ATARs Measure Class, But Not Much Else
The Sydney Morning Herald recently published a report into the increasing numbers of students with low ATARs universities are admitting into their courses. The implication is that allowing students with low ATARs into universities is or will cause a decline in academic standards as poorly-performing students are shepherded through their degrees. There are numerous problems in the debate around ATARs, not least that there is a debate about ATARs at all.
From the outset, it is important to know that ATARs are not a score, but a ranking — they are not an absolute measure of performance or potential performance, and, in any case, the ATAR is an extremely poor predictor for future university performance.
What ATARs do measure well, however, is social class and socioeconomic status. As Victoria University’s Claire Brown explains:
Students who live in low socio-economic status (SES) areas are pretty much destined to attend schools where subject choice and available resources are often significantly lower than those at higher SES schools. There are few role models to raise students’ aspirations. If students do complete year 12, it is likely to be with significantly lower ATARs that restrict the courses and institutions into which they can enrol …We effectively disenfranchise students for not achieving an ATAR above the cut-off, despite the fact that their socio-economic circumstances mean they cannot compete fairly.
Indeed, across the OECD, student attainment is usually lower in schools that enrol students from mostly disadvantaged backgrounds. In short, our socio-economic backgrounds influence the schools we attend, and the schools we attend have a marked impact on our educational attainment. To require minimum ATARs effectively locks students from low-socioeconomic backgrounds out of certain universities and degrees.
The fact that Australian universities are now accepting students from non-traditional backgrounds is a result of the uncapping of university places, which took place within the broader global context of the massification of higher education. A consequence of these changes has been a new focus on access and equity — these programmes (under which I was able to obtain a university degree, I should say) are meant to encourage students from non-traditional backgrounds into higher education and, ideally, to support them once they are enrolled.
A positive interpretation of access and equity is that such schemes are democratising higher education and moving us towards equality of opportunity. A cynical reading, which is not necessarily contradictory, is that universities are lowering entrance barriers in order to increase their customer base. With universities increasingly being run by businesspeople as businesses, it should not be surprising that they are competing for student-customers by lowering ATAR requirements under the guise of access and equity. The Sydney Morning Herald, however, seemed shocked that this could be the case.
The only way in which ATARs are important, then, are as a highly effective method of funnelling students of low-socioeconomic background into universities and degrees that tend to enrol other students of low-socioeconomic background, and channelling wealthy students toward universities that tend to enrol other wealthy students in their degree programmes. Furthermore, many students with a very low ATAR either do not take up their offer in the first place or do not complete their degrees in the end (and thus there is an important conversation to be had about the ethics of enrolling students, and charging them fees, without implementing necessary support programmes).
A complicating factor in all of this is the labour market into which students enter at the end of their studies. Employers increasingly require undergraduate degrees as a bare minimum for even the most menial white-collar occupations — not only can everyone have a degree thanks to massification, everyone must have a degree. This increases demand for university qualifications, a demand which universities themselves are more than content to meet under the current funding arrangements.
The debate around ATARs is therefore a distraction from these broader transformations in higher education and the labour market. If there is a problem with the diversification of student cohorts it’s not that students from low-socioeconomic and non-traditional backgrounds are getting into our universities when they shouldn’t be, it’s that universities aren’t doing enough, or aren’t able to do enough, to support these students.
