Ernst and Young (EY) Oceania education leader Alison Cairns told Campus Review their student surveys have shown digital transformation – using new technology to improve learning and teaching experiences – needs to be led by vice-chancellors and boards. (You can read a summary of EY's survey results here.)

"It is absolutely about leadership. The difference between transformations that are successful and transformations that fail is around leadership and bringing people on that journey," she said.

"The ones that don't do so well are the ones that are purely technology transformations, and then they follow up with change management and it's a little bit challenging."

"[Then staff] say, 'Well actually I'm not sure I signed up for this'. Or 'I don't like the way this works'. Or, 'this doesn't really suit my faculty, doesn't really suit how I want to do it,'" she said.

EY recommends university leaders put humans at the centre of any tech or digital learning upgrade, instead of placing new online resources to 'tick a box'. Their approach is to ask different questions of the different humans who will be benefiting from the tech transformation.

Ms Cairns said universities that have used this style of digital learning innovation have seen an uptick in student enrolments and engagement, along with higher staff and researcher satisfaction.

She explained one of the most important aspects of university study for students is quality of teaching. If students can pick which format best suits them, they are likely to think the quality of teaching is much higher.

Students also care about career outcomes – what is going to get me the qualification I need, for the least amount of money, in the shortest amount of time?

What are the tech innovation limitations?

Layers of leadership in bigger universities might be a reason for slow change, some education thought leaders say, but EY says it hasn't found a difference in the ability to adapt between small and large unis.

"I think our universities are very positive about change. They're very positive about what the education sector does for our country," she said.

"Some of these businesses and universities have been around for 500 years, so they do something right."

She said universities have already shown what they're capable of, through the rapid switch to online learning in 2020.

"Universities did a fantastic job of moving from classroom teaching to emergency response teaching [during the Covid-19 pandemic]," she said.

"I just want to be really clear, that's not digital learning. It was emergency response teaching. And they did that so swiftly with just the resources that they had just so that students could keep learning.

"But that took leadership from the top, right? Obviously there was technology involved in that, but we had staff leaning in, we had academics leaning in, we had research leaning in and the students had to lean in as well."

For example, posting recorded lectures and tutorial slides fits into 'emergency response' online learning, but doesn't represent learning operations that reflect digital competency.

Asynchronous education, where students access course material on their own time, is the required next step.

"I might be an under-served learner, you might be a particularly bright student. I might need my learning slightly different," she said.

"So I might be someone who does well in case studies, gamification or video as opposed to text. And you might be someone who actually prefers text.

"[Asynchronous education] means that we can have all of that information and we can actually consume it as students in a manner that suits us best."

This approach is a real asset to universities, Ms Cairns said, because it promotes lifelong learning and attracts different cohorts, something all education sectors are looking to achieve.

"[Students] need to have the option of being able to consume in the manner that maximises their learning because a lot of them have either got care responsibilities or they have to work," she said.

"Or if you look at people who are career changes or job upgraders or lifelong learners, they might have family commitments.

"They cannot commit to being onsite on campus all of the time, even if that's their preferred method.

"If you think to the Universities Accord report and the under-served learner, and making sure there are plenty of opportunities for everyone to go through higher education, this is actually having a significant change."

How can universities put people at the centre?

The ones who are doing it well "are consulting, bringing people in from the faculties, bringing people in from executive, bringing people in from their council and actually saying, what is our 10-year vision? Where are we going to focus first?" she said.

"We've actually seen great acceleration in learning, and we've been able to see the fantastic content that the universities have being able to be shared to a much wider audience."

However, some university staff say they don't want to teach to half empty classrooms, and if students choose a more digital learning method where they don't have to show up to class, that might become the reality.

But, Ms Cairns said, a drop in class numbers could actually result in more engaged students, and called on universities to track that engagement.

"If you are replacing [face-to-face classes] with engaging learning and personalised learning and things that you like to learn in a manner that you like to consume, you're actually going to get increased engagement," she explained.

"It's not one or the other, right? It is not classroom or online, it is now hybrid," she said.

"Some things will still be in classroom, some things will be online, some will be asynchronous, some will be deep engagement.

"And if you think in Australia [there's] remote and rural; it's not practical, particularly with cost of living for some students to have to come to the city or come to a big regional campus in order to learn.

"They need that flexibility."

Even if universities are large and established institutions, the education leader said, they should be looking to set themselves apart through tech learning.

"We don't want any university to be homogenous. We actually want them to have their uniqueness and differentiation," she said.

"We're at the end of the industrial revolution, which was about mechanising labour. We're at the beginning of the information revolution. Where does information live? It lives in universities.

"How do we take the best of that into transformation and use the best and brightest minds to take education forward into the next century?"

Ernst & Young has recently released a report detailing research conducted with Times Higher Education. Here is the overview of their findings.

Why human-centred transformation design is critical for universities

Purposefully putting human needs and expectations at the centre of higher education digital transformation will improve university success.

Three questions to ask

• Convince me, teach me, support me – how can university leaders meet student expectations and support their success?
• Empower me, free me, enlighten me – how can digital technology help staff to create better content and seamless processes that improve student experience?
• Equip me, connect me – how can researchers be better supported to conduct leading-edge research?

When embarking on digital transformation, universities often deploy strategies that serve the needs of the institution and its existing structures and processes.

For many of the students and staff on the receiving end of such changes, the experience has been less than ideal.

“Digital learning” is still often old content on a new platform, rather than being designed to enable optimal learning through personalized, digital self-access.

On many campuses, staff and students still struggle daily with multiple systems to get simple administrative tasks done.

We contend that institutions would get a far better return on their digital investment by putting the needs of the people they serve at the centre of technology efforts.

In a bid to understand what the people at the centre of universities want from digital transformation, we undertook research with the people who experience it every day. Our latest study, conducted in collaboration with Times Higher Education (THE), includes more than 3,000 students and hundreds of teaching faculty and professional staff in eight geographies, and explores their wants and needs. 

The research clearly shows critical areas where digital transformation needs to deliver a better experience for students and staff. This article surfaces a few of the ideas from the study. Read the report to learn what each cohort had to say and see the full body of our research and recommendations for university leaders.

Chapter 1: What do students expect from their universities?

Exceptional teaching, real-world career advantages, convenience and flexibility

Universities are underestimating student expectations

The Covid-19 pandemic has fundamentally changed what students want from universities. Their educational norms and situations have shifted. In our survey, 60% of students are managing work or caring commitments alongside their studies. Partly for this reason, campus-based students expect to access content and administrative processes online, in their own time.

Concerningly, one-third of students told us they feel neutral about or unhappy with their choice of university. This should raise alarm bells for university leaders who are tasked with delivering a positive experience for all their students. Not meeting expectations around improving career prospects or preparing students for the workplace are key drivers of overall unhappiness. 

In order of priority, our research shows us that students are looking for their higher education institutions to deliver:

1. High-quality teaching, including using digital technology
2. Improved career prospects and workplace preparation
3. Better support to achieve their learning goals

To meet these expectations, there are a number of actions that university leaders can take. We have looked at these through the eyes of the students that universities serve.

Teach me effectively and in a way that suits me

Quality of teaching is the most-cited reason for both happiness and unhappiness with a student’s choice of university, indicating that some universities are offering better teaching experiences than others. Students also give low satisfaction ratings to the “quality of online learning” - putting it at the bottom of all surveyed aspects of university life.  Although, the amount of online versus in-person teaching is of little concern.

