School leavers drive record number of QUT offers

QUT has made more than 11,600 QTAC offers to prospective new students for 2021 – a record number, as of mid-January, for a new university year.

Major offer rounds have now been made for December and January, with smaller QTAC offer rounds between now and mid-February expected to take QUT’s total offers to more than 12,000.

Increased demand for university places in 2021 has been driven by school leavers, who make up 53 per cent of those offers.

QUT’s Bachelor of Business is again the university’s most popular course (818 offers), while the Faculty of Health will have the most new students – around 3000.

With Queensland’s new ATAR system now in effect, QUT’s highest ATAR course is the Bachelor of Medical Imaging, which required an ATAR of 99.95 to receive an offer for this year.

Almost 8 per cent of QUT offers across all courses have gone to students with an ATAR of 99.00 or higher.

QUT Vice-Chancellor and President Professor Margaret Sheil said the biggest increase in demand had been in courses for our next generations of teachers, nurses, paramedics, scientists and engineers.

“School leavers have driven increased demand for many of our courses, but we’ve also seen a jump in the number of mature age students wanting to retrain as teachers through QUT’s Master of Teaching (Secondary) program,” she said.

“We had 375 people make this course their first preference for 2021 – more than double last year’s applicants – and we’ve been able to make offers to 340 of these people to enable them to pursue a new career.”

Professor Sheil said Queensland’s Year 12 graduates had successfully transitioned to the new ATAR system and she looked forward to them making another successful transition to university.

“We know this cohort is talented and resilient,” she said.

“They were the first full cohort of Prep students in Queensland, the first Year 7s at high school, the first to complete their final year during a pandemic and now our first ATAR students.

“We look forward to welcoming around 6000 school leavers to QUT in February, and another 6000 non-school leavers.”