The higher education participation rate at age 19 almost certainly fell in 2023 – but an exact rate cannot be calculated

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Despite significant policy interest in higher education attainment rates, the preceding participation rates are rarely reported. The most readily available time series is in Mapping Australian higher education, at figure 5 of the 2023 edition. It reports the participation rate at age 19 years, the modal university student age. For the first time in decades, the Department of Education recorded a participation rate in their recent 2023 statistics release.

Unfortunately data issues mean participation figures are only estimates. This post discusses these data problems and compares participation rates using two different methodologies. Both point to participation in 2023 being lower than in all recent years.

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Budget treatment of student debt policy announcements

Andrew Norton3 Comments

One criticism of the weekend’s big proposed changes to student debt – a new repayment system and a 20% cut to student debt balances – is that they are ‘off budget’, concealing their true cost.

The Budget includes several different takes on the government’s annual finances, including fiscal balance, headline cash and underlying cash. The Budget papers also report the value of government assets, including student debt.

The ‘underlying cash balance’ is the most commonly used Commonwealth’s Budget metric. When the Treasurer boasts about the government’s fiscal performance he uses an underlying cash measure. Unfortunately from a ‘Budget honesty’ perspective underlying cash is the weakest measure of student loan costs and of the financial impact of proposed changes to student loan policies.

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Big proposed changes to the HELP repayment system – a higher first income threshold & a marginal rate of repayment

Andrew Norton6 Comments

Today the government announced big changes to the HELP repayment system. Its proposal involves several interconnected conceptual and practical considerations.

The first issue is where to set the first repayment threshold – how much should a HELP debtor earn before they start repaying? The government proposal is for a higher first threshold.

The second issue is annual repayment amounts, which affect the disposable income of debtors and how long it takes them to repay their debt. The government proposal is for most debtors to repay less HELP debt each year, increasing their annual disposable income but also their repayment time.

The third issue is the method of repayment. Should it be – as we have had since 1989 – a system which levies a % of all income when income reaches a threshold, or should we have a marginal rate system, which is a levy on income above the threshold (like the current income tax system). The government has decided on a marginal rate system.

All three issues intersect with the public finance element of HELP – the cash flow implications of the changes for the Commonwealth, and the costs in interest subsidies and bad debt. These will all be negative for the government.

In this post, I will look at the annual repayment implications for debtors, effective marginal rates of repayment, and make some initial comments about selling this reform to debtors and voters.

What the government proposes

The first threshold for repayment will go to $67,000, from $54,435 for 2024-25, and approximately $56,000 after CPI indexation for 2025-26 (I have assumed 3% indexation, which seems to be around what the government has estimated).

From this first threshold of $67,000 we will move to a marginal rate of repayment, at two levels – 15% from $67,000 to $124,999 and 17% from $125,000. These rates would replace the current whole-of-income rates ranging from 1% to 10%.

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Mapping Australian higher education 2023 – October 2024 data update

Andrew Norton1 Comment

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

An updated version of Mapping Australian higher education is not on the horizon, but to extend the life of the 2023 version I have updated the data behind the charts and some tables. An Excel file with these and the two further updates mentioned below is here.

Further update 6/11/2024: The 2023 Student Experience Survey results have been released. Some question changes have broken the time series but the replacement question results are recorded.

Further update 12/11/2024: A careful reader has identified the missing higher education provider mentioned below and identified other errors in my institutes of higher education appendix. Hopefully the list is now correct and complete. This update also includes 2024 bachelor and above attainment data.

The original pdf with explanatory text is here.

