Australian universities must redesign themselves for a “new normal” where part-time students dominate many classrooms, research suggests.

A from the Australian Centre for Student Equity and Success (Acses) says part-timers now comprise 35 per cent of university enrolments and 60 per cent or more of postgraduate, online and mature-aged students. Yet institutional and government policies remain geared towards full-time attendance, tipping the scales against people who come disproportionately from disadvantaged backgrounds and drop out or fail at higher rates than their full-time counterparts.

Report author Kelly Linden said universities had a blind spot about part-time students. Policies were based around 20th-century assumptions that part-timers were cashed-up workers studying 50 per cent of a full-time load.

In reality, about half of part-time students took just one subject a semester, and many slipped in and out of full-time study as their circumstances changed. Others were in effect full-time students picking up subjects during summer terms.

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Linden said many students had reduced their study loads to work more because they were struggling with the post-Covid surge in living costs. Others were mature-aged parents lured to university after online delivery and work-from-home policies made higher education a feasible option.

Universities had failed to accommodate such trends with prescriptive rules around course duration and eligibility for special consideration. Meanwhile, governments often denied part-time students the scholarships, income support, public transport concessions and tax exemptions available to their full-time peers.

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Linden, sub-dean of student retention at Charles Sturt University, said part-time students were overrepresented in the equity groups – indigenous, regional, disabled and socio-economically disadvantaged – that the government was targeting for higher university participation.

“We want to enrol these students, and we just need to be a little bit more understanding of what they’re juggling,” she told Times Higher Education. “If they have a mortgage and young children…university can’t be their number one priority. Making sure they care for their children and don’t lose their job [comes] ahead.”

Linden used a year-long Acses fellowship to do a “deep dive” on part-time study. She obtained tailored 2024 data from the Department of Education and complemented it with a survey of 965 part-time students, with 80 granting follow-up interviews.

Part-time students’ success rates were seven percentage points lower, and first-year retention rates 15 percentage points lower, than those achieved by full-time students. Part-timers were also almost two-thirds more likely to receive “zero-fail grades” for not submitting any assessment work whatsoever.

Linden said this often happened when complications at home – “your babysitter’s just cancelled, or you’ve got a 48-hour daycare hole for your children” – coincided with major assignment deadlines. Most universities only awarded special considerations for caring responsibilities in cases of “death or severe medical issue”, she said.

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“Time-to-complete” policies were equally indifferent to real-world problems. Linden said an interview subject undertaking a one-year taught master’s course had been barred from taking a semester off, despite having given birth two weeks earlier, because her understanding of the subject matter would be too out-of-date.

The student complied and was given lecture notes “date-stamped 10 years from the past”, Linden said. “They were teaching outdated content and telling her if she didn’t study that semester, she would be excluded from the university due to [lack of] currency of knowledge.”

The report says universities should allow students enough time to complete their courses so that those enrolled at the lowest acceptable attendance rate – one unit per semester, for example – can qualify without being timed out.

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Extensions to routine assignments should be granted on a “no-questions-asked” basis, and work and caring commitments should constitute reasonable grounds for extensions to major assessment work, the report adds. Workplaces typically grant extensions in circumstances where universities refuse, Linden said.

Her analysis found that most scholarships went to full-time students even though part-timers often benefited more from the extra cash. At one university, full-time undergraduates received three-quarters of scholarships – despite comprising less than half of enrolments – and their scholarships were worth more than twice as much as those granted to part-timers. Yet scholarships were associated with a 12 percentage point boost to the success rates of part-time students, compared with six percentage points for full-timers.

The study found that part-timers benefited from sympathetic teaching practices including early release of content, routine recording of lectures and clear instructions around assessment and learning expectations. Many such practices were consistent with the universal design for learning (UDL) principles recommended for students with disabilities, Linden said.

“UDL…has been shown to support all students,” Linden said. “Part-time students benefit particularly because they’re juggling so many responsibilities.”

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john.ross@timeshighereducation.com