Framing the benefits of higher education participation from the perspective of non-completers

ABSTRACT

Ensuring that students of all backgrounds are smoothly transitioned through the stages of access, participation and completion in higher education has been the focus of much public policy and research in recent decades. Subsequently, public policy discourse treats those who do not complete their higher education degrees as unsuccessful, despite a lack of research considering the beneficial outcomes of non-completing students. Evidence of beneficial outcomes of higher education participation without completion has potential to challenge the deficit-centric discourse of completion dependent on a binary view of success and failure. This article details a critical discourse analysis of responses to a 2017 survey of university non-completers asked ‘were there any benefits from the time you spent doing an [sic] incomplete degree?’. This study finds that non-completers experience a wide range of benefits from incomplete studies despite the dominant discourse discounting their experiences as unsuccessful. Additionally, this study presents a critique of framing surveys of non-completing students within the normative bounds of success as completion in higher education, and instead calls for a more nuanced construction of success in higher education.

KEYWORDS:

• Non-completion
• benefits
• student success
• deficit discourse
• critical discourse analysis

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank Andrew Norton and William Mackey at the Grattan Institute for their generosity in sharing the data collected for this analysis, and providing clarifying detail on the details of their survey. We would also like to extend our thanks to all the respondents who took the time to complete the Grattan Institute’s survey, and provided such rich comments to consider for this analysis.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 The Australian Government introduced HECS (Higher Education Contribution Scheme) in 1988 to replace fully subsidised university tuition with a government-student co-contribution system which provided funding for students’ share of tuition fees in the form of an income-contingent loan to be repaid upon graduation and subsequent employment earning over a determined threshold.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Australian Government Research Training Program (RTP) Scholarship.