Some noteworthy changes since its publication:

  • We now know that domestic enrolments fell in both 2022 and 2023; enrolments last declined in 2004 (figure 3)
  • International students – although no regular reader of this blog needs this pointed out – recovered strongly from the COVID period (figure 10)
  • The source country skew of international students means that a top 15 source country does not necessarily send a lot of students, but for the first time an African country made it to the list, Kenya with 6,538 students in 2023 (figure 11) (and 7,330 onshore YTD July in 2024).
  • Higher education student income support recipient numbers continued to fall, to 156,710 in mid-2023, the lowest figure since 2009 (figure 18). While since 2022 falling income support recipients is partly due to fewer students, except for a COVID spike the number has been in structural decline since 2017.
  • Staff numbers recovered strongly in 2023 to be roughly what they were in March 2020 (figure 19)
  • HELP repayments increased increased significantly, from $5.56 billion in respect of 2021-22 to $7.8 billion in respect of 2022-23 (figure 31B). Most of this was due to voluntary repayments increasing from $780 million to $2.9 billion, as debtors sought to evade high indexation (some of which will be refunded if the indexation reduction bill passes).
  • Short-term graduate full-time employment rates improved, in 2023 reaching the best level since 2009 (figure 40)
  • The number of higher education providers continued to increase, from 198 in mid-2023 to 211 in October 2024 (appendix A and appendix B).

The Department of Education’s failure to release the 2023 Finance or Student Experience Survey publications means that the update is not as full as I would like.

Visa processing and international student policy

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Some universities and vocational education providers would prefer enrolment caps to ministerial direction 107, which consigned their offshore student visa applications to the end of the visa processing queue. 107 tells the Department of Home Affairs to give processing priority to applications for schools, postgraduate research, and higher education institutions with a low immigration risk rating.

The education minister has said that ministerial direction 107 will go if the caps bill passes.

While 107 should be repealed, as it unfairly penalises some student visa applicants and education providers, like Claire Field I think the sector over-rates the benefits that would follow. 107 is blamed for other things that happened around the same time that would not be affected if it went.

These other things include the resources Home Affairs allocates to student visa processing, changed practices in applying visa eligibility criteria, and new visa rules.

Student visa processing levels

From November 2022 to July 2023, Home Affairs put significant effort into clearing a student visa backlog. On my calculations, in those nine months they processed – counting both grants and rejections – 483,199 visa applications (primary visa holders only). That is 54% more than the equivalent number pre-COVID, between 2018 and 2019.

In the second half of 2023, shown in green in the chart below, monthly visa processing dropped back to levels that were similar to 2019. Ministerial direction 107 was announced in December 2023, but that was the fourth month of more normal pre-COVID visa processing volumes.

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The National Student Ombudsman and bureaucratic overreach

Andrew Norton3 Comments

With so much going on in higher education policy at the moment, the National Student Ombudsman legislation has not received much attention. But university submissions to the Ombudsman bill Senate inquiry raise important issues. I also put in a submission.

Academic judgement versus academic matters

University submissions make similar academic freedom objections to the bill as one of my blog posts on the National Student Ombudsman.

One issue is the scope of ‘exercise of academic judgement’, which is an ‘excluded action’ that the Ombudsman cannot investigate. The bill’s explanatory memorandum seeks to distinguish ‘academic judgement’ from ‘academic matters’, such as claims for special consideration and discipline for academic misconduct, which it thinks should be within the Ombudsman’s jurisdiction.

The QUT, Monash, University of Melbourne, ATN, Gof8, UA, UTS and UQ submissions all raise concerns about this aspect of the bill. As UQ says:

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Making the international student caps bill less bad

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Today is the likely final day of public hearings for the international student caps bill, ahead of a report due on 8 October.

Despite the strong campaign against this bill the political reality is that the Opposition supports provider-level caps. This gives scope for a compromise that will see the bill pass in some form.

In my final submission to the Senate inquiry I focused on ways to make the bill less bad, while still letting the government and alternative government achieve their migration-related policy objectives.

Remove the course caps provision

80%+ of international students do not stay in Australia permanently. In this context, the government’s position that international students should be stopped from taking courses that don’t align with Australia’s skills needs borders on the absurd.

With over 25,000 courses registered on CRICOS regulating at the course level is also beyond the government’s administrative capacity. As Claire Field has been reporting, there are numerous errors in the much smaller task of imposing about 1,150 provider-level caps.

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Should ‘student-led organisations’ get a guaranteed share of student amenities fee revenue?

