I’ve criticised the government’s exclusive focus on attracting more university students from the lowest 25% of geographic areas, as measured by an index of education and occupation. I had found several data sources suggesting that educational achievement in the second-lowest quartile wasn’t much better than in the lowest quartile.

Today the ABS released an update to its online 2011 census package that lets us classify students according to their socioeconomic status ($$$ if you want access). I calculated university attendance rates for 20-24 year olds by SES deciles, with one the lowest and ten the highest.

I think my general point stands: there are low rates of university attendance well above the lowest 25%. Someone in the 4th decile is well above the lowest 25%, but still only has a third of the likelihood of attending university as someone in the top 10%. Even removing early school leavers from the analysis, their chances of attending university are still less than half those of someone in the top 10%.* We need a re-investigation of the role poor school results versus other factors play in this outcome.

However, the data is less lumpy than I expected. There is the upper middle class at deciles nine and ten with high rates of education and professional employment which is quite different from the rest of the population. But below that attendance rates do slowly but steadily increase as people move up the SES spectrum, without the large and weakly-differentiated lowest 50% I expected from other sources.

* The decile differences are somewhat exaggerated due to students who move from low SES areas, especially in regional areas, to live near universities which are in high SES areas.