What’s missing from the digital learning experience is engagement. Although students rate the availability, quality of production and accessibility of digital learning materials reasonably well, they give low ratings to its ability to engage, enable collaboration or check understanding.

This reflects the fact that many universities are still simply recording lectures and posting lecture notes and reading lists online.

Students asserted that if funds were available for technology-related investments, they would prefer this to be invested in training teachers to deliver digital learning more effectively (45%) and in better digital learning materials (41%), rather than in upgrading the technology.

Convince me your university can improve my career prospects

Not meeting expectations around improved career prospects and preparing students for the workplace are key drivers of overall unhappiness with university choice. To win student choice, universities must better understand what students expect from higher education (HE) and offer programs that directly support their career goals.

Just under half (48 per cent) of students indicated that the main reason they chose their program was to qualify for a chosen career or improve their career prospects but a concerning 21 per cent of final year undergraduates say their university experience does not meet their expectations regarding preparation for the workplace. 

Creating programs that provide students with the skills they need for the future workplace will require critical thinking.

Support me to succeed academically and find connection

Our survey found that almost three-quarters (74 per cent) of students rate support to achieve academic goals as very or extremely important. Lack of support was also a key reason for students’ unhappiness with their choice of university, especially among mid-level and final-year students. 

Students also need to find connections with each other. Campus location remains students’ third reason for choosing a university, suggesting the campus experience is not over. But its role may need to be reimagined.  Nearly two-thirds of students say the campus is where they prefer to access social events and networking. This is key to students’ wellbeing, sense of belonging and developing social skills in addition to reducing feelings of isolation in an increasingly online learning environment. 

Chapter 2: What do university staff expect from digital transformation?

More time, better tools and quality data to help them deliver more value.

Universities misjudge the importance of the employee experience

While the student experience is fundamental to a successful digital transformation, university leaders must also pay attention to the staff (teaching faculty, researchers and administration) experience. The human experience includes all of the people involved in making a university work. To be successful, digital transformation needs to meet their needs and expectations, too.

Teaching faculty

Empower me to create quality digital content

Teaching faculty must be supported in carving out time to design and oversee the development of new curricula and learning materials that incorporate the best of digital and in-person learning modes. From our focus groups, we learned that many university teachers urgently need further training in blended teaching best practice. They need to understand how to both develop curricula and content for effective digital or blended learning and deliver teaching and learning support using the chosen modes.

Free me to focus on the important tasks

For teaching faculty, time is their most precious resource. Digital transformation should enable them to devote more time to their core missions of teaching and supporting students or leading research. Providing more asynchronous content will free them from needing to deliver in-person lectures, while using virtual meetings and online scheduling tools can help them provide one-on-one student support more efficiently.

"We are trying to give back time to pedagogy and teaching by making things quicker. It is now easier to design timetables and organise assessments."

UK/Ireland faculty focus group

However, simply implementing new tools and processes will not automatically lead to meaningful time savings. Faculty in our focus groups said they were faced with a myriad of new systems and tools, which were unintuitive, difficult to use or duplicative.

Enlighten me so I can better support learning outcomes

The higher education sector is currently grappling with improving learning outcomes. With the move to new modes of teaching and learning, faculty need to easily assess the effectiveness of their teaching and continuously adjust based on what is working well and what isn’t.  As more systems move to digital, there’s increased potential to analyze the data and create meaningful insights around student interactions, their levels of engagement and their learning progress. By collating that information into progress dashboards, faculty can track learning progress at an individual, class or program level, as well as identify students who require more support or programs that need adjusting. 

Researchers

Equip me to conduct leading-edge research

Universities have tended to under-invest in the digital transformation of research, as the focus shifted to teaching and learning. The investment needed is not just better equipment and computing power to support leading-edge research. There is also a real need to streamline and automate the significant level of administration surrounding research, to free up researchers’ time and help them be successful.

Processes ripe for digital transformation include grant applications and management, risk assessments, scheduling access to shared equipment, results disclosures, reviews, audits, publication and dissemination.

Connect me to other researchers

In many cases, research and innovation are not solo efforts but collaborative ones. The research community has a particular need to connect, share data and ideas, and work together to solve problems. The use of digital technologies for research is making collaboration within and across institutions much faster, more efficient and effective. This is greatly facilitating international research collaboration, widening the pool of potential research collaborators, which is particularly important in niche fields.

Administrators

Show me the data I need and save me from busy work

Our focus groups with administrative staff revealed a cohort that feels increasingly overworked and overwhelmed, with many digital transition initiatives actually adding to workload pressures.

The most cited challenge for administrative staff is that the data they need to perform their jobs resides in disparate siloed systems and cannot readily be combined. As a result, universities end up with a patchwork of siloed systems with different access points, that are not integrated, cannot share data, and have a very different look and feel.

Digital processes generate a wealth of data that administrators are hungry to use to drive decisions, but insights cannot be generated when data resides in silos.

"It’s about increasing the amount of time staff can spend making a difference to the students versus satisfying the system."

Paul LeBlanc, President, Southern New Hampshire University

In addition, many universities are looking at how to automate HR, finance and procurement processes across the institution. Automating routine student-facing tasks, such as processing applications can continue to relieve the burden on administrative staff.

For universities to truly survive and thrive in a digital era, university leaders need to maximize the value of digital transformation, focus on designing services and processes around the needs of the people they serve — from students to administrative staff, and deliver a distinctive student offering and digital experience that sets them apart. This means aligning the value proposition with evolving student and workforce demands, having a clear understanding of the end-to-end student experience and how to make it more convenient, engaging and supportive, using technology. It also means designing services and systems that enable faculty and staff to spend more of their time supporting students to achieve their learning and career readiness goals. And of course, the technology must be matched with investment in upskilling faculty and staff to deliver an exceptional student experience.  

Summary

Successful digital transformation in higher education is predicated on putting the humans that they serve at the centre of all transformation projects – from students to teaching faculty to administrative staff. By understanding their needs and expectations, university leaders can build strong strategies, invest in the right technologies, and strengthen their university’s student offering so they thrive in a digital era. 

This article is by Catherine Friday, the EY Global Education Leader and EY Oceania managing partner of government and health sciences. It is summary of an Ernst &Young (EY) Digital Transformation survey and report, which asked over 3,000 students around the world how they think their university performs in the digital learning space.

My mum was an academic and a hugely passionate one. Consequently, I spent most of my holidays, many evenings, and countless weekends perched beside her at her desk at the Queensland University of Technology Gardens Point campus.

Like any child of a shopkeeper or restauranteur, I spent holidays, weekends and evenings either helping in the family business or doing homework at the corner table. Our family business was academia.

My parents grew up in rural western Queensland, and are the first in their families to attend university. It was a slog for them to get there, and a slog for them to complete their degrees. But both did. They met each other during their years at the University of Queensland, and supported each other to complete their undergraduate and postgraduate qualifications, so they could each go on to build solid careers.

They’ve been divorced for 20 years, so it’s not an idyllic romantic tale. But, it is a love story about university. University was the making of both of their lives. It let them dream bigger and opened doors. For my dad, it was his ticket off the land. For my mum, it was her everything.

My mum’s profound appreciation for the transformative impact that university education had on her life led her into academia. This also meant that in her work as an academic, she was deeply committed to helping others have the kind of transformational university experience she’d had.

During my early years and into young adulthood, I would’ve met close to 100 students and colleagues my mum championed and for whom university unequivocally changed their lives. Higher education pulled them out of difficult circumstances and gave them social mobility, cultural capital, diverse connections, and opportunities that wouldn't have been available to them if they had not undertaken higher education.

