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SECTION III IDENTIFICATION OF KEY PERFORMANCE INDICATORS AND THE MEASUREMENT OF INSTITUTIONAL SUCCESS IN SCHOOL TO UNIVERSITY TRANSITION Chapter 9: IntroductionFirst year is a stumbling block for many students, and in particular those students with no prior experience of higher education. Although the passage to second year is most usually seen in terms of the student’s success, it simultaneously provides a measure of institutional success. From a university’s perspective, it is a reflection of its capacity to select students with the ability to succeed, and/or to ‘value-add’ to students as they move from secondary to tertiary education. It can be argued that universities could enhance the opportunity for students to succeed beyond first year by ensuring that they have allocated appropriate levels of funding, both for teaching and for student support services. Universities ‘earn’ their Government funding by meeting agreed targets, expressed in equivalent full time students. This income stream is loosely based on a funding formula which takes into account course level and subject discipline. Anecdotally it is acknowledged that in a strict ‘formula’ sense, income "earned" by universities to teach first year students is used to cross-subsidise students in later years of courses, particularly for smaller classes in third and fourth year. In the main, subjects taught in the first year of many courses are large, and there are relatively few of them. This is in contrast to the situation in later years, where fewer students have a much wider range of subject offerings available to them. Neither the higher education system, nor its student body is homogeneous. Universities offer different ranges of courses, and there is wide diversity in modes of course delivery and in the make up of the student body itself. This part of the study looks at elements of the diversity of the student population. First there is a description of some of the aspects of students’ access to university, and then some comparisons of the relative performance of different groups of students. This section focuses on the largest cohort of students entering bachelor courses. School leavers comprise about 54% of all commencing bachelor students, and 69% of ‘first time’ students. The ‘input’ is readily identified and measured, but not so the ‘output’, which in this case is represented by students’ successful movement into the second year of a course. Student Progress Units (SPU) analysis has been used to measure and compare the system-wide relative performance of school leavers and other students, by university, by enrolment type and by AOU Group, following on from the analysis of enrolment distributions. Tertiary Entry Score (TES) is an important variable in the analysis of student performance. Students with the highest TESs in Year 12 have been shown to out-perform students with lower TESs (Dobson & Sharma, 1993, p208), suggesting that universities’ capacity to ‘value add’ for low TES students could be very important for those students. A methodology, which universities could adapt to establish how much of their resources should be committed to teaching commencing undergraduates, is suggested. System-wide data files obtained from DEETYA were used to establish the characteristics of the student body, the distribution of student load (EFTSU) and weighted student load (WEFTSU) between groups of academic departments (AOU Groups), and the distribution of teaching academic staff between AOU Groups. Additional information on students, staff and finance was obtained from published DEETYA statistics collections. The last part of this section suggests a set of indicators universities might use to test their performance in aiding the transition of students from school to university. The indicators relate to the proportion of teaching resources devoted to first year, the composition of their student population, including designated equity groups, and the relative success of various groups of commencing bachelor students. |