Abstract
Demand for higher education keeps growing, making it more important to create new insights into what and how people succeed. Student success is a large topic which researchers and practitioners approach in a large array of ways. To advance this field of eight leading researchers contribute insights and perspectives through articles which take stock of pressing problems and emerging developments. The researchers explore politics, international dynamics, student perspectives, institutional configurations, curriculum characteristics, economics, and educational practices. The findings are relevant to Chinese higher education, and to other systems around the world.
Demand for higher education keeps growing, making it more important to create new insights into what and how people succeed. This spurs big questions. What new higher education institutions and forms of service provision are emerging? What market and geopolitical dynamics are shaping student participation? How can governments and institutions reframe higher education to shape growing demand? What new research is required to help articulate responses to contemporary uncertainties? What job and workforce designs might be helpful? Such big questions can be tackled from multiple perspectives.
Many professionals involved in higher education contend that an important front in helping students succeed amounts to helping smart and disadvantaged people find better ways of using education to prosper. The transition of many rich-country higher education systems from elite to larger and even universal levels of scale has not always (and some would argue inherently) led to equitable patterns of participation. 1 There are somewhat parallel and much larger problems regarding access to higher education by people in developing countries. Concerns about such inequity have spurred many psychologically, financially and politically tuned investigations. Aspirations-raising initiatives, admissions reforms and more nuanced forms of finance have all been revealed as solutions, among others, though legacy power structures can often hinder change. Finding ways to make progress in this area remains fraught.
Student success has also long been about helping brilliant people flourish. Cultivating high-level talents has forever been a part of higher education, was evidently the dominant endeavour just a generation ago, and likely still is. Brilliant people make contributions that advance science and society. To help brilliant people flourish it is helpful to have institutions which cater to diverse ideas and perspectives, even those which are paradoxical or seemingly irreconcilable. It is helpful to have programs and schemes which stimulate creativity and innovation. Yet such conditions hence brilliance can be stifled by isomorphic institutional striving, a rush for professional credentials, or education arrangements that are stretched to accommodate thousands more people. Identifying ways to create space and conditions that help brilliant people flourish is an important vein of research into student success.
It is difficult to ignore commercial or political analyses of student success. Most student success comes from students and often their families using invariably complex financing arrangements to invest in a higher education experience with hopes of securing a branded credential that signals their value in the professional workforce. Such “postsecondary punting” 2 is little understood as markets and consumers/students are little more than a generation old, are layered with all kinds of cultural, historical, institutional and technological perplexities, and most research is badged ‘commercial in confidence’. Governments react with surprise at their declining regulatory traction, with fiscal delight at the opportunity to reduce outlays, and increasingly with new somewhat experimental forms of risk-based policy intervention. Commercial firms react with glee at prospects of parlaying bibliometrically infused lists into rankings that derive free-flowing advertising rents. Understanding the locus and nature of power in these new political economies seems essential for understanding and promoting student success.
These big viewpoints start to reveal the significance and also nuance of education practice and research regarding student success. Everyone involved in higher education wants students to succeed but converting such aspirations into outcomes is challenging. There can be disagreement on what success means. Even when people agree on ideas and language, balancing different understandings can be difficult. Even if clear goals are set the complexity of education makes effective delivery fraught to orchestrate. Research reveals that teachers and students play the largest role in determining outcomes, which then throws the whole process back on complex relationships. All such flux permeates and perhaps is even magnified in related evaluation and reform work. Such relativity is problematic and unhelpful because it makes it hard to progress research and practice, yet ignoring or artificially conflating the muddle challenges authenticity and generalisability.
Higher education researchers react to this problem in varying ways. Some retreat to the intellectually cosy study of zombie theories or political agendas. Others zoom in to study narrow theories or populations. Astute scholars with an interest in advancing practice try and cut through proliferations of conceptual or practical stasis with fresh insights. With this intent, this Special Issue of the International Journal of Chinese Education (
Researchers proposed a range of interesting papers in response to this invitation. Broadly, these papers probe the intersection between the changing place of the university in society and the political and economic framing of student success, fundamental normative assumptions about ‘success’ and ‘who students are’ in higher education, the academic and broader experiences that are correlated with student success and failure, the impact of new technologies and information as an influence on the framing and engagement of student success, and patterns and prospects for student and graduate outcomes. The articles are summarised below, showing that while student success is an eclectic field a characteristic feature is that it gives primacy to students.