This is why I thought universities were so magical. I saw first hand how life changing and truly transformative they could be.

I understood that accessing university was more challenging for some people. Still, I believed, for a long time, well into my university career, that once the barriers to access were removed, then the transformation could begin. I didn’t understand that for many people, opening the door to university is just the first barrier, and there are multiple other hurdles from there.

It won’t surprise you to learn that, to date, most of my career has been in universities. I worked for over 10 years in professional staff roles – positions focused on student support, international development, engagement, and events. I then into the academic space for several years as a casual research assistant and tutor.

Looking back now, I am deeply embarrassed at my naiveté and my blinkered, privileged perspective. I always existed in university culture, and tertiary study was just a given, natural next step in my life. I could live at home, work casually and study whatever I was interested in. For many of the early years of my career, even while working directly with students, I still knew very little about the complex, intersectional barriers people face in seeking the educational opportunities that were so readily available to me.

This doesn’t mean that studying at university was easy for me. It was just hard in the right way.

University is meant to be challenging. The content should stretch and provoke minds, expand knowledge, skills, and abilities. University often involves long hours, an annoying commute, and juggling study and work. But these are ‘normal’ challenges – the difficulty and complexity everyone faces when pursuing higher education.

This is not the inequity and systemic exclusion that equity groups - Indigenous Australians, people from low socioeconomic backgrounds, and people living with disabilities - face, that is intersectional inequity and systemic exclusion.

Universities are aware of inequity and exclusion. Most have substantial equity, diversity, and inclusion policies and committees. Many develop research on migration, social cohesion, economic participation, diversity, and inclusion. And most universities would argue that they exist for the public good.

However, students, staff, and communities from equity groups are not seeing changes from these policies, nor the beneficiaries of this research. They are still struggling to overcome barriers that go further than juggling a casual job and an annoying commute.

Paraphrasing Sally Patfield’s excellent article in The Conversation – access to higher education study is vital, the growing parity of equity groups numbers is ambitious, and developing policies and programs to connect with those equity groups is essential. Those connections might even open the door to a few more prospective students from underrepresented groups. Still, more policies and programs will have little to no impact on equity if the sector is not listening and responding to the needs of these cohorts. It's time to take appropriate action to remove barriers, address inequity, and change the university system.

I will further discuss this at HEDx's ‘Changing Higher Education for Good’ conference in Melbourne on Thursday, alongside my colleague, former University of Melbourne People of Colour Committee officer Mohamed Omer. We are appearing on a panel called ‘Accelerating in our pursuit of social justice and equity’ with several other excellent speakers, thinkers, and innovators who advocate for access and equity across different spaces.

Mohamed and I will speak on issues of systemic racism and exclusion that culturally diverse people (including international students) experience in university education; whether that be accessing uni, balancing studying or seeking post- study support and opportunities.

As universities and the broader higher education sector explore the recommendations of the inclusion-focused Australian Universities Accord, Welcoming Universities recommends that a culture of welcoming all students and cultivating a sense of belonging for disadvantaged cohorts is placed at the centre of all Accord reform efforts.

Welcoming opens the door, invites students in, and helps them overcome hurdles. Belonging is the next step. Belonging ensures that everyone “feels valued, connected and able to be their authentic self”¹.

Through extensive consultation with students and communities facing barriers to accessing, completing, and working in university education, the Welcoming Universities network offers actionable ideas, approaches, and measures of success that puts inclusion at the centre of universities.

My hope is that conversations like the one happening at HEDx next week, along with the work of Welcoming Universities, along with other equity work such as the disability-advocating Universities Enable initiative, will restore the magical possibility of universities I saw as a young person.

I truly believe that university and higher education can be even more transformative if people from all backgrounds and communities are welcomed and allowed to belong.

Cate Gilpin is the coordinator of Welcoming Universities, an organisation that advocates for an inclusive culture in tertiary education where every student is made to feel like they belong. Several universities, including Charles Darwin University, the University of Melbourne, UNSW, the University of Wollongong (UOW) and Western Sydney University have signed up to participate in Welcoming Universities initiatives.

Professor Burke was invited to give the keynote address at the Universities Australia Solutions Summit, where tertiary education sector leaders gathered in Canberra under a 'harnessing universities for national priorities’ theme.

Below is an edited version of her address. A recording of it in full and other information about Professor Jane Burke's work, and that of the UNESCO Chair in Equity, Social Justice and Higher Education, can be found here.

It’s a great honour to be invited as keynote speaker at this year’s Universities Australia Summit and I thank the organising committee for the privilege and opportunity to be part of ongoing conversations about the perplexing and challenging problem of creating equitable higher education – and perhaps even more importantly generating sustainable higher education for equity and social justice. I want to acknowledge the immense leadership and knowledge in the room and the collective work across the sector to build more equitable and inclusive educational institutions.

It is impossible to consider developing equitable higher education without acknowledging the colonial histories embedded in global educational systems and ensuring that we generate higher education equity that foregrounds, respects, embeds and recognises the knowledge, wisdom and values of First Nations peoples. Repositioning higher education as a force for equity and social justice can be at the heart of these important commitments.

Equity is not peripheral to higher education practice; it is a profound part of all that we do. The work of equity requires us to reflect deeply on the directions we are taking, and what values underpin these directions.

As a society, we are facing profound and urgent issues of which widening inequalities are a massive challenge, and so there is an imperative for us to reimagine higher education and its key role in the face of such confronting social issues.

Experiencing a global pandemic has helped uncover our human and more-than-human interdependency. It has forced us to pause and contemplate new approaches. And yet, we are all too quick to recover the TINA effect – the narrative that there is no alternative. In a rush to recovery, we forget to ask critical questions about what forms of higher education we want to enable, for whom and why.

So, let’s activate our collective imagination through critical questioning:

• What is the purpose of higher education?
• Who participates and on what terms?
• What has equity and social justice got to do with it?
• How might we reimagine higher education as a vehicle for equity and social justice?

The collective act of critical questioning challenges the status quo and activates our capacity to imagine new possibilities. Critical questioning enables visionary thinking. It helps us make rich, nuanced and textured connections – to better understand ourselves as continuously formed in relation to others including those who have been historically excluded from projects of higher education development.

The urgencies of our time are a matter for higher education. The multi-dimensional, multi-scalar social and ecological crises facing communities across the globe alert us to the crucial role of higher education in contributing to sustainable and equitable transformation of and beyond our institutions.

UNESCO (Parr et al, 2022) calls for “higher education institutions and their stakeholders to systematically rethink their role in society and their key missions, and reflect on how they can serve as catalysts for a rapid, urgently needed and fair transition towards sustainability. The complexity of the issues at stake means that solutions should be part of a radical agenda that calls for new alliances and new incentives”.

As Antonio Guterres, Secretary-General of the United Nations explains, “we must work for solutions rooted in justice, with renewed urgency and solidarity”.

Higher education is not outside of complex geopolitical dynamics. These dynamics impact all dimensions of higher education; equity is not a separate issue but is part of the social fabric in which we create the conditions for our collective sustainability, flourishing and well-being.

We have engaged in an extensive process of reviewing our higher education system through the Australian Accord process. As Chair of the Accord, Professor Mary O’Kane asked a fundamental question during this process “if we can’t reform our own system than what can we do?” The final Accord report asks us to refresh our thinking in relation to bold, systematic reform.

