As everyone has said - supply and demand
a lot of reasons for this - ignorant people who have in their head that you gotta go to a city uni to get a job thus decreases number of people competing for the uni
each year the uni quite significantly has increased the number of places available as a whole so logically, if the same number of people apply but more places are made available, lower UAI people can get in
a lot of people accept an offer for a course lower than they want eg B Soc Sc(criminology) to enable them to take advantage of the guaranteed internal transfer into say, B Laws - ie B laws cut off is 90-ish... but say they got 89 and just missed and really wanna do B Laws - they do a lower course for a year and transfer in
it's a young uni
A lot of people don't want to go to uws for logistical reasons - eg friends chose mac uni over UWs For Bach of Arts simply coz they didn't wanna have to travel to Bankstown for uni coz Mac was more convenient
There's heaps of reasons - a lot of trheads cover this so have a look thru some prior threads...
but i mean.. the cut off's aren't representative of the peopl ewho get in - eg its hypothetically possible that say, B Combined Laws last year was 90 cut off - it's possible everyone who got in got 99+ except for the last person accepted who got 90
yeah i know it didn't happen but its possible... i mean, i got high 90's and went to uws even though i coulda gone elsewhere coz i thought the course was 'newer', more up to date and more applicable and practical etc.... whereas friends frmo school chose city unis for the opposite reason - coz they were older, more established, more theory based etc...
a lot of people mistake age and advertising and Cut off's for a uni with quality of teaching and staff and opportunities you'll end up with...
Plus - UWS isn't significantly much lower for most courses than all the unis... UNSW, Usyd, UTS and Mac are generally higher... there's still CSU, UNE, ANU, CU, ACU, La Trobe, Southern Cross, Newcastle, Wollongong,
for a uni with an establishment date only in 1997, its doing better comparatively as far as results vs duration of operation than pretty much every uni.... especially since for those of you who take UAI cut off as representative of quality, it's doing better on average than 9/13 unis in NSW....