Mapping Australian higher education 2023 is now available from the ANU Centre for Social Research and Methods website.
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.
Yesterday the government introduced legislation to extend demand driven funding from regional and remote to all Indigenous students. Currently Indigenous students from major cities are funded from within each university’s capped maximum basic grant amount for higher education courses. If the legislation passes universities will get the full Commonwealth contribution value of all enrolled Indigenous students in demand driven funding eligible courses, with no funding cap.
What are current Indigenous enrolments by geographic category?
Demand driven funding only applies to bachelor degree students – of which more later – which makes it a funding category that is not also a publicly-reported statistics category. However a table in the annual equity statistics lets us calculate the number of undergraduate (ie bachelor + diploma + associate degree) Indigenous students by home geographic location. It shows that Indigenous students from the major cities outnumber regional and remote students. Enrolments from both groups have increased in recent years.
In an earlier post I looked at how Job-ready Graduates could produce fewer total student places than originally forecast. This post examines the geographic distribution of those places. Both posts draw on my first submission to the Universities Accord review.
Job-ready Graduates ‘growth’ funding is based on campus location (‘growth’ in quotation marks because it is off a reduced base). Regional campuses get 3.5 per cent annual funding growth, with 2.5 per cent for metropolitan campuses in high growth areas, and 1 per cent for other campuses. Higher growth rates for regional campuses reflect concern about lower university participation rates for people from regional areas.
Growth funding is for coming increases in the school leaver population, which will translate into increased demand for higher education. My submission uses 2021 Census data to see where the school leavers of the mid-2020s to 2030 are located, and how this aligns with higher education policy.
City/rest of state growth rates
Full regional classifications are not yet included in the publicly available 2021 Census data, so the chart below uses a greater capital city/rest of state classification. The age groups cover the young people who will finish Year 12 and seek university entry from mid-decade through to 2030. It compares their numbers to those of people the same age at the 2016 Census, who reached/will reach university age in the first half of the 2020s.
Overall the population of 9 to 16 year olds was in 2021 13.5 per cent higher than in 2016 in the greater capital city areas and 7.8 per cent higher in rest of state areas. Population growth is significant in both categories, but larger in the cities that will get a smaller funding increment.
The chart also shows variations by specific year of age, with growth rates most aligned in the 11-to-14-years age groups.
Note: Citizens only. Source: ABS Census 2016 and 2021, TableBuilder ProRead More »
Some 2021 Census is now available on the ABS TableBuilder site, allowing additional analysis of the social and personal characteristics of higher education students. This posts looks at migration status and language spoken at home, previous strong predictors of higher education participation rates.
Year of arrival
In 2021 migrants who had taken out citizenship were significantly more likely than people born in Australia to be enrolled in university in the post-school 18 to 20 years old age bracket. The participation gap was 19 percentage points for migrants in the decade prior to the 2021 census, 54 per cent participation compared to 35 per cent for young adults who were born in Australia. Migrants who arrived as younger children have a higher participation rate again, at 59 per cent.
Andrew Norton 