7000 students can’t be wrong: a modern university experience

Over 85 per cent of students report a strong sense of “belonging” at Monash University. Picture: Andrew Henshaw

A modern university education, and the student experience that comes with it, is different to what it once was in the 2000s, the 1990s, and the decades before that. The shape of our universities are different. Both need to be, if we are to have global impact on scale and provide greater access to more students than we did in the ‘good old days’.

Our world has grown more complex, connected and contested; and while many aspects of a traditional university experience from the 1990s or before remain central to a modern student’s rite of passage, the expectations of students in 2023 have evolved greatly.

We know that students who studied through Covid lockdowns believe their experience was diminished. This decline is not dissimilar to what occurred in our workplaces, but what our university students lost was more egregious. A university experience is also about personal and broader intellectual growth for young people as they transition to adulthood, and you don’t get that chance back.

Universities across the country recognised this and invested heavily post-Covid to re-energise the student experience and allow students to reconnect with experiences they missed. Most importantly, the investment was made to emphasise that university is not just about receiving a prestigious education but also about energising student engagement as well as building relationships and experiences that shape not just the academic abilities, but the character and ambitions of our graduates.

The challenge here is to imagine the student experience not as a discrete and manageable set of value-add activities, but rather as an individual and collective experience of teaching and learning that is active and engaged, on campuses that are porous to both industry and the community, and include immersive experiences that prepare graduates to contribute to the biggest challenges of our age. Most of all, it is to inspire and to have our students find their people – the relationships and networks that will sustain them for years to come.

For those of us educated in decades past, there is a temptation to believe that we can only do this in the ways we have done it before. When the White Australia policy was still in place, when fewer than one in five Australians received a university education (far fewer if you were a woman), when university life was organised around those who could afford to live on campus, and those that did not need to hold down paid work while they studied.

The temptation is also to believe we cannot realise the highest quality education and student experience at scale.

University education is one of the most transformative social projects of any generation; it is arguably the driver of social and economic mobility. In short, we are not seeking to uplift the student experience of the elite or of the few, but for the broadest possible body of the highest performing students we can reach. A top 50 university experience can only be societally transformative if it reaches the many.

In this way, we will make the greatest contribution to reducing domestic inequality and powering an innovation nation while simultaneously making the greatest contribution to Australia’s influence across the region and around the world through our outbound students and inbound international students. And, of course, providing access to an Australian education experience to thousands around the world.

Universities need to play a significant role in preparing students to be global citizens. While some of us have graduated from university and gone on to become active members of the global community, we had to actively seek that out, and it wasn’t an opportunity afforded to the majority of students; it was in fact mostly available only to those whose families could afford it.

The Monash campus experience is recognised around the world for its facilities, infrastructure, and most of all, a high performing, diverse, inclusive community of students from more than 170 countries that makes you feel seen and encourages you to be your brave, best self.

We’ve surveyed more than 7000 students over the last two years, with 85 and 86 per cent having reported a strong sense of belonging at Monash University in 2022 and 2023 respectively.

There is a strong, statistically significant relationship between students’ sense of belonging and their study performance, with students with weak belonging achieving a weighted average mark 2-5 points lower than students with strong belonging. Similar to average marks, there is a strong and statistically significant relationship between students’ sense of belonging and both unit withdrawals and course discontinuation.

Comparing institutions on the basis of “satisfaction” can be problematic, given the subjective nature of satisfaction judgments and the fact that students’ expectations of their higher education may vary considerably. As such, we feel that an optimal use of Student Experience Survey data is comparing our own performance over time, to facilitate continuous improvement in our own educational offering.

Monash saw 83.6 per cent of undergraduates indicate satisfaction with learning resources; 80.1 per cent with their skills development; and 77.9 per cent with teaching quality. Not only do these results reflect a return to pre-pandemic levels, they also highlight that the vast majority of students are satisfied with the quality of our educational offering. We will always have room to improve, but these results broadly paint the picture of a satisfied student body.

A more tangible measure of the quality of our education offering is the employment rate of our graduates, since it reflects the quality of our graduates in the eyes of the labour market, and is arguably less subjective than self-rated satisfaction. Monash is consistently one of the top Victorian universities in relation to full-time undergraduate employment.

Monash also has its own internal quality assurance processes around students’ satisfaction with their units of study, which further highlights the strength of the Monash educational offering and the advancements made in relation to teaching and learning.

In Semester 2, 2022 for example, around one in five units were classified as “exceeding expectations”, up from only one in ten in the five years prior to that. We’ve also seen a substantial reduction in the share of our units classified as needing improvement. Not only do these results highlight the quality of Monash’s educational offering, they underscore the importance the university places on student feedback – continuous monitoring of quality, and making changes on the basis of this feedback to ensure that students have the best experience we can deliver.

At Monash, our graduates are distinctive to the university they have chosen – they are international and enterprising, with access to outstanding, world-leading research. With deep, established industry networks, they are prepared, confident and capable of living and working in places where they are not the cultural majority. And with almost half of them studying double degrees, they have the technical, ethical and social capabilities to help change our world, for good. We think that’s worth supporting in unison not just as a university, but as an entire sector.

Professor Sharon Pickering is deputy vice-chancellor (education) at Monash University.