Commonwealth Department of Education, Science and Training

Views and Influences:

Tertiary education, secondary students and their advisers

Executive summary

The study explored the range of perceptions, attitudes, images, aspirations, plans, and knowledge of tertiary education held by groups of students in Years 10, 11 and 12, some parents, and some teachers of senior school students. It did this primarily by using a case study methodology.

The main research questions for the study were:

What are the perceptions, attitudes, images, aspirations, plans, and knowledge of tertiary education held by Year 10, 11 and 12 students?
What are the perceptions, images, plans, and knowledge of tertiary education held by the parents, teachers and careers counsellors — the main advisers to these groups of students?

Theoretical framework

To address these questions, a theoretical framework was proposed. It advanced the view that those processes underlying the development of occupational preferences also underlie the development of educational preferences. This theory suggested that students’ views of tertiary education would have four key dimensions — sex type, prestige, field type, and ease or difficulty of access to the institutions or to courses within those institutions. These dimensions and their theoretical context shaped the interpretation of key concepts in the research questions and the content of the questions asked of students, parents and teachers during the interviews.

Literature review

A literature review was conducted for the study. The review showed that the two most important sources of influence on students, as reported by students, were parents and teachers. This provided a rationale for the interview of parents and teachers in the case studies. As well, a number of studies that were reviewed had findings consistent with information collected during the case study interviews. This helped add plausibility to the study.

Longitudinal Survey of Australian Youth data

Complementing the information taken from the literature review was the analysis of data from the Longitudinal Survey of Australian Youth (LSAY). This is a data set held at ACER. It contains information on the educational and occupational plans and aspirations of Australian youth across time. It consists of nationally representative samples of a number of different cohorts. These data confirmed many of the findings identified in the literature review as important. The LSAY data also contributed some new findings. For example, they suggested that how happy a student feels at school is an important predictor of educational aspirations. (This suggested that this study’s focus on school advisers was justified.) Together with the literature review, the LSAY data also (1) provided a context for the case studies, (2) helped to identify which types of schools to approach, and (3) helped to weight the amount of time spent on various topics during the interviews. But it was the case studies which provided the data to help answer the main research questions.

Case Studies

For the case studies, a total of 87 students, 23 parents and 19 teachers were interviewed. A total of 28 interviews were conducted, 19 of these were with students, five were with parents and four were with teachers.

There were five schools selected for the study. Using the information gleaned from the literature review and the LSAY results, a number of factors were used to guide selection of these schools. These factors included: geographic location, sector (Catholic, government, independent) and the likely socio-economic background of students and parents. The final set of five schools involved in the study came from five States. There was a remote government school, a rural government school, a city Catholic school, students and parents from a city government school and a rural independent school.

Findings from the case studies

The case studies were designed to provide in-depth accounts of the range of views held about various aspects of tertiary education. The main findings are now summarised.

There was little evidence of a systematic variation among the views of these students, parents or teachers across any of the classifications used in the study — school location, sector and, for the students, Year level. This may in part be due to the wide variation seen within the schools. The only systematic difference seen was that some rural students and parents were concerned about the cost and distance from home of a move to a city campus.
The perceptions and images that these students and parents have of TAFE institutes and of universities seem to be mainly shaped not by the amenities, courses or locations of the institutions, but by their perceptions and images of the students (and to a lesser extent the teachers) at these different institutions. People not things or processes are the important features of the tertiary education landscape.
The attitudes towards both TAFE and university held by students, parents and teachers ranged from the positive to the negative. The students less often saw TAFE in a positive way, although some were very positive about its ‘hands-on’ approach to learning.
Sex typing and prestige did not seem to be important factors in the images that these students and parents had of universities and TAFEs as institutions. (There were some parents and students who felt that boys would feel more comfortable than girls in TAFE.). Sex type and prestige dimensions seemed more pertinent to these students’, parents’ and teachers’ images of courses within these institutions.
Ease of access did seem to colour the images that the students had of TAFE. It was seen in a less positive light than universities because of this easier access. In contrast, ease of access did not seem to shape the images that these parents and teachers had of TAFE and universities.
The parents and students in this study rarely knew about administrative procedures for admission to either TAFE or university. Equally, they were rarely concerned about this, relying on the school to provide the information when needed. There were low levels of understanding, outside of the most general observations, about what was done on a day-to-day basis at either university or TAFE by the students. The parents and teachers did not provide much information on this topic. This suggested that the day-to-day life of a student on campus is not important in shaping attitudes, perceptions and images of tertiary educational institutions.
For students and parents in this study, the outcomes expected of university and TAFE were often to do with the world of work — qualifications, jobs, knowledge and skills. Some of the parents and teachers who were interviewed also referred to the intellectual and cultural enrichment that students could achieve.

In summary, the perceptions, attitudes, images, aspirations, plans, and knowledge of tertiary education of the students, parents and teachers that participated in this study were often bound up with their images of the people who study or work at universities and TAFE institutes and of their understandings, images and expectations of the demands of the world of work.

Full Report (PDF 442KB)

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