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.

The commencing bachelor decline in EFTSL (full-time equivalent places) is a bit higher at 9% overall and 9.1% for Commonwealth supported places.

Are school leavers turning away from university?

At least up until 2022 the aggregate enrolment data does not reveal a big school leaver move away from university. This time series is all undergraduates, not just bachelor degree students.

In the 18 and 19 year old age group domestic commencing enrolments drop 6.1% between 2021 and 2022, as the chart below shows. But comparing 2022 to the years 2019 and 2020 there’s virtually no change; for these years the range is 112,086 to 112,225.

This makes the 2021/2022 decline look more like a correction back to pre-COVID levels than a major disruption. In 2021 school leavers could not take gap years so started university earlier than planned, or decided to sit out a recession at university (and when the recession lifted earlier than anticipated dropped out, as seen in higher attrition). In 2022 gap years were back and there was no need to find alternative time uses to paid work.

For the age 17 or less time series we see fewer commencing students from the late 2010s, which I think is mainly the flow-through effect of 2000s changes to school starting ages in WA and QLD. While there were small increases in 2021 and 2022 the numbers show no strong trend in the 2020-2022 period.

Putting school leavers in context

School leaver trends should be put in the context of their relevant population. Frustratingly, no agency produces data purpose-built to calculate high-quality Australian higher education participation rates. Every number is deficient in some way. For my purposes here the two biggest issues are 1) that all the time series in the chart below include temporary migrants and 2) for Year 12 the figures shown are students enrolled at an August census date, including people not on an ATAR track and/or who left before the school year finished.

With the noted caveats, 2021 Year 12 school leavers (i.e. the people who could have started university in 2022) were slightly up on 2020 but sitting around the level seen in recent previous years, except for 2019 where Queensland-specific schooling issues led to a smaller Year 12 cohort. The birth cohort size increased slightly between 2020 and 2022. Migrants attend university at higher rates than the Australia-born, but population figures do not distinguish between migrants relevant to domestic participation rates (citizens, New Zealanders and permanent residents) and international students.

Applications data suggests school leaver demand for higher education declined after the mid-2010s, except for the 2021 academic year. But softer demand as measured by applications does not necessarily have a big impact on enrolments.

Using an integrated applications-enrolments dataset to track 2013 school leavers, Grattan Institute analysis found that only two-thirds of the original applicant pool were enrolled in second semester of what would have been their first year. The other third did not receive an offer, or did not accept an offer they received, or dropped out. If the lost applicants are mostly people who would not have continued with their studies anyway there is not a major problem. Fewer applicants will have some effect on commencing students numbers but less on continuing enrolments.

In 2022 universities may have lost more weakly-committed students to the labour market than in the pre-COVID years, but the overall commencing intake is unsurprising in the context of pre-COVID enrolment levels, Year 12 student numbers and demographic data.

Mature-age student trends

For older people we see a more volatile pattern of commencing enrolments than is observed for school leavers.

In the aggregate, the key differences better the school leaver and older demographic groups are:

• From 2011 to 2017 annual commencing undergraduate year-on-year growth rates are higher for the 20+ than the 19 and under age group (although smaller in absolute numbers)
• In 2018, 19 and under commencing students are stable while 20+ drops by 4%
• In 2019, both groups decline, but 19 and under by 1% and 20+ by another 4%
• In 2020, 19 and under declines by 4%, but this is mainly due to the Queensland change to the school starting age reducing the number of 17 year old commencing students
• By contrast in 2020 age 20+ commencers surge by 15%. Half of this growth is due to sub-bachelor courses, many of them the ‘short course’ undergraduate certificates offered at discount student contribution rates as a response to COVID.
• In 2021, 19 and under commencers grow by 5%, due to delayed Queensland starters and the other reasons mentioned in the school leaver section, while the 20+ decline by 4%;
• In 2022, 19 and under decline by 5% while 20+ crash by 15%

Although the timing and scale of trends differ between the two age groups, arguably the overall pattern is similar. After the COVID disruption both the 19 and under and 20+ age groups continued trends that were evident before COVID. The 19 and under cohorts reverted to a stable period of small annual ups and downs, while the 20+ cohorts resumed a downward trend that started in 2018.

A subsequent post will look at the older group in more detail.