Public perception of higher education in Australia has deteriorated on three intertwined fronts: value for money, employment outcomes, and the relevance of traditional models. The data now show a pattern that predates pandemic disruptions and cannot be explained away by temporary shocks.
Beginning with the price students pay and the debt they carry, continuing with short-term job results that have softened from a recent peak, and extending to questions about whether campus-based, semester-bound, lecture-heavy designs still match a labour market that prioritises speed, flexibility and applied capability. The price of the headline shift in 2024 to cap student loan indexation at the lower of CPI or the Wage Price Index and to backdate the credit to 1 June 2023 reduced aggregate HELP balances by around three billion dollars. It fixed a politically damaging anomaly after the 7.1 per cent indexation spike in 2023. Yet that policy relief has not altered the basic perception that costs outpace benefits for many cohorts, particularly those in disciplines that faced higher student contributions under the Job Ready Graduates settings targeted for “urgent remediation” by the Accord panel. The Department of Education explained that indexation will never again exceed wage growth. At the same time, media estimates placed the total debt reduction at about three billion dollars across more than three million accounts, and the Australian Taxation Office confirmed the cap and backdating framework.
The debt is only part of the value, and attention has turned to jobs where the national Graduate Outcomes Survey shows domestic undergraduate full-time employment four months after completion fell from 79.0 per cent in 2023 to 74.0 per cent in 2024, with overall employment down from 88.9 to 86.9 per cent. This is a retreat that coincides with tight cost of living conditions and turnover in entry level hiring and that undercuts the triumphalism that followed the 2021 to 2023 recovery phase, even as the longer run earnings premium is still visible in ABS data that put median weekly pay at one thousand dollars for workers without non school qualifications and approximately one thousand nine hundred and twenty five dollars for those with a postgraduate degree in August 2024.
A gap that shows higher education continues to confer average lifetime benefits but does not guarantee rapid payback for every field, particularly where graduate underemployment persists or salaries lag local housing and inflation pressures, which helps explain why perceptions of value can decline even while macro averages look positive, especially when students experience course costs upfront and benefits only gradually and unevenly.
Here, sentiment research overseas is a useful comparator because the UK Student Academic Experience Survey in 2024 reported movement up from the lows but still only a minority calling their course good value and in 2025 just 37 per cent rating value as good or very good amid cost of living strain, demonstrating that perceptions of value for money track lived affordability and contact quality rather than headline economic premiums.
While Australia does not run a direct national value for money question, the QILT Student Experience Survey acts as a proxy with overall ratings still below pre pandemic highs and press coverage in 2024 reporting 23.3 per cent of students dissatisfied with their degree quality in 2023 before a slight post pandemic improvement in 2024 when 76.5 per cent of undergraduates rated their experience positively, a mixed picture that supports the claim of recovery with a persistent trust deficit. Employers add another layer because the 2023 Employer Satisfaction Survey indicates high but softening satisfaction with notable gaps for fully online graduates on collaboration skills at 81.9 per cent versus 88.3 per cent for face to face or hybrid, and overall employer satisfaction easing to 83.7 per cent in 2023 from 84.1 per cent, details that validate student anxieties about whether remote heavy delivery matches workplace expectations and that feed a narrative of relevance risk in purely digital models even as hybrid systems mature.
Relevance more broadly is under structural pressure because the market has become crowded with short-cycle pathways from VET, trade and online providers that promise faster skills for lower cost, leading the Accord review to place stackable microcredentials, tertiary harmonisation and new work-integrated norms at the centre of reform.
This implies a deliberate pivot away from monolithic degrees as the sole currency of learning and toward flexible accumulation of credit and capability, and the fiscal backdrop makes that pivot urgent since 2023 domestic enrolments fell 2.4 per cent year on year to 1,076,027 while commencements fell 1.8 per cent, numbers that reveal a demand base under strain even though total headcount rose on the back of a 24.9 per cent rebound in onshore international students.
This reliance that regulators and vice chancellors agree is volatile and increasingly risky in the face of visa tightening cycles and geopolitical shifts, and when domestic interest softens, the public tends to blame relevance and value rather than macro demography, even though cohort shrinkage is real.
For a parent or school leaver deciding between three years of foregone earnings and a 12-month applied certificate that leads to immediate wages, the microeconomic calculus weighs contact time, placement access, and speed to job over research prestige. This is why value perceptions hinge so tightly on the short-term markers that QILT and ESS measure, and the pathway from perception to institutional solvency is now visible in the financials, where perennial deficits have emerged as salary, energy, and compliance costs rise faster than CPI-capped domestic revenue.
A gap that ratings agencies, state treasuries and the Office for Students in England have described as structural and that Queensland press reported in 2023 as only two of seven universities posting a profit, while the University of Canberra forecast a thirty six million dollar deficit for 2024, a global pattern mirrored by English providers where 43 per cent are forecasting deficits in 2024–25.
So public scepticism about value intersects with real institutional fragility, creating a feedback loop in which student doubts reduce demand, lower revenue constrains student support, and degraded services further depress satisfaction scores.
