1: Introduction
The University of South Australia was established on 1 January 1991 as a result of the Commonwealth Government’s reform of higher education commenced in 1988. One of the youngest universities in the Unified National System, it was formed through the amalgamation of the South Australian Institute of Technology and three campuses of the South Australian College of Advanced Education. The University is the largest in South Australia with a total enrolment of around 23 000 full-time and part-time students, and offers the widest range of professional and general higher education courses in the State. Its organisational structure comprises nine faculties: Aboriginal and Islander Studies; Applied Science and Technology; Art, Architecture and Design; Business and Management; Education; Engineering; Health and Biomedical Sciences; Humanities and Social Sciences; and Nursing. The faculties of Applied Science and Technology and Engineering are being restructured into two new faculties—the Faculty of Engineering and the Environment and the Faculty of Information Technology. The nine faculties are located on six campuses, five in metropolitan Adelaide and one in the provincial city of Whyalla, 460 kilometres north west of Adelaide.
The broad geographic spread of the University’s campuses assists in improving access to its courses. Student access is further enhanced by the activities of the Flexible Learning Centre, which administers distance study for a number of courses offered by the University of South Australia, and other universities, to students throughout Australia. The Centre employs a combination of traditional distance education methodologies and study and delivery support from an increasing number of collaboratively operated telelearning centres based in regional community and Technical and Further Education (TAFE) facilities. The University is also a major participant in the activities of Open Learning Australia.
The University’s antecedent institutions had both developed a strong commitment to providing high quality tertiary education for students from a wide range of backgrounds. This commitment has been extended and made more explicit by the University of South Australia. In its Act of Establishment, it is specifically charged with the responsibility of providing educational opportunities:
as the University thinks appropriate to meet the needs of groups within the community that the University considers have suffered disadvantages in education,
and also;
to meet the needs of Aboriginal people.
This charter is reflected in the University’s Mission, Values and Goals, which include the following as two of its eight goals:
to promote access and equity of educational participation and outcomes for groups for whom higher education opportunities have been limited and ensure that teaching and research programs identify, respond to and reflect a diverse student population,
and;
to meet the needs of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people by providing culturally appropriate education, employment and research programs.
In addition, a commitment to the principle of equity underpins the remaining goals in the areas of quality teaching and learning, responsiveness, research and consultancy, the learning and research environment and the University’s national and international standing (Appendix 1). The University’s Equity Plan and Aboriginal Educational Strategy, developed as part of the Government’s framework for increasing equity in higher education, have been fully integrated into the University’s Corporate Plan and therefore incorporated into all aspects of its planning, evaluation and quality assurance processes.
On a national level, equity policy and debate in higher education have been prominent for more than ten years in the context of the growth from an élite to a mass system in which 30 per cent of the 17–22 year age cohort are now enrolled in universities. The Higher Education Equity Program and the Aboriginal Participation Initiative were established by the Commonwealth Tertiary Education Commission in 1985. In 1987 the Green Paper, Higher Education: A Policy Discussion Paper (Dawkins 1987) and in 1988 the White Paper, Higher Education: A Policy Statement (Dawkins 1988) established the Government’s framework for public accountability in higher education. The White Paper recommended that the development of ‘a statement of national equity objectives will form the basis for further negotiations between the Commonwealth and institutions on the development and funding of their equity proposals’ (Dawkins 1988, p. 55).
In February 1990 the Department of Employment, Education and Training (DEET) and the National Board of Employment, Education and Training (NBEET) jointly issued A Fair Chance for All (DEET 1990), a statement of the Government’s objectives, targets and strategies for equity in higher education. The statement outlined Commonwealth expectations and institutional responsibilities, making clear that ‘higher education institutions ... have a clear responsibility to provide opportunities for all sections of the Australian community’ and to ‘[change] the balance of the student population to reflect more closely the composition of society as a whole’ (DEET 1990, p. 2). In particular, A Fair Chance for All identified six groups as disadvantaged in their access to higher education, as follows:
Since 1991, all universities in the Unified National System have been required by the national equity framework established by A Fair Chance for All to plan and report on equity strategies aimed at improving higher education access, participation and success for these six identified groups.
A Fair Chance for All also emphasised the importance of monitoring institutional and national progress towards achieving equity in higher education and the development of system-wide performance measures to monitor progress. It was not, however, until the publication of Martin’s report, Equity and General Performance Indicators in Higher Education (1994) that this became possible in an operational sense. The report not only recommended a set of indicators enabling comparison of institutions’ performance against their own and national targets, but also devised system-wide definitions for the equity groups to allow this comparison (Appendix 2), each of which have subsequently been adopted nationally by the Department of Employment, Education, Training and Youth Affairs (DEETYA) and the Australian Vice-Chancellors’ Committee (AVCC) for use across the sector.
In May 1995, the Minister for Employment, Education and Training asked the Higher Education Council (HEC) of NBEET:
to assess the progress of the higher education system towards meeting the original equity objectives set in the White Paper of 1988 and further enunciated in A Fair Chance for All , and provide advice on the appropriate foundation, principles, broad national policy objectives and means of monitoring achievements of the system in meeting these equity objectives over the next five years.
