Opinion
If we are serious about widening participation in higher education, we need to look beyond inherited measures of disadvantage and outdated ideas about student life. We need to understand the lives students actually lead, the costs they bear to participate, and what this means for the university we design around them.
Australian higher education has long relied on proxies to identify disadvantage.
Socioeconomic status, for example, is generally inferred from where a student lives, rather than from the circumstances of the student or their household. A residential address is mapped to a small geographical area and classified using an ABS index of education and occupation. This is useful for understanding patterns of participation across populations, but much less capable of telling us what deprivation looks like in an individual student’s life.
For example, a student living in an affluent area may still be supporting family members, working long hours to meet basic expenses, struggling with housing costs, and experiencing food insecurity. Another may sit outside every established equity category while carrying several disadvantages at once. Place can tell us something important about structural inequality but much less about the complexity of individual lives.
But the problem is much deeper. Just as policy retains inherited ways of seeing disadvantage, universities retain inherited ideas about who their students are, not least because we too easily imagine today’s students through the lens of our own experience. The cultural imagery is familiar. Students are young, relatively carefree, and time-rich. University provides the organising rhythm of their lives. Work fits around study, perhaps providing money for the discretionary parts of student life. Campus is a principal site of social connection. There is time for clubs, societies, friendships, and — so we often imagine — drinking.
Of course, these students still exist. Increasingly, however, students lead lives that bear little resemblance to this imaginary.
Student debt provides a useful illustration of how much has changed. Australia’s income-contingent loan system has enabled mass higher education without requiring most domestic students to pay tuition fees upfront. Yet the character of the bargain has changed. National HELP debt has grown considerably, and Australians are taking longer to repay it. The former Coalition Government’s Job-ready Graduates package compounded this by shifting much more of the cost of some degrees onto students. The current Labor Government has since moved in the other direction, changing indexation arrangements and reducing outstanding HELP debts by 20 per cent. Even so, the underlying burden remains substantial. At Macquarie, as elsewhere, some students can accumulate more than $60,000 in HECS-HELP debt over a five-year degree.
Yet debt is only the most visible part of the cost of university. In April, we ran a Student Life Survey at Macquarie. More than 7,700 students participated. Three-quarters reported working in paid or unpaid roles. Among those in paid employment, 22% worked at least 25 hours a week during session. More than half said providing basic necessities for themselves or their families was one reason they worked. Nearly half found balancing work and study difficult, and 43% believed work adversely affected their university performance.
Nor does the wider picture much resemble the time-rich student of our imagination. More than a quarter of those travelling to campus commute for over an hour each way. One in eight has caring responsibilities. 43% struggle to find time for leisure or social activities during semester. More than a third average less than seven hours’ sleep a night. Even the familiar association between student life and drinking looks increasingly outdated. A third report never drinking alcohol, with another 31% drinking only monthly or less.
Meanwhile, 30% report difficulty meeting living expenses, 39% are often or always worried about their finances, and 15% cannot agree that they have enough food to eat every day. There is another, less visible part of this story. More than half of domestic students who answered our survey receive some form of financial support beyond paid work, yet only around a third receive formal support through government schemes. For many, family and other informal support are helping to make university possible. The financial burden of participation is therefore not borne by students alone. It reaches into the households and families around them. To those who led universities when we were undergraduates, this picture of student life would have been barely recognisable. Today, it is a reality with which we need to grapple.
Macquarie is not exceptional. This is precisely the point. Research from the University of Melbourne’s Centre for the Study of Higher Education and ACSES describe the same broad phenomenon nationally. ACSES has found one in three surveyed students experiencing financial insecurity, with consequences for academic performance, mental health, and the risk of dropping out.
We must, then, stop imagining disadvantage as a collection of separate vectors. A student does not experience their HECS debt on Monday, employment on Tuesday, caring responsibilities on Wednesday, and anxiety on Thursday. They experience a life. Nor can that life necessarily be inferred from their address or membership of a recognised equity cohort.
The system measures where disadvantage tends to be. Universities need also to understand how disadvantage is lived. More fundamentally, we need to ask whether we understand the lives of contemporary students at all.
This matters enormously as Australia moves from the aspirations of the Accord to implementation. Much of the planned growth in participation has to come from communities historically underrepresented in higher education. Opening the door wider is only part of the task. As participation broadens, we have an opportunity to ensure that the university education we offer evolves with it.
This reaches into the architecture of education itself. Timetables should recognise that paid employment is part of ordinary student life. Curricula should be coherent and navigable. Assessment should remain rigorous without creating avoidable concentrations of pressure. Work-integrated and experiential education should sit within degrees rather than become another claim on scarce student time. Patterns of attendance, digital education, campus life, and student support should begin with the lives students actually lead rather than an inherited conception of university life.
This is not an argument for making university easier. It is an argument for creating the conditions in which demanding education remains possible.
Intellectual ambition depends upon students having sufficient time, security, connection, and intellectual space to learn well.
If Australia wants a genuinely inclusive university system, understanding who our students are is only the beginning. We need to understand how they live, recognise deprivation our existing measures cannot see, and question assumptions about student life that may no longer hold. Only then can we design universities for the students we have and those we hope will follow.
Professor Taryn Jones is Pro Vice-Chancellor (Education) and Professor Rorden Wilkinson Deputy Vice-Chancellor (Academic) at Macquarie University.