Curious case of the missing domestic graduates, an incomplete tale

We have a mystery of the missing graduates

Since 2013, Australia’s working-age graduate population has grown by more than a million.

A domestic student enrolment boom contributed to this growth, but not by as many graduates as expected. Fewer course commencements flowed through to completions than they did previously.

The potential for strong domestic graduate growth seemed high until recently. Commencing bachelor-degree enrolments surged for six years, with nearly 79,000 more students starting courses in 2014 than 2008.

Despite a downward trend in the past two years, commencements remain high compared with the past. Demand-driven funding at public universities explains most of this expansion, but other higher education providers also contributed to the overall trend. A goal of demand-driven funding was increased higher education attainment rates.

In 2009 Julia Gillard, the education minister at the time, set a target of 40 per cent of 25 to 34-year-olds to have a degree by 2025. Course completions, essential to attainment rates, have increased but by much less than course commencements.

In 2018, just over 32,000 more domestic students completed a bachelor degree than a decade earlier. Completions as a proportion of commencements four years earlier fell by about 10 percentage points for student cohorts starting in the mid-2010s compared with the late 2000s.

We have a mystery of the missing graduates. Part of this puzzle is easily solved. Attrition rates are up, and obviously students who leave higher education without finishing any course do not add to completion numbers. The four-year dropout rate across this period increased by 3.6 percentage points. But incomplete courses explain only part of the apparent graduate deficit.

A key to understanding what happened is that neither commencing nor completing numbers are totals of unique persons. The same individual can be counted twice or more in each category.

The unique student ID number, the CHESSN, which a student uses across courses and universities, is needed to calculate unique persons. Double-count commencing students with a previous enrolment grew from less than 20 per cent of commencing students in 2008 to more than 30 per cent in 2016.

These double counts include students changing university or course and existing graduates returning for another degree.

Previous Grattan Institute research showed that 14 per cent of the students who started a bachelor degree in 2014 changed universities or courses within two years, up from 10 per cent for 2006 commencers.

In the demand-driven era entry to university based on previous higher education studies was the fastest growing admission category. Course changers are counted at least twice as commencing students, but many complete only one degree, and some do not complete any qualification.

Delay is a minor final explanation for why previous relationships between commencing and completing numbers have changed.

Four years after first entering higher education the proportion of students who are still enrolled went up by one percentage point between the late 2000s and the mid-2010s. Students often lose time when changing courses. An upward trend in part-time students since 2012 has further contributed to slow completions.

Double counting also means that annual new course completions exceed the number of new graduates added to the population. An enrolment question on prior qualifications, which can include overseas degrees and Australian credentials that predate CHESSN, indicates that 9 per cent of the domestic students who received an undergraduate qualification in 2017 already had a degree. These lifelong learners acquire new knowledge and skills but do not add to overall higher education attainment rates.

Dropping out and double counting contributed to additional Australian citizen graduates of Australian universities making up less than half of the total new graduates aged 20 to 64 years recorded between 2013 and last year in the Australian Bureau of Statistics Education and Work survey. Australia’s migration program, which is heavily biased towards graduates, makes up the rest.

Since 2013 the proportion of all graduates reporting an overseas qualification as their highest has increased, to nearly 26 per cent last year.

Not counting current international students, more than a half-million overseas graduates live in Australia on a long-term temporary visa or with permanent residence. Another 300,000 non-citizens, often former inter­national students, have Australian degrees.

In addition to these graduate populations, Education and Work identifies 165,000 current international students who already have degrees, whether from Australia or elsewhere.

Migrants mean that Australia met Gillard’s goal of 40 per cent of the 25 to 34-year-olds holding a degree last year, six years earlier than planned.

But dropping out, course changing and students who already have degrees mean that domestic commencing student numbers give us an inflated sense of progress by the Australian-born. They stood at 31 per cent attainment last year, still well short of the aspirations of a decade ago.

Andrew Norton is professor in the practice of higher education policy in the Centre for Social Research and Methods at the Australian National University.