We urgently require securely and comprehensively funded systems with visionary thinking that expands the view of the purpose of higher education. While calling on governments, policymakers and civil servants to recognise their role in creating such possibilities, universities and their leaders have a key role to play – those with the power to influence change must do everything in their power to create the conditions for equity, and thus for our sustainable futures.

We must pay attention to who participates in transformative processes and on what terms. This requires critical consideration of the insidious inequalities that are regularly ignored, silenced, and rendered invisible through a preoccupation with measurement as holding all the answers.

A key example is the way we continuously invoke the metaphor of a barrier, an overused terminology in educational policy and practice. This metaphor ignites our social imagination that the problem of equity is relatively simple to fix as long as we figure out how to measure it.

Barriers are tangible, concrete things that are observable and thus easy to quantify and measure. The idea that we can fix the problem of equity through measurement is so seductive that we then ignore the insidious inequalities that are rooted in the very foundations of higher education even as we seek to build equity within it. We lose sight of the ethical dimensions of what we do in the name of equity and how we do it.

A powerful way that insidious inequalities are sustained is through deficit imaginaries. This refers to the idea that equity interventions must correct the perceived deficiencies of individuals constructed through the lens of disadvantage. The problem is located in the bodies of those targeted by equity policy and practice, thus reproducing hierarchies between those granted the power and influence to construct and implement policy and those for whom policy is projected.

Dominant temporal structures privilege quick fix approaches that over-simplify rather than develop long-term commitments in which equitable and participatory processes and relations can be developed and sustained.

Through deficit imaginaries, particular aspirations and identities are privileged and valued. There is sometimes a slippage into a quasi-medical discourse that sets out to provide ‘treatment’ to those with perceived impoverished aspirations and identities, while ignoring the implications of who is seen to ‘know’ and who is seen to ‘lack’.

This is reflected in evaluation methodologies that foreground random control trials to measure the impact of the ‘treatment’ provided or withheld. Or evaluation narrowly framed to measure ‘what works’ while ignoring the systems of inequality and injustice that produce the conditions for inter-generational disadvantage.

Deficit imaginaries have led to a legacy of educational policy and practice committed to raising aspirations through outreach programs. The idea that historically under-represented people and communities lack aspiration is unacceptable and pathologising.

Equity can too easily become reduced to a set of crude interventions, focused on changing individuals constructed through disadvantage, with minimal attention to the historical, intergenerational and deeply entrenched multidimensional inequalities in which aspirations and identities are formed, validated and enabled.

The effects can be detrimental, widening inequalities rather than creating the social and institutional conditions for parity of participation. Indeed, conceptions of parity are too often one-dimensional, strongly framed by a quantitative conception only.

This reinforces deficit imaginaries by counting numbers of people within one-dimensional policy categorisations – driven by questions such as “how many students from low socioeconomic status backgrounds enrolled in higher education in a particular year?”

We lose sight of the root problem:

• What are the social and economic structures that reproduce the conditions in which there
  are growing inequalities that affect educational access and participation?
• How do these social and economic inequalities affect how different people, knowledge and
  forms of learning are unequally recognised, represented and valued in society and in higher
  education?
• What are the effects of these multidimensional inequalities on human and more-than-
  human flourishing and well-being?

In short, we need a reframing of notions of parity of participation to challenge deficit imaginaries. A social justice reimagining of parity of participation substantially deepens engagement with equity by examining the implications of who participates and on what terms. Nancy Fraser explains that "parity is not a matter of numbers. Rather, it is a qualitative condition, the condition of being a peer, of being on a par with others, of interacting with [others] on an equal footing…"

So what is to be done? How do we move away from deficit imaginaries, couched in one-dimensional approaches to parity of participation? How do we challenge insidious inequalities that are reproduced through inequitable educational systems? How do we move forward in solidarity to create the conditions for higher education to be mobilised as a force for equity and our collective, sustainable futures?

I propose a multidimensional framework for equity that offers vital insights to challenge inequalities. These dimensions, when held together, shift our focus from individual remediation and assimilation to the social, economic, cultural and representational inequalities that damage our system, our communities and ourselves.

Redistribution seeks to redress social and economic inequalities – the intergenerational maldistribution of educational opportunities, life chances and key resources. Access to quality resources and opportunities is imperative to full and meaningful participation in higher education and lifelong learning.

Recognition challenges the inequitable cultural value order that leads to status subordination through deficit imaginaries. This requires moving beyond tokenistic celebrations of diversity to recognise the knowledge, experiences and identities that students bring, which both enrich and transform local, institutional and sector-wide tertiary education communities.

Representation develops programs collaboratively with students and communities as peers, rather than recipients. It demands rigorous and ethically-oriented co-design and co-development with those who have been denied a voice in the development of higher education and its social contribution.

Human and more-than-human flourishing and well-being demands a broader conception of higher education beyond economic-centred notions and towards its broader contribution to generating collective, equitable, sustainable futures for us all. It recognises the commitments of students who see higher education not only as a pathway for their future well-being but also for the future well-being of others. It recognises the responsibility and contribution of universities to the local, regional and global communities they serve. It recognises our interdependency and the different knowledges, capabilities and values that constitute an equitable and inclusive higher education system.

Methodological rigour avoids collapsing research, evaluation, and programmatic development into instrumentalised methods and considers the ethics of what we do and how we do it. It emphasises participatory practice with a deep commitment to ongoing, dialogic cycles of critical reflection and critical action. It values the time required to do equity carefully, collaboratively, sustainably, and ethically.

This multidimensional framework underpins the UNESCO Chair in Equity, Social Justice and Higher Education based in the Centre of Excellence for Equity in Higher Education at the University of Newcastle. A key project of the UNESCO Chair team focuses on multidimensional inequalities and its manifestation in gender injustice and gender-based violence; what the United Nations calls the shadow pandemic.

Globally one in three women will experience gender-based violence (GBV) in their lifetime. In Australia one in four women have experienced violence by an intimate partner since the age of 15, but this rate is higher for women from socioeconomically disadvantaged areas, women with disability, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander women, LGBTQI+ communities, and women living in rural and remote areas. GBV is estimated to cost Australia about $22 billion annually. These numbers are staggering and reveal that we have a long way to go to building equity.

Last year all levels of Australian government launched a national action plan to end gender-based violence. Just this past week Education Ministers published an action plan addressing gender-based violence in higher education.

These developments are immense in recognising the social epidemic that is devastating to our society. Now is the time to seize higher education’s crucial contribution in actively challenging injustice and its manifestation in GBV as part of its broader commitment to equity.

Although the profound, detrimental, and long-term effects of gender-based violence on all dimensions of personal and social health and well-being has been strongly articulated over recent years, the impact of experiences of GBV on higher education access and participation remains largely a silent issue.

To redress this, the UNESCO Chair team have conducted research with 430 student victim-survivors in the Newcastle region and have found that GBV profoundly undermines higher education equity. We found that:

• the majority of GBV experiences happened in students’ own or someone else’s private
  residence.
• on average students first experienced GBV at age 13.
• student victim-survivors aspire to use their university education to help other victim-
  survivors and to make a difference to their families, communities and society.

The students valued the opportunity to participate in higher education but this was countered by a profound sense of alienation, not belonging, unworthiness and isolation. Bertram and Crowley describe this as insidious trauma, which does harm to the soul and spirit. Insidious trauma is deepened by institutionalised misrecognition: this is the combined impact of stigmatisation with deficit imaginaries.

The silencing of gender-based violence as an issue of institutional significance reinforces a personal sense of not belonging articulated by many of our participants – here are some poignant examples.

