Weaving work into higher education

ACER last year released a major report funded by Ako Aotearoa on the Australasian Survey of Student Engagement (AUSSE) titled Student Engagement in New Zealand’s Universities. The report conceptualises diverse facets of student engagement and recommends strategies for improvement.

Report editor and ACER Research Fellow, Ms Ali Radloff, said that understanding and improving New Zealand students’ completion rates requires identifying the aspects of students’ experience at university that are intrinsic to their success. AUSSE shows that students with strong engagement in work-integrated forms of learning display lower departure intentions.

In New Zealand universities, there is room for improvement in this area. By the later years of study, around 22 per cent of New Zealand students have participated in an industry placement or work experience. New Zealand students are engaged less than their Australian counterparts with experiences that can build job-related or work-related knowledge and skills.

Analysis by Trudy Harris and Richard Coll from the University of Waikato examined career readiness in depth, reporting a marked relationship between departure intentions and the extent to which students feel that their experience has helped them gain job-related or work-related knowledge and skills. More than 44 per cent of students who say that their experience at university has contributed only ‘very little’ to their development of work-related knowledge and skills have seriously considered leaving their current institution before graduation. In contrast, the prevalence of departure intentions drops to around 20 per cent for students who say university contributed ‘very much’ to the acquisition of work-related knowledge and skills.

Harris and Coll suggest that improving students’ acquisition of work-related knowledge and skills may help mitigate students’ departure intentions. They believe this could be addressed by encouraging students to seek careers counselling or careers advice, and also by incorporating more work-integrated forms of learning, such as participation in work experience or internships, into curricula.

The report also examined the engagement of Ma¯ori and Pasifika students, international students, differences between male and female students, full-time and part-time students, campus-based and extramural students, and between students by field of study, and the relationship between study and work.

Read the full report:
The 2011 New Zealand Universities Student Engagement Report, Student engagement in New Zealand's universities, edited by Ali Radloff, is available at <www.acer.edu.au/ausse/reports>