Despite a COVID-driven dip to 1.6 million, Australia remains a country with high numbers of long-term migrants without the rights that come with permanent residence or citizenship. In many areas of public policy we are struggling, often unsuccessfully in my opinion, to deal with the social and political implications of this population, of which international students are the second largest category after New Zealanders.
A recent article in The Conversation by election law expert Graeme Orr drew my attention to a further example of unjustifiable, and in his view potentially unconstitutional, treatment of temporary migrants. For some years now the government has been preoccupied with ‘foreign’ (ie Chinese) influence. One response has been stripping temporary migrants of political rights.
Three years ago I wrote a post criticising restrictions on temporary migrants being able to make political donations. Legislation passed this week takes these restrictions much further, covering other kinds of political expenditure and activity.
For international students the 2020 higher education enrolment data released this week is already very out-of-date. The international branch of DESE produces more current aggregate numbers, and has been circulating up-to-date figures to experts and stakeholders. Peter Hurley used these in a recent Conversation article. It’s a model for what, after a recent IT upgrade, could and should be done for domestic enrolments (my long-after-the-fact analysis of the 2020 domestic results is here).
Although more recent current total international enrolment figures are available, a few things in the recently released 2020 enrolment data tell us more than is publicly available elsewhere.
Attrition
International bachelor degree students have much lower attrition rates after first year than their domestic counterparts. Flying to a foreign country and paying sometimes exorbitant fees is a strong incentive to get the degree. But while attrition for 2019 commencers into 2020 declined for domestic students, the international rate increased nearly 3 percentage points to 12.73 per cent. The most likely reason is that some international students could not get back to Australia due to travel bans.
Commencing and continuing students
Increased attrition meant fewer continuing students than would have been the case without COVID-19. But the prior boom years for commencing students meant that continuing students still increased in 2020 on 2019 figures. This is one reason why the overall decline in international students was contained to 6.6 per cent, despite an 18.2 per cent decrease in commencing numbers.
The 2020 higher education student data has finally been released, giving us the first detailed look at potential COVID-19 influences on enrolments. This post is on domestic students. Another post examines international students.
Aggregate trends
Overall domestic student trends were positive for both undergraduates, up 2 per cent after a decline between 2018 and 2019, and postgraduate coursework, up 14 per cent after six years of stagnation or low growth. Postgraduate research was an exception, down by 577 enrolments or 1.3 per cent. Including enabling and non-award students total domestic enrolments were 1,133,519, 4.4 per cent up on 2019.*
Student ‘load’ – full-time equivalent enrolments – was up by less, 2.6 per cent. The headcount share of part-time students, defined as less than 75 per cent of a full-time equivalent study load, is only up by .7 of a percentage point, suggesting more part-time students with light study loads and/or more full-time students not at a 100 per cent study load.
Long overdue data on university staff in 2021 was released yesterday, giving us the most detailed information yet about job losses since COVID-19 hit the higher education sector.
Aggregate losses
The Department of Education’s staff statistics are mostly based on a 31 March census date. For staff with permanent or fixed term contracts I assume few job losses before 31 March 2020. The full travel ban on incoming international students was less than two weeks old, although some countries – including, importantly, China – had earlier travel restrictions. But retrenchments take time to process so I doubt the impact at 31 March exceeded some new hires abandoned at the last minute. These weren’t enough to prevent a 3.7 per cent headcount increase between 2019 and 2020.
In the next twelve months to 31 March 2021 total permanent or fixed term contract staff fell by 9,050, or 6.9 per cent of the 31 March 2020 total. This is only the third decline in staff numbers since 1989, and by far the largest. Difficult as 2020 was for everyone involved, total staff numbers at 31 March 2021 (121,364) were roughly what they had been on 31 March 2018 (121,718). The higher education sector is still a big employer by its own recent historical standards.
The full-time equivalent fall for permanent or fixed term contract staff was 7,985, or 6.8 per cent. This number, however, needs a caveat. For these staff the FTE is an extrapolation based on work arrangements as at 31 March. Normally this would understate actual FTE, as hours worked by additional staff hired after 31 March will not be counted until the following year. But in 2020 the 31 March estimate would have overstated FTE, by not taking into account net staff reductions during the rest of the year.
For casuals DESE reports actual FTE (ie not an extrapolation) with a lag, so that 2021 actuals will be reported in the next staff data release. Before then DESE publishes university estimates of casual FTEs. With no notice periods or retrenchment payouts required, universities could start reducing casual numbers before 31 March 2020. As the chart below shows, casual estimates were trending down at 31 March 2020 compared to 2019 – a contrast to the increase in permanent and fixed term staff.
The actuals show an even bigger decline, with losses of 4,258 FTE or 17.5 per cent in 2020 compared to 2019 .
Andrew Norton 