“Why am I studying this degree? Like why? How could I be of any use to anyone?”
“You can’t get over this feeling of you’re not worthy, you don’t even deserve to be here.”
“The after-effects of abuse lowered my self confidence and esteem so that I felt I did not deserve
a better life.”
“My ex said I was too stupid and too dumb to go to uni. I believed him for a long time.”

(quotes from student participants)

Maldistribution was a major factor in undermining students’ capacity to flourish. Students suffered profound financial deprivation as well as restrictions on their freedom. Rigid policies such as compulsory attendance as well as the burden of large student debt exacerbated by severe disruption to their studies was a major theme emerging from the survey data. Students made important recommendations to the university on this basis, for example:

“After I experienced [domestic violence] I was homeless, living in my car and I did my first ever
final exams at university the day after sleeping in my car.”
“Access to consistent and quality psychological services would help.”
“Please excuse our attendance rates for compulsory tutorials. We are so often going through
wars at home that no-one knows about, attendance in the middle of one of those wars could
mean additional violence for us.”
“We carry such a heavy burden already, the ever-growing financial burden [of student debt] is
scary.”
“[Domestic violence] prevented me from being able to meet assessment deadlines. I was deeply
afraid that my partner would find the letters or emails and become violent. This resulted in a
huge [student] debt.”

(quotes from student participants)

The students’ insights teach us how redistribution, recognition and representation can be held together to guide transformation for equity. The students provided powerful recommendations to university leaders and policy-makers including:

• providing quality education for staff and students about GBV.
• building capacity and new forms of expertise to address and combat GBV.
• taking an explicit stance against all forms of injustice including GBV.
• ensuring costs of study are covered, safe accommodation is available and free healthcare
  (including trauma-informed counselling services) and legal services are available.
• creating flexible and responsive time structures and inclusive pedagogical, curricular
  assessment and support frameworks and practices.
• avoiding punishing students suffering coercive control and restrictions on their mobility.
• providing navigational support to ensure access to key support, services, resources,
  opportunities and pathways.
• exercising zero tolerance of stigmatisation.
• reforming policies that lead to excessive debt, withdrawal and poor educational profiles.

Through the collaboration taking place under the UNESCO Chair, which includes research, evaluation, new programs, student advocacy, relational navigation, and inter-agency collaboration, we are producing critical knowledge and action to mobilise HE in its capacity to contribute to gender justice, higher education equity and to challenge GBV. A key role is providing a platform for students to articulate their knowledge and insights to create collective action for social change, and to build capacity for new forms of expertise.

The UNESCO Chair team at the University of Newcastle is collaborating with student victim-survivors and community service agencies to build a gender justice hub, which aims to:

• produce new knowledge to understand the extent and nature of GBV among HE students.
• ensure the voices of victim-survivors inform an improved HE sector.
• produce an evidence-base with specialist community services to support increased resourcing that enables access to lifelong learning and higher education and capacity-building.
• develop models for partnership with HE students/future students, to support their
  educational journeys, life chances and to build collective capacity, knowledge and action.
• help improve HE policies, procedures and curriculum, preparing the next generation of
  professionals to understand the complexities of gender injustice and its manifestation in
  gender-based violence.
• challenge universities and other professional organisations to become change-drivers in the
  fight against GBV.
• recognise the knowledge, insight and capacity of students for societal and institutional
  transformation.

The gender-based violence project is one case study of many that illuminates how social, economic, cultural and representational injustices, when ignored, can sabotage our collective efforts to build equity.

Challenging ourselves to move from one-dimensional models to rigorous, multidimensional frameworks enables us to dismantle harmful and insidious deficit imaginaries. When insidious inequalities are ignored they unravel our institutional and personal efforts, investments and commitments to equity.

We need to urgently move towards solutions for higher education rooted in social and ecological justice by fostering a culture of solidarity and compassion. This means thinking differently about equity, carefully considering the key messages we communicate and holding ourselves accountable to communities navigating social, economic, cultural and representational inequalities.

The UNESCO Chair project I shared illuminates that students have high aspirations to contribute to society, including participating in meaningful paid work that benefits themselves and others.

Students and community partners are co-leaders with universities in processes of reframing the purpose of higher education, and of contributing valuable knowledge and wisdom from their experience and expertise.

We simply cannot contemplate a reformed system of higher education that puts equity at the centre without recognising the value of this body of knowledge.

The narrowing of higher education for job-ready, market-centric, commercialised purposes undermines our capacity to eradicate poverty, reduce inequalities, promote gender equality, and build peace, justice and strong institutions, key sustainable development goals that centre equity and social justice.

Hyper individualism, entrenched as it is in a culture of competitiveness rather than collaboration, compassion and solidarity, is toxic for us all. Overlooking multidimensional inequalities is ultimately damaging for sustainable higher education, while doing harm to our students and to ourselves. If we ignore these social imperatives, we ignore our long-term, collective well-being.

I would like to end by paying special and heartfelt tribute to the participants, team members and community sector partners in the UNESCO Chair project I shared. I want to acknowledge the wisdom and knowledge they bring to processes of higher education transformation. Importantly, the UNESCO Chair scheme is not conceived of as the work of a lone scholar. Rather, UNESCO understands that transformation can only come through collective action, through cooperation, collaboration and meaningful parity of participation in the project of change. It is only together that we can systematically transform higher education for equity and sustainability.

References

Burke, PJ, Coffey, J, Parker, J, Hardacre, S, Cocuzzoli, F, Shaw, J & Haro, A, 2023. ‘It’s a lot of shame’: understanding the impact of gender-based violence on higher education access and participation, Teaching in Higher Education, DOI: 10.1080/13562517.2023.2243449.

Coffey, J, Burke, PJ, Hardacre, S, Parker, J, Cocuzzoli, F & Shaw, J, 2023. Students as victim-survivors: the enduring impacts of gender-based violence for students in higher education, Gender and Education, 35:6-7, 623-637, DOI: 10.1080/09540253.2023.2242879

Fraser, N. 2013. Fortunes of feminism: From state-managed capitalism to neoliberal crisis. London and New York: Verso Books.

Parr, A, Binagwaho, A, Stirling, A, Davies, A, Mbow, C, Hessen, DO, Nader, HB, Salmi, J, Burkins, MB, Ramakrishna, S, Serrano, S, Schmelkes, S, Shijun T and McCowan, T, 2022. Knowledge-driven actions: Transforming higher education for global sustainability. Paris: UNESCO.

Only 15 per cent of STEM jobs are held by women, and just 23 per cent of senior management, and eight per cent of CEOs in STEM-qualified industries are women, according to 2023 data.

This has resulted in a 17 per cent, or $27,012, gender pay gap in STEM industries.

Bias, stereotyping, and negative social experiences in STEM "begin early in life and have a significant impact on girls and women’s development of confidence and interest in STEM," according to the Advancing Women in STEM strategy from the Department of Industry, Science and Resources.

These experiences often lead to a belief that STEM 'isn't for women', reflected in data that shows young girls generally don't want to go into STEM careers because they're not interested in the subjects, or the subject matter doesn't relate to the career they want.

Low confidence in STEM starts in primary school, and, if social experiences don't improve, will lower with age, and accelerate a lack of interest in science and maths in young girls.

Girls make up a quarter of enrolments in year 12 information technology, physics and engineering classes, women make up 37 per cent of enrolments in university STEM courses, and 17 per cent of vocational education STEM courses.

