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For Mia Russo, early entry into her “dream course at the exact uni I wanted to go to” was the cherry on top of a perfect year 12.
“Early entry really helped me maintain a positive mental state,” said the Kellyville teenager, who this year starts a bachelor of psychological and social sciences at Western Sydney University. “It was such a relief.”
Russo was one of the thousands of HSC students offered a place at university before her HSC was done, an increasingly common practice that now sees three in 10 school-leavers using a non-ATAR pathway to go to university.
Policymakers have serious concerns about the schemes’ equity and recipients taking it easy for the remainder of year 12 after their place is secure.
Early offers are difficult to measure because they come in two streams – directly from the university through initiatives such as Western Sydney University’s True Reward program and Macquarie University’s “Leavers and Achievers”, or through the University Admissions Centre’s School Recommendations Scheme.
UAC made 27,926 early offers last year and 27,038 in 2024. That number has steadily risen over the past decade: there were 9804 offers in 2015.
Criteria vary but can include year 11 results, school recommendations or a portfolio. At Macquarie University, participation in robotics, Model United Nations and the Duke of Edinburgh Award are all “recognised activities” that can contribute.
What they have in common is that they cost money, and are not necessarily available to students who need to work during year 12.
“I’m really concerned,” NSW Education Minister Prue Car told The Sydney Morning Herald School Summit this month.
“There are just some students, in some communities, that do not have the opportunity to go out and do extracurricular activities to build up their CV, to build themselves an unconditional early offer,” she said.
“To me, that is just not a level playing field. The whole idea of the ATAR is that it’s supposed to be a level playing field. When you’re sitting the same exam, that’s equitable. That’s not necessarily the case with early offers.
“Good on the university sector for wanting to get enrolments. But it doesn’t seem right that the university sector is determining what’s happening in the HSC. Should it not be the other way around?”
Not all universities do early entry – the University of Sydney, for example, says it puts a premium on the “significant work” students put into the HSC and the 2 per cent of its offers that are made early are the exception based on equity considerations or a creative portfolio.
The University of NSW also restricts early entry to arts, design and architecture degrees that take portfolios into consideration, and students applying on equity grounds.
Universities are keen on early offers for myriad reasons, says Associate Professor Tim Pitman from the Australian Centre for Student Equity and Success, including financial, equity – some universities describe early entry as facilitating access for groups such as Aboriginal, disabled or low-income students – and managing student load.
Schools are not so keen, arguing that early offers often result in under-par HSC result, Catholic Schools NSW chief executive Dallas McInerney said. “We’re seeing two-speed classrooms. Kids [with early offers] kick back, maybe not doing everything they should.”
For the student kicking back, this is not a huge problem – an aspiring teacher wanting to study education gets into that degree via an early entry, rather than an ATAR. But HSC marks are calculated by a combination of an exam mark and a moderated school assessment mark based on the entire cohort’s results, meaning fellow students’ marks affect the HSC results of others in their cohort.
Some argue that by making these early offers, universities are killing their own creation, the ATAR. Generated from a student’s HSC results, the ATAR is not a mark but a rank used to allocate places at university based on a course’s popularity.
“The ATAR really isn’t a measure of how kids perform in the HSC, which is the most important thing. [Universities] take the HSC and do their own calculations against the supply and demand. We need to keep that distinction,” McInerney said.
“Early offers are reaching in and being dislocative inside schools.”
Western Australia’s former education minister, Tony Buti, is more blunt.
“We may be developing a culture in which seeking the easiest possible pathway into university is outweighing the importance of engaging with challenging content, developing writing skills for essay-style assignments, and acquiring experience in the rigours of studying for exams,” he wrote in an opinion piece in The West Australian.
Pitman shares the concern. “Getting that foundational academic grounding in high school is still, generally, the best foundation for success in university.”
In 2023, the country’s vice chancellors agreed that early offers would not be made before September, after previously being made as early as March, which has forced students to keep working for the majority of year 12.
For her part, Russo says the early offer did not dent her motivation.
“The early entry definitely was really great and did take off a lot of pressure,” she said.
“I still worked as hard as I could for my HSC because I wanted to know my own personal best. I still worked hard for myself and my school.
“You only do it once, there’s no point in getting lazy at the end.”
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