Do Australian universities need to improve their image with prospective domestic students or enhance their knowledge of the paranormal?
While many are concerned that the collective lower opinion of higher education is driving down university attainment rates, the University of Newcastle (UON) believes ghosting may be part of the problem.
In August 2022, Kent Anderson from UON said they noticed that domestic students were not applying as expected based upon historical patterns. As they went digging for answers, they found a missing group of students from the domestic undergraduate pipeline.
“Ghosts, the students we can’t find in the data, have grown significantly,” said Kent Anderson Deputy Vice Chancellor from UON. Normally, UON said about 7 percent of a cohort is not in employment, education or training (NEETs). However, in the past year it shot up to 15 percent and that level of ghosting is scary. “This is shocking. The challenge with NEETs is the research shows if you NEET for a year your life outcomes are scarred.”
Though this increase may be the result of a COVID hangover, it is still very concerning because students who step out tend to never return to the average in economic, health or well-being measures.
“My real concern is that we tell ourselves that they just need some time out, but the research suggests that this is going to leave them permanently worse off,” said Anderson.
The second reason for the drop in student participation may be more positive. Anderson said as well as finding a doubling in the number of NEETs, they also found some students were looking at lower cost pathways. With vocational education made free by state and federal government policies, some entrepreneurial students are laddering to university later. For instance, Anderson indicated some nursing students may study two years at vocational college and then transfer.
“These students are motivated, but just making a rational economic choice, albeit at the cost of a prestige factor,” said Anderson.
Economics definitely seems to be playing a role in the decision-making.
Melbourne Universities Taking the Pulse of the Nation that was released in October 2023 found 60 percent of respondents indicated expensive tuition fees were deterring people from university study, followed by doubts that University led to a better job.
“It’s debt aversion – people fear it,” Dr. Nicoloas Salamenca from University of Melbourne was quoted. “What surprised me is there’s a large share of people that think university doesn’t lead to a better job – and jobs that don’t require a degree here are well regarded.”
According to Canadian Education Futurist Ken Steele the trends are financially driven, but also vary depending on the demographic breakdown of each jurisdiction.
“Certainly traditional liberal arts and science programs are losing ground rapidly,” said Steele, adding that in Canada, the short-term return on investment towards college programs has driven more students overall from general arts and science degrees. However, he also points out that in areas of Canada with larger populations of first-generation Canadians, interest in STEM subjects at university has grown and should continue to grow as demographics improve starting in 2026. Meanwhile, in the United States, he expects the high tuition, lowering demographics in the Northeast of the country and right-wing anti-intellectual politics to continue driving domestic enrolments downward.
“In the US the cliff still looms large, especially in the northeast,” said Steele.
Ironically, though students may be choosing to take fewer traditional arts and science courses, data from the UK shows that employers seem to care less about the type of study students undertake.
Professor Carl Gombrich, Dean at the London Interdisciplinary School, United Kingdom, said that a 2019 poll by the Institute of Student Employers found that 86 per cent of graduate recruiting organisations don’t care what degree their new employees have studied.
“In the UK, at least, the link between the content of a single honours undergraduate degree and a typical graduate career is truly broken,” said Gombrich. “And yet the myths and poor advice to students continue as if none of this data form the last 10 to 20 years existed.”
Steele and Anderson both agree that the reputational issues higher education faces in the United States are much more nuanced in Australia and Canada.
“What we are seeing in the United States – real questioning of the value of higher education – isn’t exactly what is going on in Australia,” said Anderson. “They are similar enough to be confused and lumped together, but I don’t see Australians rejecting higher education. I see them making rational choices or nihilistically rejecting all options.”
Governments worldwide are setting ambitious targets to improve domestic student higher education rates. The Australian University Accord recently recommended ambitious targets of increasing PSE participation rates by 2050 from 60 to 80 per cent and university degree attainment form 40 to 55%. However, as those goals are being set the trajectory is headed the exact opposite direction.
According to Australian Bureau of Statistics data, the number of students studying for a bachelor’s degree fell from 939,000 in 2016 to 815,700 in 2023.
If higher education wants to demonstrate its value to future students who otherwise might ghost the system, Anderson suggests higher education providers need to look at how they offer and promote their current offerings. He suggests they provide more digestible bits of education, rather than a scary proposition of three or four years of full-time study. In particular more online, more embedded microcredentials and more life-long learning options. He also suggests more industry connection in codesigning curriculum for workforce needs and blending paid work with training.
Aligning to the workforce seems to have merit, given that so many are choosing the workforce rather than education. Australian National University policy expert Andrew Norton indicated that the increase of 120,000 Australians with full-time jobs in 2022 “must be part of the story,” in explaining the shift away from higher education.
Dr. Pouyan Mahboubi, Vice President Academic at Langara College, said many institutions have been building industry partnerships to offer experiential learning and improved employment outcomes for students, but this is now becoming an imperative. Mahboubi indicated one example of a pilot underway at Langara that will aim to transform their general education diploma into a new practitioner-oriented future works program that will better align with their learners whose average age is 24 and need to balance their studies with employment outcomes; especially given the high cost of living in Vancouver. The program will be comprised of stackable sub-credentials that include both skills-based courses that closely align with the labour-market and foundational academic courses, collectively creating skilled, critical-thinking, innovative and adaptable students who will be successful in both the short- and long-term.
“There is nothing to suggest that the bachelor degree will not continue to hold a high value in the Canadian context, but students are increasingly wanting it in smaller units of relevant programming”, said Mahboubi. “Well-designed future-facing degree programs will need the architecture to allow multiple seamless entry and exit points, with each round trip leading to desirable competencies that stack together to form increasingly higher credentials. But the reality is that our institutional policies and legislation need to catch up to make this work.”
Rod Skinkle, CEO at Academica Group in Canada, echoes Anderson’s observations, pointing out a significant alignment with trends identified over 27 years of surveying higher education applicants.
“Anderson’s proposals, particularly about micro-credentials, work-integrated learning, and increased industry involvement, are indeed the right direction for higher education’s repositioning,” said Skinkle.
Skinkle emphasizes that while the appeal of bite-sized learning aligns with our digital-age tendencies, the critical shift lies in prioritizing ‘essential skills’ over traditional university degrees. These skills, more than ever, form the core value proposition in today’s education market—a market where degrees are increasingly viewed as transactional commodities.
The cost—both in terms of time and money—and the expected return on investment (ROI) are now pivotal considerations for applicants. This generation is responding to a new reality: employers are in search of essential and adaptive skills, not just credentials.
Louise Nicol, Founder and CEO at Asia Careers Group argues the responsibility for making higher education more accessible lies with the universities and employers. As degree discipline is in many cases irrelevant for more than 80 per cent of employers, Nicol suggests perhaps the answer is allowing students to indicate the company they wish to work for while they are studying and having a system that highlights the universities with a track record of placing graduates in their chosen company.
“Young people know the companies and brands they want to work for,” said Nicol. “Students and their advisers want to know that a university degree is worth the money they are paying. Good universities want to be able to provide hard evidence that they are meeting employer needs and student career aspirations.”
Anderson indicated all of these changes are really about doing everything possible to make higher education less scary and more of a natural progression.
“We need to communicate that higher education is not elite but something everyone does,” said Anderson. “Like Grade Nine.”
