The lost boys: Australia’s male education ‘catastrophe’

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Australian boys are in the midst of an education “catastrophe”, landmark research has found, as they fall further behind girls in academic achievement and the search for high-skilled jobs.

Male secondary school students are far less likely to go to university than girls – with only a quarter of male government school students going on to gain a degree – and state governments are being urged to act to help close the gap.

The report confirmed large gaps in outcomes for students from the three school systems.

The research also identifies the major career advantage that private school students gain compared with government and, to a lesser extent Catholic, school students, with analysis of 10 years of census data revealing they are roughly twice as likely to be employed in the most highly skilled professions such as medicine.

One state, NSW is defying the trend of private school advantage. Government schools there produce significantly more high-skill workers such as doctors than other states.

Report author David McCloskey, of the Australian Population Research Institute, said his research revealed two key findings: that Australia’s unequal school system contradicts and undermines the national ethos of a fair go, and that other states should follow NSW’s lead and invest more in select-entry government schools for high-achieving students.

McCloskey said the report provided unprecedented insights into the life outcomes of students going through Australia’s three education systems – government, Catholic and independent.

“The universities say that they try to expand access to higher education, and they’ve done lots of work to try to expand access, but when you actually look at these results, they really haven’t got very far at all,” McCloskey said.

The report, School choice and careers, draws for the first time on 10 years of census data on Australian secondary school students’ outcomes in higher education and employment.

It confirms large statistical gaps in outcomes for students from the three school systems and in the prospects for male and female students.

In Victoria, just 28 per cent of boys and 43 per cent of girls who were in the government school system in 2011 had a university degree in 2021.

The figure falls significantly short of the 40 per cent of boys and 59 per cent of girls from Catholic schools, and 51 per cent of boys and 68 per cent of girls from independent schools, who graduate from university.

Male government school students from Queensland had the lowest rates of degree attainment of any group (17 per cent), and female independent school students from the ACT had the highest (71 per cent).

“It’s a catastrophe in terms of education for males, and the gap is widening enormously between academic success of males and females,” McCloskey said of the data.

He said the inequitable results provided troubling proof that Australia’s school system was creating a stratified society.

“We’ve always prided ourselves in Australia on being egalitarian and about a fair go. And what we’re seeing here is that, through a whole variety of influences and reasons, the fair go is not really there for many, many people,” McCloskey said.

The report analyses each school cohort’s success in landing highly skilled jobs, requiring at least five years’ relevant experience or a bachelor’s degree or higher.

In this category – defined by the Australian Bureau of Statistics as skill level 1 occupations – girls who went to independent and Catholic schools performed best, with 41 per cent and 38 per cent respectively gaining a high-skill job.

They were followed by boys from independent schools at 33 per cent. Males from government schools had the lowest rates, with 18 per cent going on to skill level 1 jobs. Boys from Catholic schools and girls from government schools were on equal footing at 25 per cent.

Education researcher Dr Melinda Hildebrandt, from Victoria University’s Mitchell Institute, said the university education gap had flipped; in 1986, 11 per cent of male school-leavers went on to study at tertiary level, compared with 8 per cent of their female counterparts.

Hildebrandt said that trend may have been driven in part by a shrinking jobs market over the decades for women without tertiary qualifications while well-paid career paths dominated by non-university educated men – such as trades and construction – remained plentiful.

The report also reveals that on current trends, Australia will fail to meet its Universities Accord target that nine in 10 school graduates go on to gain a tertiary qualification. Currently, about 55 per cent of the Australian working age population has a tertiary qualification.

Hildebrandt said the accord “had work to do” in reaching its enrolment and attainment goals but warned against the assumption that all young people wanted to pursue a university education.

“Let’s not assume that just because you come from a disadvantaged background and you’re a boy, and you go into a trade, that that is not what you wanted, and that you’re not perfectly happy,” she said.

The research also finds that although government schools produce far fewer university graduates, they provide strong pathways to careers in construction and home building.

McCloskey identified a notable exception, NSW, where government schools hold their own in producing graduates going on to careers in medicine and related fields such as psychology, audiology and occupational therapy.

According to the analysis, graduates of NSW government secondary schools perform significantly better than those in the rest of the country, and almost twice as well as Victorian students, in going on to a career in medicine.

NSW has 47 government-run select entry schools, where students must sit a highly competitive exam to gain entry, Victoria has four and Queensland has three.

The report argues that select entry schools produce more graduates who go on to study in fields that require the highest ATARs for university entry.

“The provision of selective entry schools run by the [NSW] government appears to reduce the skew towards students from other independent schools being highly over-represented in highly sought after occupations,” it argues.

McCloskey said that if other states built more select entry schools, more students from less academic and less professional family backgrounds could receive a top-tier academic education without having to pay private school fees.

“Parents can then choose to send their kids to apply for the selective entry schools and the pool that can do that is far wider than it would be, compared to only those who could afford the fees of the independent schools,” he said.

Efforts are under way in Victoria to increase the flow of students from the state’s government schools to university, including the opening of the government’s Centre for Higher Education Studies in South Yarra in 2022.

Stewart Milner, principal of the centre for Higher Education Studies, says the government school is sparking enthusiasm among its students for university study. Milner is pictured with students (from left) Claire, Kaysar and Oscar.

About 650 high-achieving youngsters from state senior secondary schools attend the centre part-time to study tertiary-level subjects, while remaining enrolled in their home schools.

Principal Stewart Milner said the centre was having success sparking enthusiasm for tertiary study by offering high school students a taste of university life, at no financial cost.

“The great thing about the courses that we offer is that students have the opportunity to get credits for those courses and there’s no cost to them, no cost to their schools. The universities, together with us, support them to do that as a head start,” Milner said.

“Those sorts of opportunities can change minds. They often leave the lectures, the master classes and the tutorials we run and say, ‘If this is what university is like, then I can’t wait to do it.’”

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