Opinion
For years, Australian higher education has attempted to address student disengagement through softer interventions such as nudges, reminders, wellbeing check-ins, and carefully designed outreach campaigns. Yet these approaches often assume that all students understand how university works, recognise the significance of institutional communications, and that students possess the confidence and institutional knowledge to act on them. For many students, particularly those entering higher education for the first time, these assumptions simply do not hold.
The evidence is now confronting. A recent randomized trial from Curtin University found that high-risk first-year students who barely accessed the university’s online learning system (learning management system, or LMS) were no more likely to withdraw before census date, even when staff explicitly told them they would incur significant debt if they remained enrolled. They did not answer the phone, respond to texts or act on emails. They simply stayed on the enrolment books, disengaged and accumulating debt.
This research highlights a fundamental flaw in our approach.
Universities continue to treat disengagement as a matter of individual student choice rather than recognising that engagement itself is an equity issue, and a structural and moral responsibility of the sector when its students do not engage.
Students do not all arrive at university with the same understanding of institutional systems, expectations, or academic culture. Many are encountering online learning systems, census dates, progression rules, and HELP debt for the first time. Others are simultaneously navigating work, caring responsibilities, financial hardship, or unfamiliar educational environments.
Higher education Institutional literacy is rarely recognised as an equity issue, yet it underpins students’ ability to engage, persist and succeed.
Institutions provide support, but ultimately wait for students to act. The Curtin trial (2025) demonstrates that many students at the highest risk will not act, regardless of how much support or information they receive. When they do not act, the consequences are profound and disproportionately borne by those who can least afford them, including First Nations, first in family, low SES, regional, and international students who often enter university while already navigating multiple complexities.
The sector often talks about widening participation, but pays far less attention to widening capability. Access alone does not guarantee meaningful participation. Students cannot engage with systems they do not understand.
It is time to confront an uncomfortable but necessary truth. Universities should take a more proactive and ethically-accountable approach to student non-participation.
Where there is clear and sustained evidence that a student is not engaging with their studies, institutions should move beyond simply monitoring participation and sending repeated communications.
They should establish transparent processes for early identification, meaningful intervention and, where appropriate, administrative unenrolment before students continue to accrue unnecessary debt without a realistic pathway to success. This is particularly important in a participation-based higher education system, where institutional responsibility should extend beyond providing access to ensuring that non-participation does not become effectively invisible. While TEQSA’s Standards require providers to monitor participation and intervene early, universities should interpret this responsibility substantively rather than narrowly.
The Curtin study confirms why relying on students alone to withdraw is inadequate. Some students simply disconnect from the learning environment and still do not withdraw, even when directly warned of the financial consequences.
Too often, the system assumes these students are making an informed choice. Yet disengagement is rarely the result of a fully informed decision. It may be shaped by fear, shame, confusion about the census process, cultural expectations, mental health challenges, or the mistaken belief that nonparticipation does not create debt.
For instance, the authors have experienced students who do not turn up to class, do not engage in the learning or activate the learning management system. These students are rarely met in-person, known or submit an assessment. This is also occurring in the early stages of a semester with universities awaiting the census date for students to self-unenrol, but these students don’t.
No matter how many times we communicate, reach out and encourage students to self-withdraw before they incur a dept the response does not come and the student remains silent and invisible.
A sector that claims to be equitable and ethical must prioritise student protection over revenue, enrolment targets, and superficial retention optics. Administrative unenrolment of persistently disengaged students is not only justified. It is overdue. Why cannot universities unenroll students by the census date who have not engaged, are silent and will most likely fail the first assessment, if not already?
If universities truly value equity, wellbeing, and student success, they can no longer wait for students facing the greatest barriers to withdraw themselves. They must act before the debt does, even when doing so requires tough decisions and a loss of revenue.
Professor Rachael Hains-Wesson is the Associate Dean Learning and Teaching in the School of Global, Urban, and Social Studies at RMIT University. Dr Nira Rahman is a Lecturer and Curriculum Designer in the Faculty of Arts at the University of Melbourne.