Enrolment data ‘show Job-ready Graduates reforms are working’

Australia’s shadow education minister has claimed that new data revealing positive trends in enrolments and graduate employment is evidence that his party’s much maligned funding reforms are working.

Liberal Party education spokesman Julian Leeser said his opposite number, Labor education minister Jason Clare, was tacitly endorsing the previous government’s 2021 Job-ready Graduates (JRG) reforms, with recent “claims to success” showing “extraordinarily strong alignment” with the “cohorts” that supposedly benefited from the changes.

JRG overhauled tuition fees and teaching subsidies to accommodate surging enrolments at a time when Covid-19 had put enormous pressure on government coffers. Based on the notion that the government could use price signals to nudge students into occupational areas of need, JRG reduced fees in some fields – including allied health, clinical psychology, engineering, nursing, science and teaching – while amplifying study costs in disfavoured areas such as the humanities.

The package is widely reviled, mainly because it more than doubled the costs of arts degrees while slashing overall funding for the teaching of many disciplines. Clare says JRG is “fundamentally flawed” but has baulked at reversing the package. “[It] needs to be fixed [but] it’s complicated and it’s expensive,” he told the AFR Higher Education Summit this summer.

Leeser said Clare had more recently effectively endorsed JRG by highlighting enrolment growth in education, nursing and engineering courses and in regional Australia. “Not only are we seeing growth in those priority fields that benefited from JRG but we’re also actually seeing better employment outcomes as well,” Leeser said. “That’s why Labor has spent five years ignoring vested interests who say that JRG should be repealed.”

In a media release unveiling preliminary data from semester one this year, Clare said commencements at university had increased 5.3 per cent compared with the same period last year. Incoming student numbers had grown 5 per cent in regional Australia, 6.6 per cent in health courses, 6.8 per cent in science, 7.7 per cent in teaching, more than 8 per cent among indigenous Australians, 9.8 per cent in clinical psychology and 10.5 per cent in engineering.

In a subsequent media statement launching the 2026 Graduate Outcomes Survey report, Clare said teaching, nursing and engineering students – along with those from “the regions and the bush” – had recorded “some of the strongest employment outcomes”.

Leeser said the figures reflected the impact of the JRG reforms including fee cuts, the Tertiary Access Payment – a relocation grant for students from the outback – and the uncapping of undergraduate places for indigenous students from regional areas.

Leeser said the opposition supported a re-evaluation of JRG so long as it was “an honest and balanced review that takes into account all aspects of the package”.

Clare has courted criticism for claiming that “more Australians started a university degree this year than ever before”, even though the preliminary figures showed that more domestic students joined the system in early 2021.

However, previously unpublished forecasts reported by the Future Campus news site suggest that domestic commencements for the full year will exceed the previous record.

Higher education researchers have welcomed the release of the preliminary half-year enrolment data after an eight-year hiatus. But it means that partial 2026 statistics have been published in advance of any 2025 statistics.

Craig Fowler, a former managing director of the National Centre for Vocational Education Research, said higher education statistics were published far too slowly to meet the needs of the forthcoming funding system enshrined in the “Opening the Doors of Opportunity” Act. “Open the Doors by all means, but lift the game on counting,” Fowler urged in Future Campus.

Meanwhile, actuarial assessments published in the federal Department of Education’s annual report show that the Labor government’s forgiveness of 20 per cent of student debt – an act it claimed would save students and graduates more than A$16 million (£8.3 billion) – has reduced the “fair value” of accrued student debt by just A$9.6 billion.

Analysts always considered the A$16 billion figure an overestimate, because a significant proportion of student debt is never repaid anyway.

john.ross@timeshighereducation.com