Forging The Student Accord

21 Aug

What would be different if we designed the future Australian tertiary education system around the needs of students and not around legacy arrangements? What if the Australian Government had promulgated a Students Accord instead of a Universities Accord?

Summary

Delivering higher education on a universal scale means thinking differently about how students participate and succeed, exploding many assumptions which have been carried through to the present from the 1980s.
Australia can lead the world by formulating a Higher Education Student Accord (HESA), which designs the future Australian tertiary education system around the needs of students and not around legacy institutional arrangements.
Among other priorities, a HESA should focus on financial support, better advisory and transition arrangements, tailored and proactive supports which help students succeed, enriching experiences, and student leadership and co-contribution.
The Universities Accord presents a vision of a bigger, and more inclusive, tertiary education sector. But the underpinning transactional and supplier-centric logic misses a focus on the student as the recipient, active participant, and creator of their own education.

A skin full of equity

Australia’s Federal Government – the country’s major higher education client – has signalled major future education growth. This sounds great, and portends a thrilling and meaningful future for the sector and the many communities it serves. It will be an exciting and entrepreneurial time in a country long portrayed as a global petri dish of tertiary education.

The logic which underpins such projection is all about economic needs and benefits. The dominant discourse around post-secondary education in Australia, like elsewhere, is that we should start with labour market needs, then work backwards on the presumption that students file neatly, widget-like, onto the conveyor belt of human capital development in pursuit of regulated course outcomes. This has worked where economies have sought rapid development, most recently across Asia and particularly where large volumes of learners can be funnelled into the system.

But as economics pluralists recognise, this model denies students’ agency, fails to grasp the messiness of educational and personal development, focuses too narrowly on ‘jobs’ and not careers or lifelong learning, and denies the prospect that universities, policymakers or regulators (‘the system’) could ever be wrong. It also fails to reflect that, of all the players, students have the most skin in the game and the least power to shape the rules.

In Australia's high participation system, students are as diverse as the community at large. However, our universities are largely set up as institutions for the middle-class with deep roots in the liberal values and the ‘ways of doing’ of the West. For First Nations students, those living in the bush, students living with a disability, students with limited means from overseas, those who are juggling part-time study and busy lives, or those who did not grow up in neat four-bedroom homes, the traditional model of university can be alienating and is often not a great fit with the realities of life or the student’s world view.

Engaging with universal

Australia is moving toward having a ‘universal’ higher education system. Over recent years, more than one million domestic students have enrolled in our universities each year. The Universities Accord proposes both higher participation targets and higher completion rates.

Australia’s system will find itself in a vastly different landscape as it continues to enrol students who invariably have higher education as a more peripheral part of their lives. Over the next decade, university leaders will need to work harder than ever to ensure that highly diverse students are set up for success and supported to realise their learning journeys.

In the 1970s, an influential American researcher, Martin Trow, speculated about the ‘costs’, or undesirable consequences, of a universal higher education system. Fifty years later in Australia, it is not quite playing out as Trow imagined. First and foremost, a universal system seems to have psychological costs for students. In addition to high levels of student stress and mental ill-health, financial difficulties and concerns about debt, and a lack of engagement with learning are the three most consistently reported issues. These issues are leading, at the extreme end, to ‘ghost students’ who remain enrolled in their program of study and incur a debt despite not attempting any of their assessment tasks in one or several of their units.

At this stage, in Australia like elsewhere, the incumbent public universities which service most higher education students in most countries don’t seem to have any compelling or effective solutions to these issues. Quite the opposite. Established players teeter towards the full digitalisation of education services, competition from commoditised and packaged providers, and new street- and media-smart perspectives on opportunity costs. Critically, the (typically older, affluent and more educated) people who run higher education must stop thinking about students as revenue, as market segments, and as short-term players.

What frontiers could make a better deal for students over the next 25 years? How can we get students to engage – meaningfully, and with purpose – in an expanding university system?

Creating The Student Accord

No food, no learning

Learners, like anyone, rarely do their best work while starving. Everyone needs to eat, which means money. Not too long ago, students were discouraged from paid work during semester, as it was seen as a distraction from the formation of the petite bourgeoisie. Despite paid work being regulated for student non-citizens and those on Youth Allowance, almost all current students are employed while studying, often for up to 30 hours each week. Few work in areas linked to their study, and most are in low paid jobs.

