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Measurement Of The Socio-Economic Status Of Australian Higher Education Students, Julie Mcmillan, John Western

Julie McMillan

The underrepresentation of persons from socio-economically disadvantaged backgrounds in higher education in countries such as Australia is of policy concern. In order to be able to identify such individuals for targeted interventions and to monitor their participation rates, it is necessary to have an accurate, simple to administer, and relatively inexpensive method of measuring students' socio-economic characteristics. We demonstrate that the postcode methodology currently used by the Australian Department of Education, Training and Youth Affairs (DETYA) for monitoring purposes, while being relatively simple and inexpensive to administer, is subject to considerable error. A student is allocated the `average' socio-economic status …