Brendan Cantwell launches the Special Issue by unpacking the student success movement from a macro-sociological and political economy perspective. He argues that the student success movement is a manifestation of the social, policy, and organizational concerns associated with high levels of participation in higher education. The analysis helpfully frames the following papers which each explore particular approaches for improving student outcomes.
Umesha Weerakkody and Emeline Jerez continue the Special Issue with analysis of factors that contribute to the success and quality of international student success. So much analysis of international education concentrates on the scale of admissions and derivative revenue streams. There has been a comparable dearth of research on outcomes. Yet it is outcomes that drive the value contribution of cross-national education. Weerakkody and Jerez look beyond at the meaning of international student success and the mechanisms for making it real in higher education.
In the next contribution, Kelly Matthews sheds light on another little understood facet of success of great contemporary relevance. She studies how students function as partners in learning and teaching. Looking well beyond participation in feedback surveys, she argues that higher education scholars researching student success and learning outcomes should take seriously the perceptions of students to inform practice and policy, while also partnering with students in research.
Adrianna Kezar and Elizabeth Holcombe also investigate a reconfiguration of conventional education boundaries. They look at how to create integrated and comprehensive programs to support historically underserved students. Many support programs are disconnected from the curriculum and only target one area of student need. Through case study analysis they reveal how student success can be magnified by integrated programs which combine multiple curricular and co-curricular supports.
With a focus on South Africa, Rubby Dhunpath and Reshma Subbaye sustain argument for curriculum reform as a means for enhancing student success. They concede that while the impediments to student success are multifarious, technology can be used to institute less alienating curriculum structures which can catalyse the process of reform and reverse poor student outcomes. The researchers pose this as an important counterpoint to other efforts to raise student success by granting greater access to higher education.
Kenneth Moore broadens analysis by presenting novel structures and data on links between productivity and student success in Australian higher education. Working from interviews with higher education stakeholders Moore uses qualitative methods to identify instances when participants discussed institutional productivity in conjunction with student success factors. He charts four common themes linking institutional productivity to student success: ‘student experience and engagement’, ‘attrition, retention and progression,’ ‘cross-subsidies’, and ‘teaching-research effort’. He reveals leverage points for interventions that might improve student success hence productivity.
One of Moore’s themes is picked up in the next article, in which Le Chen draws on large-scale data to probe links between Chinese students’ engagement in their learning outcomes. Le reveals the characteristics of the people who participate in social practice, shows that engaging in social practice improves all kinds of student learning outcomes, and unpacks how engaging in different types of social practice has different impacts on learning.
This Special Issue of the International Journal of Chinese Education (
This summary conveys the diversity of researchers and research perspectives invited to contribute advances to this field. One author is Chilean, one is Chinese, two are South African, one Sri Lankan, and seven American. Four are working in Australia, one in China, two in South Africa, and five in the United States. Seven authors are female and five are male. Four authors hold a senior academic rank, two a middle rank, and six a junior rank. Uniting these researchers is a common dedication to delivering research that helps every higher education student succeed.
Combined, while the papers fail to solve the student success puzzle they do reveal new insights and approaches of interest to many people who contribute in reflective ways to higher education. The findings are relevant to Chinese higher education, and to other systems around the world. Many thanks to all of the authors and reviewers, and of course to
Footnotes
1
Simon Marginson, “Higher Education and Inequality in Anglo-American Societies.” In Student Equity in Australian Higher Education, eds. Harvey, A., Burnheim, C. & Brett, M. (Singapore: Springer, 2016).
2
Hamish Coates, “Postsecondary Punters: Creating New Platforms for Higher Education Success.” In Beyond Enrolment: Measuring Academic Quality, Weingarten, H., ed. Hicks, M. & Kaufman, A. (Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2018).