Breaking that loop requires both price credibility and relevance credibility. Price credibility demands that governments and providers address the composition as well as the indexation of student charges because reforming the Job Ready Graduates relativities to align fees with public and private benefit was a core Accord recommendation, and industry groups have tabled models to adjust contribution rates.
Relevance credibility is earned through clear employment pathways and stark transparency on outcomes by field, not just at the whole-of-sector level. The strongest argument universities can make on employment is still the long-arc premium seen in ABS series and taxation-linked QILT salary dashboards. Yet perception improves when the short arc is also strong, which is why the fall in four-month full-time employment in 2024 matters for confidence, even though the economy remains tight in absolute unemployment terms.
Employer satisfaction remains in the eighties nationally, but the modality gap calls for intentional on-campus or high-touch moments in online programs that explicitly teach teamwork, communication, and collaboration with workplace-embedded assessment. Persistent reports of weaker soft skills for fully online cohorts dent the brand of online degrees at the very moment universities need them to scale constrained teaching budgets.
On relevance, the pivot away from tradition is measurable in the spread of co-designed curricula, professional accreditation embedded from the first semester, and the rise of microcredentials that ladder into degrees. The sector must prove these are not marketing artefacts by publishing completion, credit recognition, and wage data for learners who stack credentials over time. The Accord Review anticipates this through a tertiary credit market and a stronger national data infrastructure.
Public trust is a macro variable with its own cycle. OECD trust work and Australian public institution surveys show improved trust in government since 2021, while commentary in early 2024 argued that universities face a trust problem linked to politicised research debates and governance controversies. Although such analyses are interpretive rather than statistical, they contribute to the climate in which value is judged, particularly when sensational headlines magnify campus conflict.
To restore confidence, universities are leaning on global rankings momentum and research impact narratives. However, these do not move the student perception needle unless linked to student experience. The 2023 SES shows that teaching quality, learning resources, and student support scores drive the overall experience. Media reports in 2024 highlighted discipline disparities, with higher satisfaction in agriculture and physiotherapy and lower in computing and dentistry. This signals that value is not a single sector number but a portfolio of discipline-specific stories, each showing price matched to payoff. Communications must therefore move from abstract claims to course-level evidence on placement rates, licensure success, and median earnings.
Policy will shape perception in 2025–2027 as HELP credits settle and as the federal response to the Accord resets fee relativities, participation targets, and support for equity cohorts. If support arrangements widen and attrition falls, the narrative can turn from cost and debt to net gain and social mobility. But if cost-of-living pressures continue to force students to work longer hours during study, the time they can invest in learning will shrink and the campus product will continue to feel thin regardless of provider effort.
A UK study in 2025 found 68 per cent of students working in term time and independent study hours falling to 11.6 per week, with value-for-money perceptions at 37 per cent good or very good. While that is a UK number, the pattern is instructive for Australia, because the value judgement students make is holistic and includes the ability to study without financial distress.
Success on perception therefore, requires a three-part agenda that the data supports. First, stabilise cost through predictable, transparent fees and loan settings, and match any future price rises with expansion of teaching contact and student services that students can see and feel. Second, intensify labour-market alignment through compulsory work-integrated learning in applied degrees, and through evidence that employers prefer graduates of your program—a point the ESS can help document given its national validity when satisfaction rises above the sector mean. Third, modernise relevance by replacing delivery architecture that students experience as passive with designs built around problems, placements, and projects that earn credit from industry bodies and can be published as documented capability.
If universities can demonstrate to prospective students that a dollar spent buys measurable contact, active learning, and a named pathway to a job, then the value story starts to repair. In this cycle, students and parents will scrutinise near-term employment indicators, which is why the GOS 2024 decline is so salient. But it should also be set in context: full-time outcomes remain above 2019 levels, and earnings premiums persist by qualification level. When communications explain both the short-term volatility and the long-term earnings data, and link both to investments in teaching quality, value perceptions are more likely to recover.
Perception also follows service quality. Service quality is observable in response times, feedback clarity, timetabling reliability, and the availability of staff—factors that SES repeatedly identifies and that institutions can improve quickly even in tight budgets.
The cumulative message for the sector is that value for money is not a slogan to be defended but a set of verifiable, student-visible commitments across price, pedagogical design, and pathways to work. These commitments must be tracked in QILT and ESS, benchmarked against ABS earnings, and communicated with discipline-level clarity. That is the only way to reverse the narrative that degrees cost more than they return and that the model is outdated—a narrative that will otherwise persist regardless of how many reports highlight national GDP spillovers from university research or how many global rankings place Australian institutions in the top hundred. Consumers make decisions on personal cost and personal benefit rather than sector prestige.
The test for 2026 intakes is whether providers can show that the reformed loan indexation and any adjustments to contribution relativities translate into more contact, stronger placement access, and better discipline-specific job rates. When those markers move, perception follows. When they do not, cost relief alone is unlikely to shift scepticism in a labour market that offers credible non-degree alternatives in trades, VET, and short-cycle digital credentials.
This is why the Accord’s language of a more connected tertiary system and published pathways between sectors is critical to avoiding a zero-sum contest that universities will not win on price. They can win on integrated value if they embrace the role of strategic integrator rather than gatekeeper—and publish the evidence to match.
