I haven’t been to a University of Melbourne Open Day for a while, and it was a genuine shock. The campus felt like a cross between the hunger games and a safari park, with herds of grim-faced students and their parents queuing for everything, stalking across to the next talk, or engaged in some sort of visualisations about how beautiful life might be if they get in.
The fact that they ran out of vouchers for the free donut van said a lot to me. The University of Melbourne has such a long history, high ranking and embedded aspiration in the Victorian school sector and beyond that it doesn’t have to sell itself. Open Day provides permission for those poor nervous year 12 students to see what they might get if their ATAR falls the right way.
The reality is that the University of Melbourne only took 6,600 domestic undergraduate students in 2022, with an almost 50% higher UG intake at cross-town rival Monash, so they are gearing up for and attracting far more students than they will accept next year. I ran into this issue at Monash years ago, where Open Day visitor numbers were about five times higher than the places available, which led to changes in metrics. When you have those numbers, growth in visitor numbers is a failure, if anything; taxing the resources of staff confronted by ever-greater waves of people and giving away more collateral, but fundamentally disappointing more people.
Getting the balance between equity of access and investing time talking to the students who have a realistic chance of getting into your institution (put crudely, choosing quality over quantity) is essential, but challenging for higher status institutions.
