Australian higher education attainment has dipped for the first time in a decade, in a sign that scepticism about the value of degrees could be growing.

Newly released Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) shows that the share of young adults with bachelor’s or higher degrees fell by half a percentage point this year. The proportion sank slightly among both men and women, marking the first decline in either group since 2016.

ABS estimates of the degree-qualified share of 25- to 34-year-olds have served as a yardstick for higher education attainment since 2008, when the Bradley Higher Education Review recommended a target of 40 per cent by 2020. Since then, the measure has increased from 36 to 53 per cent among women, and 28 to 40 per cent among men.

However, domestic higher education enrolments have fallen substantially since their 2021 peak. Monash University policy expert Andrew Norton suspects that demand for higher education started edging down about 10 years ago, as more school-leavers became dubious about the career benefits of degrees.

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Norton is also dubious about the ABS figure, which is based on rolling samples of about 40,000 Australians and has “a history of rogue results”. The measure is also inflated by the inclusion of migrants, who are more qualified on average than the general Australian population.

Norton said this year’s decline could reflect “statistical noise” in Australia’s “fairly stable” or “growing” levels of higher education attainment, “even if this is mainly driven by migration”. He estimated attainment among Australian and New Zealand citizens at about 42 per cent – 49 per cent for women and 34 per cent for men.

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Meanwhile, the business leader who spent most of the year examining university governance has blamed a dearth of “curiosity” for the sector’s popularity problems.

Melinda Cilento, chair of the Expert Council on University Governance, said universities had been hamstrung by a reticence about “asking the tough questions”.

Cilento said she had been gobsmacked by universities’ “defensiveness” when her panel was conducting its review. “I was stunned by the sector’s lack of curiosity,” she told the Tertiary Education Quality and Standards Agency conference in Melbourne.

Universities appeared disinterested in their failure to grasp “the perspectives of the students or the staff”, and displayed little willingness to “engage more genuinely with what was going on in the campus”, she said.

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Cilento said the “least curious” university leaders were either “confident that they didn’t need to change”, or “felt that they weren’t empowered to drive change”. She said chancellors who “didn’t feel like they were really driving the bus” needed to step up.

“[The] buck stops with you, guys. You’re the chair of the board. If you’ve got people who aren’t curious, it’s your job to lift the lid on that.”

She said curiosity required a “culture” of “challenging” without being disrespectful or resorting to “cheap shots”.

“Curiosity is really valuable. Not all countries and cultures enable it, and we should. Our universities are the institutions at the forefront of that. We should be challenging them to do more of it.”

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john.ross@timeshighereducation.com