The Age: The university courses the most people are applying for this year

[Joseph41]

I had a good time reading this article here (Victoria-centred - apologies).

Some excerpts I found interesting:

Monash University is the destination where almost one in four students want to study, with 14,832 putting a course there as their first preference. A total of 11,736 people want to study at RMIT, while 11,006 are hoping to enrol at Melbourne University.

The most sought after courses for school leavers are Arts at Melbourne University (which 2529 people put as their first preference), Science at Melbourne University (2312) and Medicine at Monash University (1576).

Are there any surprises here for anybody?

I'm a little surprised, to be honest, that Arts at Melbourne was #1. If I had to guess, I would have thought Science would have been higher.

[VanillaRice]

Not too surprised with Monash being the most popular university. Probably due to a combination of its relative prestige, and the number of courses/campuses (4-5?) it has compared to other universities.

[cookiedream]

Also, I believe that as a result of the Melbourne Model, there's less variety of undergraduate degrees that students can apply for, leading to the total number of applications for Monash being higher than Melb. Similarly, I'm not surprised with this statement:

"The data shows that a large number of students decided to change their preferences after receiving their ATAR score. In December, 2113 students had nominated Medicine at Monash as their first preference. But by the time the change of preference period closed, 537 fewer people had listed the course as their first choice."

...considering I know quite a lot of people who removed Monash med from their preferences after receiving an ATAR/UMAT combination that seemed disappointing to them/put some sort of a pressure on them to do very well on the interview (if they received an interview offer) for a chance at admission.

[Springyboy]

I had a good time reading this article here (Victoria-centred - apologies).

Some excerpts I found interesting:

Are there any surprises here for anybody?

I'm a little surprised, to be honest, that Arts at Melbourne was #1. If I had to guess, I would have thought Science would have been higher.

With that, I'd say that Arts is the highest due to it having less pre-reqs compared to science. Also, a good deal of people who go to Melbourne would be looking to get into postgrad law/med in most cases, and for arts especially it is the greatest complement to postgrad law due to the ability to study crim/ir as a major/minor combo, which would entice more people to pick it over science. Plus, I guess most people perceive an arts degree as being 'easier' than a science degree, so they feel that they can relax a bit more and not have as much pressure as if they were to pick a science degree at UoM instead.