Frontier perspectives and insights into higher education student success

This paper introduces the complex field of research on student success and surveys the 12 papers published in this special issue. We offer guidance for shaping future development of the research field, and its contribution to helping a growing and diverse number of students succeed.

How can higher education help students succeed? This question speaks to a basic assumption of student success research that universities should support learners in their efforts to learn because a core function of higher education is to educate people. Student success is often evoked to signal a commitment to students amid a sometimes chaotic higher education landscape unclear of its place or purpose in the modern, technologically disrupted and globally interconnected world.

Student success is an umbrella topic that offers the promise of drawing together important threads. For instance, the idea comes through in research that is focused on student engagement, teaching practices, learning outcomes, curriculum development, admissions policies, transition, student experience, graduate employment, student satisfaction, socio-economic health and mental health. While student success is about students, what it means is wrapped in broader considerations. For instance, how a given university fosters student success is dependent on what that university understands to be the purpose of higher education. Such understandings are shaped by the beliefs of stakeholders such as institutional governing authorities, the broader public, prospective students both locally and in foreign countries, and alumni. We were motivated to curate an ‘open international call’ Special Issue on this complicated topic, not because we thought we could offer coherence and convergence but rather to welcome critical and potentially contradictory views on a pathway toward frontier perspectives.

To this end, we drafted a specification that sought a diverse range of contributions and called widely for papers. A shortlist of papers proceeded through a process of multiphase double-blind review, and 12 articles were selected for publication. Our different research profiles, experiences and editorial perspectives shaped this Special Issue. Hamish Coates undertakes institution and policy-level research on leadership, academic work and student outcomes (e.g., Coates, 2016, 2017, 2018; Coates, Kelly, & Naylor, 2017; Coates, Kelly, Naylor & Borden, 2017; Kelly, Dollinger, & Coates, 2017). Kelly Matthews’ applied research explores professional learning, curriculum development related to learning outcomes and engaging students as partners in learning and teaching (Bosanquet, Mailey, Matthews, & Lodge, 2017; Matthews, 2016, 2017; Matthews, Cook-Sather, & Healey, 2018; Matthews, Dwyer, Hine, & Turner, 2018). We share a commitment to ensuring that student perspectives inform policy and practice in higher education.

Seen broadly, student success can embrace almost any facet of higher education and even the broader community. Researchers often focus on aspects of student admissions, student experiences or graduate destinations. However, teaching can also be viewed through the prism of student success, for instance in terms of the preparation of tertiary teachers, teaching practices or the kind of experiences and artefacts produced through teaching. Assessment and curriculum resources are important considerations in the student venture. Higher education institutions also play a role, ranging from considerations to do with the design and construction of buildings and spaces for learning, the allocation of funds, and the information that is reported, and which thereby shapes the broader narratives that surround higher education. Given the variety of energy invested in helping students learn, it is obvious that a variety of perspectives, positions and contexts can be considered. Among this diversity, what characterises student success research is the pre-occupation with students as primary stakeholders and how they succeed.

The papers in this Special Issue explore student success in Australia, China, Canada, Malaysia, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom and the United States. Scholars employ a range of research approaches to investigate student success from in-depth local case studies to validation of a large-scale data collection instrument along with conceptual works. Articles are grounded in specific literatures and world views, provoke thought and signpost important implications for practice, national policy and research. The contributions engage with student success as a multifaceted concept which is not simple to define or easy to reduce. In other words, all the works selected for this curated Special Issue are indicative of the scholarly view of student success as a complex, multidimensional construct that plays out differently in different contexts.

Most of the papers approach student success from a social justice stance by drawing attention to the aspiration of success from the perspective of equity for students who are historically under-represented or marginalised in higher education. These works provoke us to think about success differently for vulnerable students (Nelson, 2018), equity-seeking students (Cook-Sather, 2018), students who are the first in their family to attend university (O’Shea & Delahunty, 2018), students of low socio-economic status (Luo, Guo, & Shi, 2018), Indigenous higher degree research students (Barney, 2018), students who were ‘looked after’ by governments as children (Gazeley & Hinton-Smith, 2018) and international post-graduate students in non-Western countries (Nachatar Singh, 2018). They contribute important layers of nuance to the critical questions of which ‘students’ we talk about when we discuss student success, and what success means, looks and feels like for students from under-represented backgrounds navigating their learning pathways in higher education.

Many of the works position student success as a relational phenomenon. This may involve interactions between students (Gazeley & Hinton-Smith, 2018; Peregrina-Kretz, Seifert, Arnold, & Burrow, 2018) or between students and academic staff (Cook-Sather, 2018; Luo et al., 2018). Building on decades of research and study (Coates & McCormick, 2014), such relations are conveyed as paramount to the idea and outcomes of success for students. These contributions further the understanding of student success as a relationship-based phenomenon shaped by education and support practices, which speaks to research into students as partners in university education as an emerging core of student engagement (Matthews, 2016).