It starts early

Seeing other girls participate in STEM and directing science and maths activities towards girls can help close the gap, Dr James Curran, chief of ed-tech charity Grok Academy, said.

"If a student has a great experience of digital technologies at school, and in the role models around them, in my observation there is no difference in the level of interest in boys or girls," he explained.

"If they don't have a great experience at school, it tends to have much more of an impact on whether the girls are prepared to continue studying it, and that starts from years five and six, [when] girls start making decisions about what they won't be."

Monash University associate professor Christen Mirth said her start in STEM in high school was supported by her parents, and inspired by her mother, who went back to university in her 40s to gain a masters and PhD.

"My mother is dynamite," she said.

"This, 'you don't frame yourself by your limitations' attitude was prevalent in my household.

"If I were having to battle gender stereotypes at home in addition to battle societal gender stereotypes, it would've been so much harder, so I recognise that I come from this really great position of privilege, and that my parents could afford to send me to university.

"In fact, when I chose biology, they sort of went, 'oh, that makes sense'. And then my dad said, 'are you sure you don't want to be a doctor?'

The scientist said she also had a friend in high school who's mother studied mushrooms and other fungi, which made her realise she wanted a career where she would get her hands dirty.

She also didn't know there were fewer women in STEM subjects until she stared at university.

"The powerful thing behind having a mother who goes back to do her master's and her PhD after her kids have gone off to university, is that it also demonstrates that there is no one correct path to get anywhere, that you can change your mind, that not everyone's trajectories are linear and that's okay," she said.

"I think a lot of those things contributed to where I'm right now."

Insidious behaviour

Small interactions that play into gender stereotypes started to creep into her career post-university, and, at first, she said it was a hard thing to pinpoint.

"It's those little tiny moments that you notice that your confidence gets a little bit eroded: being challenged in meetings, being challenged at conferences, being approached at conferences for not necessarily the right reasons," she said.

"That's the really insidious thing about everyday sexism.

"It's just when that thing feels slightly off and you're not quite sure if it was somebody treating you differently because you're a female and yet you've never seen it happen to a male colleague."

The biologist said she had to build a support network of friends and colleagues to cope with the "death by a thousand cuts" style of unconscious gender bias.

Now, she does what she can to support less-experienced women in STEM who aren't sure how to combat sexist microaggressions.

Doing it differently

She is the associate dean of equity, diversity and inclusion at Monash’s faculty of science, a committee that runs events and support functions for marginalised groups at the university.

"At some point I realised that things won't change on their own, unless I start stepping up," she said.

She said one of the things she can do for younger women is, if she is organising a conference or event, make sure that event has a code of conduct.

Universities have strict rules and reporting processes about harassment, but a large part of STEM work takes place at conferences or "in the field", where the lines of acceptable behaviour are often blurred.

"At this point in the game, I feel like I'm pretty good at shutting inappropriate conversations down, because I've developed the skills to say, "actually, that doesn't make me feel very comfortable."

"[But, there's still] that instinct of asking, 'do I need to be on the defensive here because I'm not sure what their intention is, it's [an evening conference] and everyone's had a bit of wine?'

"A code of conduct would say that everyone is worthy of respect, harassment of any type is not tolerated, and that the people that are present at the conference have a duty of care to call out behaviours.

"I also think it's really important that there be a 'safe person' at conferences or in workplaces."

We need them

Associate professor Mirth said if she could give advice to a young girl interested in STEM, she would tell her to not be deterred by negative social experiences.

"My advice would be that we need her, that we absolutely need her, and that if she loves what she's doing, the trick is only to surround yourself with the right people," she said.

"There are fantastic people out there and we all have our own little personal armies.

"I'd hate to see someone's passion be destroyed by a negative social experience.

"We need women to be involved in STEM. We need their unique perspectives and the joy and passion that they will bring to their job.

"We need the fact that their histories are going to be different from a lot of other people's that are more represented.

"Those voices are so valuable they help make science and innovation more innovative."

Live from the foyer of the Universities Australia (UA) Solutions Summit in Canberra, this special episode shares the immediate reactions of tertiary education leaders to the Universities Accord final report.

Featured in this episode are vice-chancellors Deb Terry from the University of Queensland, Renee Leon from Charles Sturt University, Chris Moran from the University of New England, Clare Pollock from Western Sydney University, Simon Biggs from James Cook University, Theo Farrell from La Trobe University and Alex Zelinsky from the University of Newcastle.

Host Martin Betts from HEDx also interviews sector leaders including chief executive of UA Luke Sheehy (pictured), UA former chair John Dewar, higher education commentator Andrew Norton, and others.

The solutions summit ran over two days on February 27 and 28.

Student surveys found an average of 275 students experience sexual assault on campus every week, and don't report it because they don't know how.

Sexual violence on campus researcher Dr Allison Henry spoke to Campus Review to discuss how universities got to this point, and shared the findings of her recent PhD thesis, which investigated regulatory responses to sexual violence on campus.

Her studies revealed the lack of action from regulatory bodies like the Tertiary Education Quality and Standards Agency (TEQSA), the effect of fluctuating political interest from different education ministers and federal governments, an absence of independent investigation into reporting processes, and the "performative" nature of anti-sexual violence university's campaigns.

The draft Action Plan addressing gender-based violence in higher education, along with the Universities Accord Final Report, is due this month.

Campus Review spoke to Dr Alison Henry, who wrote her PhD on regulatory responses to sexual assault and sexual harassment in Australian University settings and was a member of the Department of Education's gender-based violence stakeholder reference group, about what we can expect to see in them.

Q: Talk to me a little bit about the draft action plan. It was developed to change the situation through recommendations such as a student ombudsman and a national code to improve transparency and accountability. Are these going to deliver the change that we need to see?

A: Part of the draft action plan is a national higher education code to prevent and respond to gender-based violence.

What this will do is build on what we call the 'threshold standards' now, which are wellbeing and safety standards that TEQSA administers, but it will provide much greater detail and be specifically focused on gender-based violence.

The new code will effectively provide a blueprint for universities about what the expectations are, how they talk about sexual violence, [and] how they respond to sexual violence.

It'll provide a standard set of expectations so students, no matter which university they go to or which campus they're at, will have a standard consistent set of expectations around how an incident of sexual violence will be dealt with.

The new [national] code is proposed as part of the action plan, and the current plan is that oversight will be by a new unit in the Department of Education.

That will also mean that this issue's being taken away from TEQSA.

TEQSA will continue to exist doing its other work, but effectively the Department of Education's unit will oversight the implementation of the new code – that's a really important new page for students and student activists, who have really lost confidence in TEQSA.

What the student ombudsman would do, the national student ombudsman that's been proposed in the action plan, [is] provide a streamlined complaints process for students.

Once they've exhausted their processes at their institution, at their university – and if they're unhappy with the outcome at their university – they've got another body to go to and say, "Hey look, I really didn't like the way this happened," or "it "this took so long", or "they were really inappropriate about the questions they were asking". All of those sorts of things are the issues that come up.

The student ombudsman will provide a national student complaints process that will mean that all the students know where to go. Because at the moment, students don't know where to go to get help.

Q: So, it was really focused on, 'what can we do on the ground to help the students who are actually experiencing this'?

A: Yes, I think it's really looking at how can we protect and support students who have experienced gender-based violence, but it's also looking at how we can prevent it in the future.

There's a bunch of different mechanisms underneath the action plan. I think there's seven or eight action items, and there's different elements of the action plan that speak to different parts of the problem.

