| 12. The higher education choice process: A summary of findings and conclusions The diversity of intending university students and the importance of their making individual decisions about the appropriateness of courses and institutions is clear from this investigation. Nevertheless, some general conclusions and suggestions can be made. The applicants in this sample possess a strong ambition to go to university. This appears to be a well-formed, unambiguous personal objective for most applicants, within which they have very strong field of study preferences. The precise origins of disciplinary aspirations were not the subject of this study, yet appear to be the result of a long period of assessment of ‘self’—of personal interests and aptitudes—and of academic attainability. The results of the study suggest that tertiary applicants have in mind a set of ‘feasible’ course-institution combinations that is established quite early on, perhaps not with precision but in general terms. In constructing this course set, applicants match their interests and capabilities (as they perceive them) against course ‘selectivity’. Nearly half the applicants in this sample had settled on a field of study some years ago, but three-quarters only decided on a specific first preference course-institution in the year leading up to application. For most students, the attractiveness of a course at a university increases with the selectiveness of its admissions. In other words, students act to ‘maximise’ the ‘pay-off’ from their academic results in a largely reputational market. Applicant thinking is perhaps neatly summed up by the following comment:
Clearly, many applicants believe that required entrance scores are a sign of prestige and possibly quality. Course entry scores serve, appropriately or otherwise, as a proxy for a range of quality criteria on which applicants do not necessarily have, or have not sought, more accurate information. This is not a particularly surprising finding. In terms of likely vocational outcomes, higher education participation is in part a positional good. Part of the explanation for the prominence of entry scores in applicants’ decision-making is their awareness that success in gaining entry to highly selective courses is an end in itself—this partially opens the door to prestigious and perhaps lucrative professional careers. If it is assumed that employers share similar views about institutional or course reputation, then employability is strongly enhanced. The point here is that the actual quality of the social and academic experience of a course and university may have little bearing on student decision-making in the face of their understanding of the reputational aspects of the market’s operation. This is a situation in which institutions can trade on status and not quality, at least in the short run. As far as applicants’ final choice of a preferred university is concerned, the availability of a suitable course in the main field of their interest is by far the dominant consideration. Employment rates for graduates from the particular university comes a distant second (despite the majority of tertiary applicants reporting they had very little accurate knowledge of them), and a close third is how easy it is to get from campus to home. Only a minority of applicants appear to place such a strong emphasis on gaining a place in a particular university that they are prepared to forego their field of study interests to accept a place of any kind at their target university. Despite the strong pull of field of study preferences, there are clear patterns of differentiation among the applicants to ‘research’, ‘technology’ and ‘regional’ universities. Applicants to ‘research’ and ‘technology’ universities are the most similar in the considerations that have influenced their decision. The ‘metropolitan’ universities are the least well differentiated in the thinking of prospective students and may face the most challenges in achieving a well-defined and widely recognised market niche. Many considerations that might be expected to be influential, and which are prominent in university advertising, do not figure highly in applicant thinking. These include the opportunities for flexible study, the use of information technology in teaching, and the quality of teaching overall. We cannot say from this research whether this is mainly due to want of appropriate information, lack of perceived relevance, or both. But it is evident that information levels are often low. A minority of applicants focus on particular course design and structure options, such as opportunities for recognition of prior learning or exemptions, courses that are shorter than the norm, or timetables that better accommodate part-time work. The physical appearance of campus buildings and grounds is important to many applicants, and is perhaps the single major impression they have of institutions. The most widely used and influential information sources are material distributed by careers teachers, the guides of tertiary admissions centres, and university open days. Teachers, parents and friends appear to have less influence at or near the point of first application, but their advice may be sought in the final stages prior to offer and at the time of offer. Entry to higher education is an unusual market because it is strongly influenced by competition based on school achievement. Applicant choices are significantly mediated or constrained by their academic achievements and perceived aptitudes. For many applicants, their final course-institution offer and decision involves compromises and possibly rationalisations about its appropriateness. Whether or not the applicants forced to make significant compromises are more prone to the moments of doubt experienced by many first year undergraduates cannot be determined by this study. Broadly speaking, our findings show that some applicants, an alarming proportion, are not in a good position to judge the appropriateness of programs for them or to judge the quality of courses overall. By and large prospective students base their decisions on quite limited, subjective information. Applicants’ explanations of the reasoning behind their decisions often convincingly demonstrate that tertiary decision-making is not always a logical, informed process. At least two areas for future research have been identified by this study. First, it is not clear from the present study why and how prospective students have chosen the field of study that interests them, though everything points to the conclusion that for most people their preferences were formed a considerable time before university application. Since field of study preference is the key to understanding the choices of prospective university students, research into the process of formulation of field of study preference would shed light on the patterns of demand for tertiary education. Second, this study was able only to report applicants’ perceptions of their knowledge of important considerations in their decision-making, but we suspect from student comments that many applicants may hold serious misconceptions about fields, courses and universities. A more rigorous examination of applicants’ actual levels of knowledge of these factors would be able to show the true extent and areas in which there are misconceptions and provide the basis for addressing these misconceptions. 