Other scholars approached student success in terms of outcomes, for instance learning or employability outcomes. In these papers, important questions emerge about the relationship between learning outcomes (Day, van Blankenstein, Westenberg, & Admiraal, 2018) and employability (Gu, Zhao, & Wu, 2018) with varying factors that recognise the complexity of trying to predict or formulate associations for student success. Scholars grapple with the role of collecting data on outcomes (Liu et al., 2018) and the use of metrics by policy-makers (Jackson & Bridgstock, 2018). In contrast, a historical and philological analysis of the notion of success in terms of empowerment, luck and chance provokes fundamental questions about student agency within the rigid structure of universities (Nelson, 2018).

The 12 articles that form this Special Issue demonstrate the complexity given the phenomenon under study. Instead of lamenting the seemingly fragmented views on student success, we affirm the diversity of perspectives being brought to bear on this complex construct. As more voices join the conversation, we anticipate that the field of research will expand and evolve. Yet, there are risks to the current ambiguity and relativism of the student success discourse that warrant closer attention.

Student success does, can and maybe should mean anything to anyone. Surely, every person who engages in helping any higher education student succeed sees that ‘success’ is defined, weighted, lived, achieved and appraised in myriad ways. Researchers find that statistical analysis of almost any education data reveals that four-fifths or more are potentially explainable only with reference to individuals. People with philosophical inclinations can source hundreds, if not thousands, of ideas and theories that might be marshalled into conceptual perspectives and even normative assertions, sometimes buttressed by political ideology and overt moralism.

Perhaps because of this ambiguity and ubiquity, student success is an area in which many people stake claims to expertise. Such extreme relativism renders problematic the study and the progression of this important phenomenon. It means that there tends to be many competing claims and voices. It means it may be difficult to prove certain advances, which are actually very important, and that valuable inquiries may go unfunded. Well-marketed inquiries may gain prominence with compelling claims that simplify student success into a commercial product that appeals to policy-makers and university decision-makers seeking simple answers to a complex issue. There are risks in having too much ambiguity in student success research. Where higher education researchers struggle to form a coherent narrative about student success, collective efforts fail to have an impact and competition erupts that diminishes important collaboration and delivery.

The balance of this editorial considers the governance perspectives for this field. The preceding remarks convey a relativism and despondency, which may appear to render fraught any effort to articulate a meaningful agenda. However, we conclude this article by carving out a positive stance that assumes that the future is not as fraught or hopeless as it may sometimes appear. We explore three avenues for governing sustainable research.

First, we argue for research focused on meaningful topics that advance student success. This bestows value in pursuing both significant and feasible research opportunities. It follows that research experts should not invest energy in topics unlikely to yield meaningful dividends for students. The opportunity costs are way too high. Of course, funding and publication are the instruments for steering energy in ways that ensure such impact. This, in turn, emphasises the role of funding agencies, institutional managers, publishing companies and editors. Such institutions and people should not encourage research that is not likely to achieve impact.

It is important to push beyond the political or commercial language that sometimes seems pervasive in this field. Second, therefore, we emphasise the primacy of ideas and data over eloquent rhetoric. High-quality scholarship shapes powerful discourse that swamps rhetoric which stands on flamboyant language alone. This view is straightforward, though not necessarily uncontroversial, yet it carries difficult implications. For instance, it means that studies must involve clear theoretical and empirical methods and assumptions. Researchers must be scientifically honest in conveying the generalisability of research outcomes and relevance for practice, and they have an obligation to challenge rhetoric and study what has worked and what has failed and to produce ideas and data that will progress practice.

Third, meaningful and high-quality research must be reported in ways that encourage change; research is not an end in itself, and research communities should be disrupted if they become closed or conservative and are not read or recognised by key audiences. As argued, the value of a study should be framed by its capacity to have a meaningful impact, to register meaningful advance in student success. This, in turn, requires making effective channels for communicating outcomes and engaging target stakeholders in change. It also implies techniques for registering the nature and extent of change that has occurred. Bibliometrics are not a panacea here, and local and larger solutions are required. As higher education experts, student success researchers should work to not only record the impact of their work but also develop technologies for impact assessment.

These three governance perspectives are by no means exhaustive or exclusive, yet they seem reasonable for ensuring the quality and impact, and hence the overall value of research in this field. A diversity of research perspectives is to be expected, yet an ‘anything goes’ approach is problematic. The above structures are suggested to guide progress. Prosecuting disciplined research would surely yield important and required progress.

We hope the papers in this Special Issue are of interest to practitioners and researchers alike. They are intended to register compelling insights and stake foundations for the important work that comes next. We are grateful to the authors, reviewers and editorial team for their contributions.