THE University of Newcastle will welcome an increased number of domestic undergraduate, postgraduate and enabling program students to the institution this year.
Deputy Vice Chancellor (Academic), Professor Mark Hoffman, said UON was expecting a 10.6 per cent increase in - or "well over 1000" more - school leavers commencing their studies this year, compared to last year.
"We've also got much higher numbers coming from interstate or from outside our region as well, which is really interesting," Professor Hoffman said, adding people were increasingly attracted to regions.
"But the other part is the university's reputation is very strong," he said.
"We also opened up our campus and brought classes back on campus in August last year, we were probably the first university in the country and certainly the state to do that...our ability to manage that safely is a very attractive factor."
Professor Hoffman said UON had also seen a nearly 20 per cent growth in numbers in its postgraduate programs.
"If you look at where our economy is moving in the future post COVID, there's no doubt that higher levels of education are required throughout our community," he said.
"As a country, we've been hiding this for some years with skilled immigration, large amounts of skilled immigration, but that has suddenly disappeared and we know that there are real shortages in quite a number of areas because we can't bring people in through skilled immigration at the moment and probably not for some time yet."
Orientation Week activities will be held this week before a return to face to face learning next week, aside from some lectures of more than 100 people to be delivered online.
UON has the second and ninth most in-demand degrees in NSW, as measured by the number of first preferences.
Its Joint Medical Program offered with the University of New England was second and its Bachelor of Nursing was ninth.
Professor Hoffman said UON would continue to offer more places than it received government funding for, meaning it had to make up the shortfall of "millions" of dollars.
"The reason being they're in these professions such as nursing etcetera that we really, really need," he said.
"But by the same token we need to be really careful we've got the resources to provide a good education experience, this is the balance as a university we're always working on and the reason we always need to look at financial efficiencies."
He said the government's Job-Ready Graduates package - which has created new places and cut student contributions for courses in "national priority areas'' while lifting contributions in others - had not made any noticeable impact on student choices of degrees.
"Our biggest growth is actually in the humanities faculties, the ones where the student contribution has risen," he said.
"The challenge for the university is that the areas the government has reduced the cost to students are the ones where we need growth, but they haven't provided the universities with the supplementary income... so the university will have to do what it can to provide the education at a lower cost to the university."
Third year physiotherapy student, Pat Cooper, 22, said he was glad to be learning on campus and largely as he did pre-COVID, apart from smaller class sizes in "more streamlined" tutorials and access to recordings that he said helped students review content in ways they hadn't been able to before.
"It's extremely exciting," he said.
"You can't replace the intangibles of just being here, I think I'm definitely more engaged and motivated when I'm here."
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