For universities the Accord interim report proposes a more extreme version of Job-Ready Graduates

Andrew Norton6 Comments

The Australian Universities Accord interim report recommends overturning the most controversial Job-ready Graduates policy, using student contribution price signals to guide student course choices.

But overall the Accord interim report and Job-ready Graduates have strong parallels. They both take a utilitarian view of higher education, that its purpose is to provide benefits to others rather than being of any intrinsic value. Universities exist to meet skills needs, find practical uses for research, contribute to their local communities, and promote equity. The main difference is the interim report proposals are, with student contributions the main exception, more extreme and interventionist than Job-ready Graduates.

Substantially reduced university autonomy

Historically universities in Australia and other western countries have operated with a significant degree of autonomy from government. But despite using the word ‘autonomy’ a few times the Accord interim report shows little interest in this idea.

On my count at least 25 interim report proposals would reduce the scope of university-level decision making or are new reporting requirements that set universities up for future regulation. In my list these cover general mission direction, student admissions, the mix of disciplines and courses, curriculum and teaching, use of funds, and accountability.

Read More »