"University offers to students with ATARs below 50 have trebled in just five years despite escalating concern over student quality, particularly in teacher education courses. Offers to low-ATAR school-leavers increased in all disciplines this year, with the greatest growth in allied health, business and ­society and culture degrees. New government data shows that offers to students with ATARs under 50 have risen from 3607 places in 2012 to 9723 this year. Alarmingly, that number ­increased by 2624 on last year."

My experience is that in first year Uni doing I made a very good friend who was doing the same course, who had been granted access with a low ATAR. When I tried to help him with maths, it was clear that he simply could not grasp the concepts, and dropped out after the first semester along with most others who had been given preferential access. While he went on to become a capable electrician, he had lost 6 months and chunk of cash, and only the Uni gained.

From what I see, this is still happening and my question is whether HECs for subjects should be limited to those that meet a required ATAR or who pass an approved bridging course?

Where did you source this quote from?

ATAR requirements are not based on the difficulty of the course - they are based on popularity. For example, the ATAR requirements for a B. Teaching/B. Health and Phys. Ed. is degree are invariably higher than those for the more intellectually demanding B. Teach/B. Mathematics or B. Teach/B. Science degrees, because more people want to be P.E. Teachers than science teachers. Go figure. Engineering degrees have higher ATAR requirements than science degrees, even though a physics major is harder than most engineering courses because engineers are better paid than scientists so the degrees are more popular.

I think there should be some sort of 'you must be at least this educated to attempt this course' requirement but at the moment the ATAR system is not geared that way. And I'm not sure that an ATAR score is the best method to determine if the person has the capacity to do a certain course: if you do no maths or science subjects for your HSC but still get a good enough ATAR from your humanities courses then you can study science, engineering, medicine and other science based courses, but you'll struggle because you lack the prerequisite knowledge. I think that a better system would be to have the universities hold entrance examinations tailored specifically to their particular degrees.

And as for student nurses that can't speak or read English.

ATAR exams ARE effectively run by the universities as it is.

The question is, why should public money be spent on low achieving students simply because they want to have a crack at uni? We need the academic "means" test (the ATAR) to determine where money is to be directed to most effectively serve the nation, not individuals with unrealistic aspirations.

This is not to say a duck can never become a drake. It's that scarce public money should only be spent where it can do more certain good.

Luciferase, it costs Uni students big money to go to Uni, so what 'public' money are you talking about?
Runner, non-English speaking student nurses would be very rare indeed in Australia.
Where did you see all those student nurses who can't speak English?

I'm talking about Govt supported places, Susie.
http://studyassist.gov.au/sites/studyassist/helppayingmyfees/csps/pages/commonwealth-supported-places