Interstate university students choose NSW over Victoria as pandemic hurts applications

Students choose NSW for uni as interstate applications to Victoria collapse during pandemic.

Applicants for Victorian university spots have dropped by 13 per cent.

University students across the country are choosing to study in NSW over Victoria this year, with interstate applications to the southern state collapsing.

Applicants for Victorian university spots have dropped by 13 per cent on the previous year — from 8669 to 7544 — with most students choosing their preferred institutions during the height of Melbourne’s second COVID-19 lockdown.

By comparison, interstate applicants for NSW universities are up 14.9 per cent — from 7361 last year to 8456.

That figure is higher for students applying directly from Year 12 — up 21.9 per cent.

The drop in interstate students enrolling in Victoria comes after a difficult period for the university sector and with the state’s biggest export market — international education — hard hit by border closures.

Victoria’s largest tertiary institutions, the University of Melbourne and Monash, have projected revenue shortfalls of $300m and $350m respectively this financial year.

Demographics Group managing director Bernard Salt said interstate university appli­cations were in line with other migration flows and were almost certainly influenced by COVID-19 as students made choices about where to study.

“This is entirely consistent with the demographic trends: movement of people, property prices,” Mr Salt said. “And these university decisions would have been made in October and Nov­ember when Melbourne’s lockdowns were very severe.

“Many 18-year-olds are making the decisions … probably in concert with their parents ... you can imagine at that time students and parents would have been asking: Is Melbourne safe? Can I get back home if I need to?

“And then there’s the state of the employment market in Victoria: can my 18-year-old get a job as waiters and baristas under tougher COVID rules.”

New data from the Victorian Tertiary Admissions Centre shows 5629 Year 12s outside the state are applying for study this year compared with 6147 in 2019, a fall of 8.4 per cent.

There is a larger fall in non-Year 12 applicants — postgraduate students or people looking to retrain — with a 24.1 per cent fall from 2522 in 2019 to 1915 this year.

By comparison, NSW has seen Year 12 applicants from other states increase from 3874 last year to 4723.

Non-Year 12s went up 7.1 per cent from 3487 to 3733.

Older September data from the Queensland Tertiary Admissions Centre shows that state, which has largely avoided COVID-19 outbreaks, is also experiencing a boom in interstate applications for their universities this year, with a 26.6 per cent increase on 2019.

Centre for the Study of Higher Education professorial fellow Vin Massaro said lifestyle has historically not been a high factor for students who move states for study, and projected booming local demand for university spots would help Victorian institutions either way.

“You could draw the conclusion from that data that some students are either staying at home or not taking the risk of moving to certain states,” he said.

“Traditionally, the top considerations for students moving have usually been the institutions, courses and ATAR requirements — lifestyle has not been in those top three factors.

“Interstate applications are usually quite low and demand everywhere else among domestic students is very high post-COVID, so it should not pose too much of a problem for now.”

The interstate application changes come as higher education sector experts project it will take universities up to four years to regain their pre-coronavirus financial strength.

Universities have been ravaged by the loss of $7bn in foreign student fees, and Victoria’s international student market alone was worth $12.5bn in the 2019 financial year.

Melbourne University vice-chancellor Duncan Maskell last year said his institution — the highest globally ranked Australian university — would be “smaller” in future as it faced a $1bn loss from international student fees over three years.

Some Victorian universities still hope to see interstate numbers improve. A spokeswoman for La Trobe University said the enrolments picture should be clearer by February. “Recruitment is still under way and we expect that as in previous years, many students will finalise their courses later this month or next month,” she said.

More than 12,000 jobs have been lost at Australian universities, according to figures from the National Tertiary Education Union — and more are expected to be lost in the coming year.

Retiring Australian Catholic University vice-chancellor Greg Craven has predicted the elite higher education institutions would soon fall out of the top 100 world university rankings.