As thousands of graduated high school students receive their first-round offers on Wednesday, new statistics have found West Australian university students are struggling more than ever to complete their chosen degree.
The Department of Education has released a report detailing the drop-out rate in Australia's public universities, and figures have identified that WA tertiary institutions continue to steadily lose students over the course of the last eight years.
While the University of Western Australia ranked high with a 74.5 per cent course completion rate, Perth's Murdoch University and Edith Cowan University were among the country's worst performing institutions.
ECU was able to retain 55.4 per cent of its students, while Murdoch's completion rate was just under half at 49.6 per cent.
Curtin University of Technology had a completion rate of 64.2 per cent.
All universities reported a drop in completion rates between 2009 and 2014.
The report identified a number of factors contributed to lower completion rates.
"Lower completion rates are seen for those students who study externally, are part-time, are older, are admitted to higher education on a basis other than secondary education, have lower Australian Tertiary Admission Rank (ATAR) scores, are indigenous, have a lower socio-economic status or come from a regional area of Australia. Completion rates also vary across different fields of education," it said.
The report prompted Education Minister Simon Birmingham to urge incoming university students to thoroughly research their options before picking a course.
"We've heard too many stories about students who have changed courses, dropped out because they made the wrong choices about what to study, students who didn't realise there were other entry pathways or who started a course with next to no idea of what they were signing themselves up for," he said.
"To the thousands of students anxiously checking emails, text messages, newspapers and mail boxes this week to learn what your future study options might be, I urge you to take your time to understand those options.
"While there will always be a number of students who don't complete university for a variety of reasons, our ambition to protect both students and taxpayers from a waste of time and money is to keep this number as low as practical," Minister Birmingham said.
Dropout rates were the highest in Queensland and the Northern Territory.