Andrew Norton2 Comments

Senate hearings this week will examine the Universities Accord (Student Support and Other Measures) Bill. This bill includes the changes to HELP indexation, the FEE-FREE Uni Ready Places, the Commonwealth Prac payment, and a requirement that 40% of student amenities fee revenue be directed to student-led organisations. My submission to the inquiry is here.

The status quo on student amenities fees

The current law on student amenities fees is a compromise on the long-running compulsory versus voluntary student unionism debate. Prior to 2006, universities could charge an unregulated, upfront fee for student amenities. In an a reversal of normal political positions, left-wing activists supported the unregulated status quo (because it funded their activities), while Liberal students and eventually Liberal governments moved to regulate the market and abolish the fee (also because it funded left-wing activities). In 2005 the Howard government finally legislated away the compulsory fee, with effect from 2006.

In 2011, Julia Gillard legislated to restore a compulsory amenities fee, with effect from 2012. But the fee was price capped ($351 in 2024), funded by the income contingent SA-HELP loan instead of being upfront, and the revenue could only be spent on a list of specified activities. The legislation specifically prohibits the money being spent on on a political party or the election of a person to local, state or Commonwealth office.

Under guidelines derived from the Gillard-era compromise, universities must ‘provide adequate and reasonable support, resources and infrastructure for democratically elected student representatives to carry out their functions’. However there is no specific share of amenities fee revenue that must go to student-led organisations.

In practice the amenities fees is mainly relevant to Commonwealth supported places and the fixed, relatively low amount of money universities receive for them. With no CSP funding for non-academic services the student amenities fee fills this financial gap. Although universities often charge full-fee students a separate amenities fee, reflecting institutional history and politics, this is not necessary. The cost of amenities can just be bundled into the overall fee, as it typically is outside the universities. Only 5 non-university higher education providers use SA-HELP.

Changes under the bill

The Universities Accord (Student Support and Other Measures) Bill specifies that at least 40% of amenities fee revenue must go to student-led organisations: section 19-39(1). An organisation is student led if a) the majority of people on the governing body are currently enrolled or have been enrolled in the previous three years; and b) the majority of persons on the governing body have been democratically elected by students; and c) the organisation satisfies requirements specified in government-set guidelines: section 19-39(3).

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The National Student Ombudsman and academic life

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A previous post outlined the contents of the Universities Accord (National Student Ombudsman) Bill introduced into parliament last week. This post examines its implications for academic life.

Although the bill generally exempts curriculum content or assessment methods from review by the Ombudsman, the minister will be able to over-ride these exemptions with a legislative instrument.

Students will use the Ombudsman to pressure academics for special consideration and to avoid discipline for misconduct. This creates an incentive for academics to accept questionable claims and overlook likely cheating rather than risk wasting time on an Ombudsman investigation.

The post’s section references are to the bill.

Academic judgment

The Ombudsman legislation does not permit student complaints ‘to the extent that the action involves the exercise of academic judgment’: section 21AD(3)(c).

The bill’s explanatory memorandum gives as examples of excluded complaints (p. 23) ‘decisions about the academic merit of a grade awarded, the content of a curriculum, and teaching and assessment methods.’

But section 21AD(4) undoes this by stating that exceptions can be over-ridden by the National Student Ombudsman Rules.

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A National Student Ombudsman – how would this new student complaints mechanism work?

Andrew Norton1 Comment

Last week the government introduced legislation for a National Student Ombudsman.

This post outlines key provisions of the bill. A government summary is here. A subsequent post looks at the potential impact of the bill on academic life.

Statutory references are to the Universities Accord (National Student Ombudsman) Bill, using the sections as they would appear in the Ombudsman Act 1976 if the bill passes.

Which students can complain?

All students of higher education providers, except those enrolled in VET courses, can complain to the National Student Ombudsman (abbreviated to Ombudsman from now). Apart from the VET exception, non-higher education students are included. Enabling, microcredential and professional development course students will be covered. In some cases prospective or former students can also make complaints: sections 3(1) and 21AD(1)(a).

Another person can make a complaint on behalf of the student: section 21AD(1)(b).

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