According to TEQSA, no university has ever had a problem in any of the investigations that they've looked at.

When I was doing my thesis, there was probably more than 60 of those sorts of investigations over the period I was looking at it. And not once did they find there was a problem.

And that included five occasions when universities themselves had reported to TEQSA and said, "We think there's a problem." And TEQSA said, "No, we think you're fine," so there's been a real problem there in terms of an external complaints mechanism.

Q: What key things are you looking for in the Accord report that will make a real difference? What would you like to see come out of that?

A: Well, I think the Accord report really, in the space of sexual violence, the interim report was really fantastic.

The Accord panel, when we first met with them, had all read the submissions – all were completely across the issue, and all really keen to try and make a difference in this space. And that was fantastic.

What came out in the interim report has actually given the impetus for what became the working group and what has become the draft action plan.

We are not really sure whether there'll be anything else that will come out that will be in the sexual violence space. My understanding is the Department of Education and the government are moving forward with a draft action plan as a separate process, but there may be other things that come out for the Accord. We don't really know. Everyone's waiting for the report to arrive.

This Q&A is a an edited excerpt from a Campus Podcast episode. Listen to the full podcast here.

Computer science honours student Leo Shchurov told the committee automation was becoming so accessible that even people with no IT skills could use ChatGPT, or other similar platforms, to create a script to do their work for them.

Mr Shchurov said two skills that remained important in an AI workplace were curiosity and adaptability.

Fourth year law and information technology student Raphaella Revis said she would add critical and analytical thinking to the list of key skills in the age of AI.

“What I would like to see is people being taught how to analyse AI itself,” she told the hearing of the House of Representatives Standing Committee on Employment, Education and Training, which is inquiring into the use of AI in the education system.

She said that for AI to offer benefits, humans needed to think and analyse.

“I don’t think we should let AI purely automate everything because that takes out a lot of the human elements,” Ms Revis said.

Both students said assessment in the age of AI should not focus on giving students a grade or a number, but instead giving a broader picture of their knowledge and skills.

Mr Shchurov said one of the worst aspects of the education system was year 12 school assessment, which reduced a student’s achievement to one number “without giving a proper multifaceted representation of what each student is capable of”. He said the structure of year 12 destroyed curiosity because if a student became curious about something, teachers couldn’t explore it if it didn’t contribute to the final mark.

“Once the students learn that it’s not worth going out of their way to do cool things because it doesn’t contribute to the final mark, that’s when they start to lose their curiosity and that’s when they stop being able to adapt to new changes,” Mr Shchurov said.

Ms Revis said that there needed to be “purpose-based assignments” and students needed feedback on where they could improve.

“I think there does need to be a bit more emphasis on practical applications and mixing and integrating generative AI into assignments to reflect the future of the workplace,” she said.

Ms Revis said it was important for school and university students to develop their analytic skills and be able to exercise their own judgment independent of AI.

“Then whichever industry they’ll go into, they can look neutrally at the output of the AI,” she said.

Looking at the field of law, Ms Revis said it should not, and would not, automate entirely because, for example, it was unlikely to take into account personal factors or the intent that lay behind a person’s action.

Mr Shchurov said that in the engineering and IT faculty where he studied, tutors were generally neutral or supportive of students using AI.

Ms Revis said the law faculty did not permit students to use AI.

Lecturers needed training in using AI in teaching and assessment, including in how to detect when AI was used by students and “not to just blatantly suspect students of it”, she said.

Critics of early university offers claim they can cause students to disengage from their school work – they are no longer reliant on their ATAR as an early offer gives them a 'way in' to uni without the rank.

The Australian Tertiary Admission Rank (ATAR) is perceived by many students and parents as a defining mark that dictates lives and future careers, even though university admissions centres and schools say it is really no more than a rank, useful to admissions centres.

The University of Southern Queensland (UniSQ) explains ATAR in this way: 'a 75.00 [ATAR] does not mean you received a score of 75%, it indicates you were placed in the top 25% of Queensland in your Year 12 cohort.'

The 'conditions' of an early offer outline the requirements a student has to meet before they can be accepted into a course. Each university's early entry scheme is different – some require only completion of year 12, while others require a certain ATAR, which is usually slightly lowered for early entry applicants.

The student perspective

Teachers and schools are concerned about students disengaging from their learning because they already have a way into uni, and no longer need to study to receive a 'good' ATAR they would otherwise depend on.

The teachers and authority bodies Campus Review spoke to all share the belief that senior students should be studying first and foremost for their own learning, and that exam success will follow.

However, some students feel that because final exams are so stressful, and their ATAR rank can seem so life-determining, an early offer takes the pressure off and allows them to start settling into their upcoming uni life.

"I can't get any of you to do work, because you just don't care anymore," is what year 12 student Jessica Avnell from Albion Park High School in regional NSW, said her teachers told her class the day they received their early offers.

"For the rest of that day, literally no one did any school work," Ms Avnell said.

She has two early offers from the University of Wollongong (UOW) and one from Western Sydney University (WSU), and is waiting to hear back from the University of Sydney (USYD) and the University of New South Wales (UNSW).

She told Campus Review that both her UNSW and WSU offers are conditional on a certain ATAR, but knows her UOW offers are only conditional on her completing year 12, so she feels she doesn't need to try her best in exams because of that safety net.

Ms Avnell said she felt like she had "heaps of pressure taken off her" when she got her first early offers.

"So many of my friends don't care anymore, one of them got [an early offer] and she literally has not picked up a book since the school holidays (the holidays before NSW's study period)," Jessica said.

"I'm still kind of trying because if I decide not to go to UOW, I need a half-decent ATAR."

Jessica said she is focusing mostly on studying her science subjects because she wants to study medical health and science and university, and knows she needs to understand the content to do well in her course.

The teacher perspective

Veteran HSC marker and former Sydney high school teacher Ben Zunica said, even if more than half his students got early university offers, it never impacted their work ethic because of the culture of the school he taught at.

He noticed early offers becoming popular in 2018, and explained the offers could took the “anxiety-edge” off students, but if they had a persistent work ethic, they remained ATAR-focused until the end.

"You might get the odd student who would say ‘I [have an early offer] so I don’t really have to try’, but that was quite isolated," he said.

"The vast majority of my students [with early offers] continued to work as if they didn’t have one."

Mr Zunica said students see their ATAR rank as a measure of their worth, but he emphasises to them it's just a tool used to tell students about where they sit in their studies, and how that will affect their chosen study paths.

"If we can get students to see it in that light, that would be really good, but they see it as a judgement of their worth," he explained.

“It’s just a placeholder for now, not the final word on anything.”

Mr Zunica also said, even though schools want high marks from their students, most teachers just want to see their students learning and growing.

“Schools are ranked on total band sixes over total number of entries, and given a success rate percentage, so schools want to make sure they’re getting their band sixes,” he said.

“All [teachers] really want for our students is growth. If a student who was achieving 30 per cent in year 11 exams achieves 70 per cent in year 12 exams, that kind of growth is to be celebrated.”

The history of early offers

The University Admissions Centre's (UAC) chief strategy and engagement officer, Kim Paino, told Campus Review a student's "intrinsic motivations" ultimately determine what they get out of year 12 and their exams.

Ms Paino said before Covid, it was usual for the School Recommendations Scheme (SRS), which was established a decade ago under UAC, to send out early offers after students had sat their HSC exams, avoiding student disengagement.

However, as the Covid-19 pandemic disrupted two years of HSC exam operations, universities began sending out early offers independently beforehand, to 'make up' for their disrupted learning.

