When students enrol at university, they bring with them diverse experiences of prior learning, life experiences, and worries about the next step.
Yet, in most cases in those early weeks, they are still much more likely to be asked whether they enjoyed Freshers and what they think about university marketing than to share insight about who they are that could shape how their institution thinks about teaching, learning, and student support.
In fact, much of the thinking around quality enhancement remains focused on the National Student Survey – an instrument whose weight is out of all proportion to the insight it can provide, given its data only captures the views of students who make it to the end of their programme of study.
It is hard once a student has decided to leave their course early – whose non-continuation and demographic information could provide valuable data points for institutional intervention – to retrospectively draw systematic conclusions about what is going on. Even if outduction surveys were routine across the sector, by this point, the student has already disengaged and withdrawn.