Subsidies for living costs as well as tuition fees are an obvious fix for any country seeking universal engagement in higher learning. Every other country does it and income support will surely soon become a global ranking. Income support is a prominent recommendation in Australia’s recent Universities Accord report but it doesn’t go far enough. While a few institutions in Australia have handsome endowments and are happy to ‘throw some money at the problem’ to increase participation, this is not a sector-level solution.

Important changes to income support arrangements would involve broadening the eligibility for Youth Allowance and Austudy, especially to part-time students. This is a steep ask which would likely cost over a billion dollars each year just to bring student support closer to the minimum wage. Without it, significant increases in participation rates, especially from financially disadvantaged and mature-age students are unlikely to be realised.

Relatedly, Australia must implement more relevant and accurate measures of socio-economic disadvantage. Area-based measures (postcodes) used for around 40 years may give useful information at an aggregate level but are spurious when dealing with individuals. The current low socio-economic definition (the bottom 25%) lacks the rigour needed for allocating financial support or needs-based funding to individuals or demand-driven places to institutions. Individual-level assessment requires additional documentation from students and universities.

It matters how such support is delivered. In the 1990s, specialist government offices were set up to administer finances for tertiary students which were rolled into Centrelink when it was established. Given recent scandals, and the intent of inspiring rather than diminishing students, it would be useful to consider whether income support could be delivered as a partnership between government and tertiary institutions with local branches and dedicated staff to support students in applying for and managing their payments, and in building their financial literacy along the way. University Study Hubs shine a light in this direction.

Part of a Higher Education Student Accord (HESA) must be feasible arrangements for delivering subsidies for living as well as for tuition.

All feet in all blocks

If Trow was right and universalisation shifts engagement from being a ‘right’ to being an ‘obligation’, then the decision young and not so young people make about further education is not ‘if’ but ‘what kind’. The current landscape is confusing and the information provided by institutions is not always helpful in helping students decipher ‘what’s in the box’ of a particular course and which kind of program is best in light of their circumstances and goals. How would a Student Accord help students work out the value proposition of a course in terms of both money and effort?

There is no silver bullet. The principle, however, needs to involve supporting transitions into the next phase of a student’s learning journey. This could be a well-articulated tertiary pathway from school to a vocational qualification into a bachelor degree. It could be an enabling program after a long break from formal study. It could be a bridging course to meet a maths or chemistry prerequisite. It could be the academic enrichment program delivered by the university of choice that opens up a non-school pathway with additional support during the first year. It could be the delivery of the first year on country in a high-quality hybrid model. It could be a fully online induction with local support at a study hub. It could be an Associate Degree with transition into second year and a cohort-specific transition into second year.

Most of these options currently exist. The trouble is that most students only find out by accident or because of a committed staff member at their school or university of choice. Here, we need ‘success assistants’. At the university end, many of these processes are manual and clunky with open loops and split responsibilities. For students to make successful transitions, these pathways need to be easy to access and understand. Automation tools offer real process improvements and efficiencies. We need the support and input of our students to help us work out what would work for them, and how comfortable they are in using their data to push tailored offers. By law, every university has a student support policy. The trick is turning these into living, breathing frameworks for collaborative action and continuous improvement.

A key challenge in achieving a universal level of participation targets is the relatively low level of preparedness for higher and vocational education delivered by the school system. Australia has one of the most inequitable schooling systems in the world and one that has not distinguished itself by excellent performance. While people who run schools, particularly elite schools, carry a deep conviction in their character-forming properties, schools could do more to provide life education, to teach young people practical life skills not all of them are getting at home: how to cook, manage money or have healthy relationships.

Part of the HESA must be making senior secondary school and surrounding options effective transitions into tertiary education.

Smooth the path to success

Nearly all learners get into higher education to learn and develop new skills. Especially in universal settings, learners expect universities to help them succeed in real-world practical ways, not just shape their thinking and skills. Yet this often falls between the cracks, not least when the prevailing curriculum and assessments fail to add-up into a broader individual or professional whole.

Few institutions have the ‘success assistants’ who help students triage huge bureaucracies and extract the most from their experience and bundle it into a swag which will nourish them in future ventures. Such roles are only starting to emerge. Universities have constructed elaborate support, supervisory and sometimes mentoring ‘infrastructure’, yet it is only in highly elite coursework or doctoral settings that learners have guides, sherpas or advisors who come to work each day to help an individual succeed.