Post-Covid early offers have continued, and now it is common for students to receive early offers directly from universities before their exams, even if that university is associated with UAC.

When students apply directly to a university, they might have to submit alternative academic material, such as an admissions essay or teacher recommendations.

Admissions centres, such as UAC, which mainly process NSW and ACT applications, allow students to apply to multiple universities at once without extra criteria.

"For example, Macquarie University has its own early offer scheme, but it will also make early offers through SRS," she said.

"The difference is its own early offer scheme has extra criteria, called Leaders and Achievers, so [students] have to provide evidence that they've achieved academically, been school captain or have done [extra-curricular] things."

The future of ATAR

A WA School Curriculum and Standards Authority spokesperson told Campus Review a "refreshment of the [WA Certificate of Education (WACE)] is timely" as their board reviews whether its tertiary admissions pathways suit the needs of students.

"There are concerns that students who receive early or unconditional enrolment offers (or both) may not be motivated to engage in more complex and challenging courses and content that could better prepare them for a broader range of post-school options," they said.

"Students who have not attained an ATAR may not be well prepared to undertake higher education courses with demanding assessment requirements and examinations."

The WA Education Minister Dr Tony Buti has expressed skepticism about early offers from universities, and strongly insists universities should be supporting the integrity of the ATAR, regardless of early offers.

"Early offers from universities based on predicted ATARs need to be backed up by universities requiring that students complete year 12, satisfy the English requirements, achieve their predicted ATAR and attain their WACE," the authority spokesperson said. 

Ms Paino also said UAC tries to undertake a holistic approach to ATAR, which understands that exams aren't for everyone, and employs other ways to determine how successful a student will be at university.

"It's just one number, how does that tell us everything we need to know about a student and their ability to thrive at university?" she said.

"The reality is, [ATAR] has never tried to. It tells us a student's academic performance within a cohort at a certain point in time."

She said as a whole, all universities are looking more at other educational competencies of their applicants. Some processes, such as interviews, are more difficult to measure than an ATAR rank, and need to consider the different opportunities some students have compared to others.

Little to no data exists about the impact early offers may have on both students and the sector, because the process is so recent, while changes in attitude towards exams or ATAR is too fresh to quantify.

"It's more about anecdotal data and perception at this point, which is not something that was an intention of the [early offer] schemes," Ms Paino said.

"I don't think there's any intent anywhere to 'up-end' the current system of exams at the end [of year 12], because the difference is now that the relevance of those exams have changed for only some students, who are not intrinsically motivated to get the best result."

Although early offers are popular, the general consensus among the teachers and bodies Campus Review has spoken to say ATAR is still a useful tool in learning, and a fundamental part of entry into university straight from high school.

"It never has been that their aren't multiple pathways into university, this is just another one that's attracted a lot of attention in the media and community because of perceived negative impacts on secondary schooling," Ms Paino said.

"But the good news with that, is that people really do care that year 12 students are finishing their schooling in the best way they can, and it shows how deeply entrenched that importance is."

The future of early offers

A lack of transparency from universities about when and what grounds early offers are given on has resulted in a Higher Education Standards Panel (HESP) transparency consultation paper and discussion of increased regulation from education authorities.

Chief of Universities Australia (UA) Catriona Jackson told Campus Review that its understanding of early offers is that it's an alternate pathway into tertiary study that keeps students focused on ATAR until the end of their senior year.

"High-performing students apply for early offers because it gives them certainty, but it isn’t a free pass," she said.

"Offers are typically conditional on a student finishing Year 12 and achieving a good ATAR, placing the onus firmly on the student to keep working hard until the end of school."  

The NSW Education Standards Authority (NESA) directed Campus Review to the NSW Vice-Chancellor's Committee (NSWVCC), which is the peak body for NSW and ACT universities.

"The NSWVCC has taken positive steps to address concerns held by NESA and other education stakeholders about unconditional offers made too early," a NESA spokesperson said.

The NSWVCC say it has "initiated a sector-leading approach" for NSW early offers in 2024, with five principles, including that all early offers should be conditional on completion of the HSC and not be offered before September of the year of application.

Another of the principles is that 'admission practices should be evidence-based, transparent and publicly defensible', aligning with the HESP transparency paper requests.

The Convener of the NSWVCC, Professor Barney Glover AO, said these principles will uphold the importance and integrity of the HSC whilst supporting the wellbeing of stressed year 12 students.

"Alongside early offer programs, the NSWVCC continues to support the ATAR which provides a consistent starting point for tertiary entry across all states and territories, no matter where a student completes their senior secondary study," Professor Glover said.

The University of Sydney professor, who is a world-leading expert in neurodegeneration, began her studies in the 80's and became captivated in how different chemicals in the brain can form diseases in later life.

“I thought that instead of doing a normal job after I finished university, I'd like to research and find out more about how you could change the brain and how diseases affect the brain,” Halliday told Campus Review.

“That really fascinated me.”

Last week, Halliday became the fourth woman in history to be named the 2022 NSW Scientist of the Year.

The annual prize, created in 2008, is awarded to researchers and scientists whose contributions benefit the health and well being people living across the state.

NSW Premier Dominic Perrotett recognised Halliday's "groundbreaking" work in uncovering underlying causes of non-Parkinson’s disease and frontotemporal dementia.

“It was an unexpected surprise, but it’s welcomed," Halliday said.

"It will definitely give me and the team of researchers a boost to continue our work."

Halliday describes her biggest breakthrough being her work on Parkinson's disease, where she identified that a bigger proportion of the brain can be impacted by the disease - a fact previously unknown to scientists.

She also founded the Sydney Brain Bank, a facility that collects and manages brains and spinal cord tissues to help research for disorders of the brain and mind.

For her work in frontotemporal dementia, Halliday said her experience has been focused in the pathology setting because “that's a disease that's still difficult to diagnose clinically”. 

“I've done a lot of research I would never have imagined doing at all - it's been an interesting journey," she said.

According to Halliday, her most “surprising” work was looking at brain tissues after death, which she said isn’t something that is often done.

“We collect the brains at the time of death and we make sure that the disease is what people have been treated for - it is essential to develop new and accurate diagnostic criteria," she said.

“Often at death, the post-mortem will tell you that it wasn't the disease that we thought.”

Today, Halliday’s work on diagnostic criteria is used worldwide and helps patients on a daily basis. 

“It's a good feeling to think that you can help people being diagnosed better and therefore manage better in the clinics and in their practicesm," she said.  

“But it is a never ending work, we are always finding new research to improve it.

“We're currently trying to redevelop many of the criteria to make sure that people can be diagnosed and treated adequately.”

Halliday believes more work needs to be done around non-Alzheimer's degenerative diseases, as the total number of people affected is about the same as Alzheimer's disease in later life.

“These diseases affect people in the middle or early prime of their lives," she said.

"Because they affect people when they're younger, the effect is much bigger with a lot more disability and a lot more difficulties to cope.

“The families also have a lot more difficulties with coping with the neurological problem - it can be devastating.” 

While she admits a lot of her research depends on funding, Halliday has currently been working on Parkinson's disease and its mechanisms.

She is trying to identify the different cellular molecular changes happening in the brain and hope to be able to create better therapies. 

She believes young scientists should definitely get involved in research as it is a “worthwhile career”. 

“There's always funding issues, but if you've got good ideas to develop and try, then it's a very worthwhile thing to do and try to actually make a difference to people's lives.”