(DEET and HEC 1995, p. iii)
This process is still progressing with the discussion paper, Equality, Diversity and Excellence: Advancing the National Equity Framework published jointly by DEET and the Higher Education Council in November 1995. The final report and recommendations to the Minister were endorsed by the Higher Education Council prior to the federal election in early March 1996 and are now awaiting tabling in the Federal Parliament by the Minister in the new Coalition Government. Neither the final report nor the recommendations regarding the future directions for higher education equity are public at the time of writing. It is clear however from the content of the discussion paper and the outcomes of the consultation process, that the emphasis of this next stage is intended to be on analysis and intervention with respect to the causes of educational disadvantage, the achievement of systemic cultural change in the higher education system at the institutional and national levels, and the integration of equity into mainstream higher education management and institutional and system performance.
The University’s commitment to equity and the development of a national framework have both been led by senior members of the University’s staff, firstly by its current Deputy Vice-Chancellor, Professor Denise Bradley, and more recently, by its Pro Vice-Chancellor (Equity and External Relations), Associate Professor Eleanor Ramsay. Not surprisingly, the University has placed a high priority on the development and implementation of its Equity Plan and Aboriginal Education Strategy; indeed the appointment of a Pro Vice-Chancellor (Equity) in 1993 was the first such specialist appointment to an Australian university. This appointment has been instrumental in the integration of equity planning and management into the mainstream of the University, maintaining the University’s position at the forefront of equity management in Australian higher education.
Consistent with this commitment to equity, over time the University has developed a range of flexible entry policies which provide for:
In 1996 the University admitted its first students under the USANET special access scheme. This is an equity initiative designed to increase access for school leavers who have been educationally disadvantaged by the combined impact of their individual low socio-economic background and attendance at a school with a high proportion of such students. Another explicit intention of the scheme is to ensure that the number and proportion of such students gaining entry to the University does not reduce as entry to particular courses becomes more competitive.
The specialist access (Associate) Diploma in University Studies commenced in 1995 and has been successful in providing an important admissions route for targeted equity sub-groups. In addition, the admissions policy of the University enables sub-quotas to be set in undergraduate courses for particular targeted equity groups and specific entry categories. For example, sub-quotas currently operate for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander (indigenous) people across all faculties, for women in non-traditional fields of study such as engineering, and for TAFE entrants. Consequently all but one of the equity groups identified in A Fair Chance for All are significantly represented in the University’s annual intake, with students from non-English speaking backgrounds the exception to this pattern.
Aims and Objectives of the Study
The Department of Employment, Education and Training, now the Department of Employment, Education, Training and Youth Affairs, provided a grant to the University in September 1994 to conduct a study as part of its Evaluations and Investigations Program. The grant was designed to assist in the evaluation of the academic performance of a range of students who had been admitted to undergraduate courses at the University via its diverse entry criteria, and then to develop strategies that would contribute to their better performance through an enhanced learning and teaching environment.
The project has three objectives:
During the course of the project it became evident that there was considerable overlap between the equity groups and students studying in the distance mode and that the academic progress of distance students also required analysis. Consequently the Project Directors decided to include distance, or external students, as one of the groups to be investigated.
It has been argued (Power, Robertson and Baker 1987) that students who enter university through ‘non-traditional’ modes have a much greater risk of failure or withdrawal than school leavers who gain entrance on the basis of their year 12 results. Clearly, the effectiveness of policies designed to improve access opportunities for people from such ‘non-traditional’ backgrounds is reduced if these students do not subsequently experience pass and completion rates that are comparable with those of the university population as a whole. Hence the following key issues were addressed in this investigation:
Because of the emphasis in this investigation on admissions criteria and modes of entry, the study has focussed on the experiences of commencing undergraduate students only.
Chapter 2 provides a review of the literature on student attrition and other related matters. It argues that attrition can be viewed as both a positive and a negative outcome of a series of complex interactions between students and universities, pointing out that there is scope for universities to implement actions to improve student performance and reduce attrition.
Chapter 3 outlines the project methodology, while in Chapter 4 equity data extracted from the Higher Education Student Collection Database and the Students Records Information System of the University are analysed and discussed.
Chapter 5 presents an analysis of the results of a survey that was conducted with commencing undergraduate students who withdrew from the University during first semester 1995, and a control group of students who were still active at the start of second semester of that year. Qualitative analyses of responses to open-ended questions in the questionnaires and from interviews that were conducted with a sub-group of respondents are also discussed, together with interviews conducted with key student support staff of the University. Chapter 5 also incorporates a case study of the students who commenced the new Associate Diploma in University Studies in 1995 and withdrew.
Chapter 6 includes recommendations which the University, and in some cases the system, can adopt in order to assist in the achievement of greater consistency in terms of successful educational outcomes for different groups of students from the broad range of backgrounds represented in its student population. While these recommendations are relevant for all higher education institutions, consistent with the research focus of this study they have been addressed specifically to the University of South Australia.