Increasing university participation: the impact on apprentices
Authors:
Jo Waugh and Cameron Forrest
NCVER
Theme: Apprentices & Trainees
Presentation:
Apprenticeships remain an important source of skilled workers in Australia; however, commencements in the last decade have not kept pace with projected skills demand. During that same decade, undergraduate university enrolments grew considerably and there is some concern that young people who would have commenced apprenticeships are instead entering university. Additionally, looking ahead, the Australian Universities Accord outlined participation targets that includes increasing the share of students from the lowest quartile of SES backgrounds, a group who have traditionally been more inclined to choose apprenticeships.
This research sets out to explore the posited shifting youth preferences for apprenticeships and university by investigating whether young people who would previously have chosen an apprenticeship have instead entered university. The research uses data from four cohorts of the Longitudinal Surveys of Youth (LSAY) to compare the characteristics of apprenticeship-bound young people with those who are university-bound and to determine if there has been any relative change in student characteristics between 2007 and 2019.
The results reveal that the profile of a young person more likely to choose an apprenticeship than university in 2019 has not much changed across the years since 2007. In that context, and recognising that there is a significant pool of young people who choose neither university nor apprenticeships, what is the best focus for apprenticeship attraction strategies?