8 January 2013
The higher education revolution, declared by Julia Gillard in March 2009, reached its apparent apogee with the introduction of demand driven funding, through which the Commonwealth government provides a subsidy for every student that universities enrol. This led to an increase of 5.5% in university offers, on top of substantial increases in the preceding two years, with offers to applicants from low socioeconomic backgrounds showing the largest increase (5.8%).
Indeed, official figures show that total enrolments of students of low SES backgrounds to be at record levels, having increased by 26,456 since 2007, or 23.9%. The growth rate in indigenous university enrolments has been almost double that of the overall population. However, this falls a long way short of closing the gap, with indigenous people comprising 1.3% of university students but making up 2.5% of the population,an issue addressed by the Behrendt Report (see below)
The growth in participation in higher education sparked a debate that flared intermittenly through the year about entry standards” with a report by the Australian Council of Educational Research analysing university admission data Australian Tertiary Admission Rank entry scores – which are used to determine university placements by ranking academic performance relative to every other Year 12 student – are “on average are declining”.
As The Scan observed, why this should have come as a surprise is, itself, a surprise. The whole point of the reforms arising out of the Bradley Review process is to
- increase higher education attainment in the general population
- increase higher participation by poorly represented population groups (low SES, regional, indigenous).
To the extent that you achieve one goal, all things being equal (for example, #2 isn’t achieved at the expense of some other group) you also achieve the other. And the overall effect must be that, “on average”, a lower ATAR than had hitherto been necessary (or no ATAR at all) will get some more applicants into a university course than had previously been the case (though not into any university course at any university).
That is, the policy, seemingly, is achieving exactly what it is supposed to achieve– a point hammered by the Commonwealth minister Chris Evans. So why is anybody at all surprised?
The Scan revisited the issue a couple of times, ending with a December post with a post by University of Ballarat v-c David Battersby arguing that ATAR is not everything:
…[ATAR} has become a proxy used by many to make assertions about a student’s likely success at university. Does the empirical evidence support this?
At best the evidence supports a marginal relationship, but generally there is no evidence to suggest a causal relationship between the ATAR score and how well a student does at university as measured by their university grade point average.
An official report does show that ATARs, while still important for highly selective courses (see It’s still pretty hard to get into biomed) are of lessening relevance overall, with just a third of university enrolments relying on ATAR as the sole determining factor.
