In Australia, the days of big ideas and life-long friends are long gone. Now the onus is on getting a degree and getting out.
For 13 years, Emily Goncalves drove past Monash, one of Australia’s most highly ranked universities, and its largest, on her way to school. She never wanted to go anywhere else.
The younger group would speak of an underwhelming educational experience, of little or no social contact, of people– only if they have to – and leaving again. It’s a means to an end to get a qualification to get a job. Transactional is the word. “A really high-quality experience would be more of a deeply engaging experience and transformational, not just through meeting new friends, but with a deep interaction with what you are learning, and having time for reflection about yourself.”There are three big policy changes in higher education that have brought it to where we are today.
The result is that Australia has among the largest universities in the world. Monash has 86,000 students, Melbourne 54,400, Sydney 75,000 and University of NSW 62,000. Compare that to Harvard , Princeton , Oxford , and Cambridge . “Melbourne’s rankings and reputation is definitely something we are all aware of. If teachers think you are going to do well at school, they push you towards Melbourne,” Negline says.
It’s time universities “pulled up their socks” to improve the student experience, says Professor Michael Wesley.He notes that policy settings favour business models that work towards mass teaching. Indeed, the only truly residential university is Australian National University in Canberra where about half of its undergraduate cohort live in a residential college.
A side effect of such scale is poor student experience. Goncalves catalogues a long list of justifiable gripes.
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