Global brands have figured out how to scale, and now is the time for higher education. At the very least, university leaders need to interrogate, and respond to, students’ feedback to inform provision. A few institutions have figured this out, though incumbent digital platforms and entrenched roles and thinking make it difficult to almost invert traditional logic and form a more holistic offer. Conservative institutions (i.e. universities) are almost established and configured not to change from within.

Part of the HESA may well be that each university should provide an assistant who helps each student to succeed.

Create my new scene

Most people get into higher education to make new friends and professional contacts. Not all, and likely not much, study needs solipsistic introspection in small windowless rooms. Librarians are amazing educational pioneers who figured this out decades ago and reconfigured big silent buildings into learning commons, third spaces, and multimodal collaboration spaces.

Learning is lonely when it needs friends but you have none. Group work becomes a threat. The campus, a tumbleweed dust bowl. It is hard to learn to talk and walk in new ways without rambling and robust conversation. Economists predict that meeting a spouse at university is one of the great dividends of higher education. Graham Little, an Australian political scientist, highlighted the importance of social life to study in his core 1975 book Faces on Campus. It follows that universities should help people make new contacts during and around their study. This has long been hard to net in Australia’s large commuter campuses, but surely the renewed push on student colleges, residences and accommodation will help.

Part of the HESA may well be that universities, through a variety of platforms, help each student make enriching friends and networks.

Letting students lead

Students shouldn’t just engage, they should contribute and succeed. As societies mature they tend to get not just fatter, but also flatter. Subject to expertise, this goes for universities as well.

As a matter of principle, there need to be more mechanisms for involving students in decision-making in more meaningful ways. Learners who have skin in the game should help co-produce how learning is designed, taught and assessed.

Students should play more of a role on university councils and governing boards. Most councils have a grand total of around one student on their board who cannot possibly represent a diverse student body. It is not good enough to say most students are not ‘boardroom ready’, they need to be supported and upskilled to participate through formal training and involvement at lower levels of student representation. At a minimum, it takes dedicated staff who act as liaison between the student representatives and the institution as well as an active coach and translator to enable students to meaningfully contribute to decision-making bodies.

Where the ‘student voice’ is taken seriously in higher education, as it is in some universities internationally, there are clear opportunities for students to influence their education.

Part of the HESA must look at how to help students play a more active and useful role in governing higher education.

Where we land

While people come into higher education with vastly different starting points, contractual arrangements and expectations, all are students. All have valuable perceptions and perspectives which should be respected. University leaders need to listen to students, and to respond meaningfully, not explaining away that which they don’t want to hear.

Students need their proper place in policymaking, and in our institutions. Different approaches require a fundamental re-understanding that tertiary education is not simply about economic development, but also about people. Just as an authentic approach to quality requires not systems but people, so we need to think of success for students in human terms.

Australia has always been a forerunner when it comes to student agency and recognition, and now is no time to slouch. Income contingent loans (HECS) helped some students and universities finance study, tuition revenue from non-citizens (international students) has furnished generous cash flows, and policy entrepreneurs put the student experience, voice and engagement on the map. Education service firms have implemented innovative support infrastructure and carved out innovative tech-savvy roles. Large universities have embraced ideas around ‘student-centeredness’, ‘co-design’, and even ‘co-creation’.

By definition, a universal tertiary system will have students with more diverse needs and preferences. Providers need to be ready to meet the needs of learners, not just through a supply of places but also through inclusive education models and customised support.

If we want a student-centric and inclusive education system, we need to think differently about how the sector is structured to enable students’ success. Australia should think of a Higher Education Student Accord (HESA).

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The Higher Good is a space in which interesting and impactful ideas are shared for the benefit of the Australian tertiary sector. It is all about public good. The space it fills sits between immediate news, which is well-served, and considered research on the sector which takes a longer view and which is also rarely timely. It is critical commentary with purpose.

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Contributors

This collaborative article was written by Angel Calderon, Hamish Coates, Gwilym Croucher and Nadine Zacharias

Get in touch if you’d like to contribute to the dialogue and/or contribute to a future piece: info@thehighergood.net

Ant Bagshaw