12.1 Discussion of the study’s implications The patterns of prospective students’ decision-making, the influences on them, and their limited knowledge of important choice factors, have many ramifications in a higher education system that is moving to expand the diversity of options for students and to encourage considered choices. Various stakeholders will doubtless draw their own conclusions from the research. For us, the findings have particular implications for the effective functioning of a tertiary market in which students (and their parents) invest considerably in education. There is a compelling argument to the effect that such a market will only function well if students are in an informed position to select appropriate courses and institutions. Barr (1998), for example, has argued that competition and consumer sovereignty in markets produces useful outcomes when, and only when, consumer information can be of high quality, can be provided cheaply and effectively, and can be easily understood by the consumer. He further argues that consumer sovereignty is most effective when the costs of choosing badly are lower—such as for commodities which can easily be returned, replaced or discarded. Alternatively, when the potential costs of choosing badly are high for individuals, government intervention in ‘conditioning’ the market may be necessary to assist and protect the community. Placed against Barr’s criteria for an effective market, the findings of the present study suggest that many prospective university students—a large enough number to warrant concern—do not appear to be adequately informed, nor is it obvious that they attach much importance to being informed. Many prospective students may drift or be pushed into decisions that have little to do with the quantity and quality of information available to them. This situation raises four issues to do with enhancing the relevance and improving the quality of information provided to prospective undergraduates, which we will briefly discuss.
12.2 The possibilities for enhancing applicant decision-making The key to understanding the majority of applicants’ university preferences is to recognise that field of study preferences are the principal factor in their thinking. Unless there is a large shift in community interest towards the broader, non-discipline specific characteristics and benefits provided by universities, applicant decision-making will be most enhanced by marketing and information dissemination which emphasises the distinguishing characteristics and overall quality of particular courses. University applicants should be encouraged to invest considerable effort in collecting and comparing information on the courses and institutions of interest to them. After all, the choice of a field of study and a course-institution combination is one of life’s major decisions. This is not to suggest that applicants are complacent—the case studies in Chapter 10 reveal their typical anxieties and uncertainty in some detail—but it is apparent that applicants can be unaware of simple yet critical facts that are freely available in the public domain. One message from this study is that the higher education sector might be more active in advising potential applicants on what they ought to consider important in their decision-making. University advertising and information dissemination needs a strongly educative dimension. The community can rightly expect universities to take some responsibility for educating prospective students and for advising them when a course is not right for their needs. It will be no mean feat for universities in a competitive context to establish a three-way balance between accurately informing, advising, and straight-out ‘hard-sell’ recruitment. With large amounts of information already available to prospective students it is reasonable to ask whether or not it is possible to provide information that is more accessible, more relevant, and more easily interpreted. Part of the information problem is that applicants must grapple with a large volume of it, especially during what is a busy and stressful year for school-leavers. On top of this, there is the inevitable complexity of some of the information. Course descriptions and numeric indicators of quality can be abstract and it is difficult to avoid specialist language—some ‘insider’ jargon is inescapable. To illustrate with a contemporary example: a critical distinguishing point between medical curricula is whether the approaches to teaching and learning are traditional didactic or problem-based. Would-be medical students are well advised to consider which approach is preferable for them. However, even experienced academics might be hard-pressed to explain the differences between these two alternatives and the ways in which these will influence the educational experience of students. For prospective students and their families, especially those less familiar with the language and culture of universities, such specialised, technical language may be poorly understood. None of this is an argument for abandoning the aim of furnishing better information to prospective students; rather, it suggests that a premium should be placed on readily accessible sources that provide comparative information on their options—descriptions of course and university characteristics, and indications of appropriate measures of quality. It may be possible to assist the thinking of prospective students by providing them with an applicant checklist. We are not implying that their decisions can be reduced to a simple yes/no list, but an explicit statement of the areas they ought to be considering would be helpful to intending university students. This may also help applicants to understand their own priorities and preferences. There are three principal domains which prospective students should be strongly encouraged to investigate and, equally, in which the sector should be encouraged to provide information:
Having suggested this, we recognise the limits to which course and university information can capture the future university experience and its likely outcomes, no matter how faithfully the information is offered. First, higher education is clearly an interactive enterprise and its quality relies to a significant degree on the appropriateness of the match of expectations and commitment of both students and universities. Universities can hardly foresee and describe the suitability of this match for all students. Second, while the academic and social experiences provided by university courses are broadly predictable, they cannot be inspected and sampled in any useful fashion without an extended engagement with them. The student as consumer of higher education is inevitably under-informed, because the quality of the experience is far better understood during and after it, rather than before it. Market economists call this a situation of asymmetric information: the ‘provider’ has the information that the ‘consumers’ want, in this case education, and the consumers are not in a position to judge quality until they have experienced it. Choosing a course/institution is an act of considerable faith in the capacity of the provider to offer an extended program of appropriate quality and relevance. This conclusion highlights the particular limitations of open days for providing prospective students with reliable insights into what lies ahead. While these can be effective recruitment occasions for universities and may provide a valuable initial orientation opportunity, they also create superficial impressions that can be poorly representative of the actual academic experiences being offered. The written word remains a very important way of making accurate information widely available. Yet the indications from this study are that many applicants do not read what is available and instead base their decisions on hearsay that is possibly inaccurate. This suggests that more discerning reading of course and university prospectuses is needed. We believe that developing a stronger critical culture on the part of prospective students is crucial. Schools and universities both have a responsibility for building this culture. Information for prospective students on courses and institutions can be generated and disseminated by three major sources: the universities themselves, commercial enterprises, and government. While there are incentives in a competitive climate for universities to provide more comprehensive information to prospective students, this is both a good and bad thing. On the one hand, intending students will benefit, as we have argued, from better access to accurate information. On the other hand, the objective of universities is clearly to persuade intending students. Understandably, they will give priority to their recruitment objectives rather than the disclosure of all information. With the complexity of the higher education ‘product’ and the numerous indicators of quality that are available, institutions can be expected to be selective in choosing the characteristics and qualities they highlight for their prospective students. There are no obvious commercial imperatives to provide comparative data if it does not portray the institution in the best light. However, there are ethical obligations. Commercial information guides are one way of meeting a need for comparative data on courses and universities. These guides rely largely on Commonwealth or institutional data sets for their comparisons. Since the meaning of many raw performance indicators is likely to be impenetrable for prospective students there is a tendency for commercial guides to reduce complex data sets to simple rating measures that highlight differences. Rating devices such as five-star scales enhance accessibility but may also exaggerate differences to a point where they prevent students from making appropriate decisions. There are still major challenges involved in discovering how prospective students can be provided with information in an accessible format that indicates relevant differences between courses and universities, where they exist, while not exaggerating slight variations that are inconsequential and which may mislead or confuse. Overall, we favour the conversion of quantitative measures of characteristics and quality into percentages where possible, since we believe most people can make some sense of them. Should the government be involved in information generation and distribution? Clearly, the government has overarching responsibilities for guaranteeing the quality and integrity of the higher education system and for protecting the community’s interests. In a more overtly competitive system, we believe the government must still take action to promote access and equity for students and to promote quality. Part of this involves monitoring the nature and availability of information on courses and universities—the questionnaire developed for this study provides a foundation for future research of this kind. As well, consideration might be given to establishing an independent monitoring mechanism for ensuring the accuracy of the information available to intending university students. In addition to ensuring appropriate monitoring of the information available to the community, the government might choose to provide impartial supplementary information for a variety of reasons: to raise information levels in specific areas, to target equity groups, or to drive further competition within the system. Overall, we conclude from this study that policies designed to expand and enhance the information base on which prospective students make their decisions should take into account the diverse interests, values and emphases outlined in this report. While applicants differ substantially in their priorities, field of study preferences are dominant. This provides the best starting point for considering how intending university students can be educated to make informed decisions about course and universities. |
Contents Any comments or queries should be sent to: highered@detya.gov.au |