The market for student places is regularly bent out of shape by government and while universities usually find ways to meet demand, it gets quite complicated.
Andrew Norton (Monash U) and Ren-Hao Xu (Uni WA) demonstrate how complicated, in a new paper on how, and why, universities have allocated Commonwealth Supported Places to PG coursework programs.
It is an addition to their series on how universities use public funding for teaching, based on a deep analysis of enrolment data across Table A institutions and informed by (sadly) not for attribution conversations with strategists, reported here and here.
The foundation for their new analysis is that for the first time in a generation, the majority of postgrad course workplaces are government funded – made possible by Job Ready Graduates, which allows universities to move places between credential levels and funding groups.
So when UG demand fell by 28,000 places 2022-24, universities increased PG coursework enrolments from 36,000 in ’19 to 50,000 in ’24. In part, this was mission-based, especially in teaching and nursing where universities wanted to serve their communities. In part it was related to peer perception and judgement by the Feds; they did not want to appear so unpopular as to have empty places. And some just stuck to their strategies.
Across the public system, Commonwealth Supported PG coursework places (ex-medical) increased from 45% to 56% 2019-24. While they warn the system-wide evidence is “inferential,” Norton and Xu state, “We know from interviews that some universities deliberately put CSPs in postgraduate courses to minimise under-enrolment.”
But not for all. Among the Big Five, growth at Uni Melbourne and Uni Sydney was less than half the system average and Monash U and UNSW, (then again Uni Queensland went big in the domestic market, up 30%).
As to what happens next, Norton and Xu suggest that as UG demand rebounds, universities might reduce publicly-funded places for coursework postgrads – although ATEC will have something to say at each university, through compacts.
And while they do not suggest it, FC wonders whether different government intervention will just cement the status-quo of universities working within sets of everchanging rules to serve their missions and meet their markets.