From Crowd Pleasers to Student Magnets: Completion, satisfaction, equity, and demand in Australian universities

Australian universities are being pulled in multiple directions at once. They are simultaneously attempting to lift completion rates, protect (and credibly measure) student satisfaction, widen participation, and stabilise commencements as offshore markets wobble. These are all elements of a similar design challenge: how to build institutions that can both attract students and help them finish their studies.

A chart has been doing the rounds as of late, mapping student satisfaction against completion rates across Australian universities.

The implied takeaway is a trade‑off: you’re either an Academic Powerhouse, with high completion rates but lower satisfaction levels, or a Crowd Pleaser, with high satisfaction levels but lower completion rates.

Look closer, though, and the picture is more complex and revealing. QS top‑200 ranked universities tend to cluster as Academic Powerhouses, while most others sit among the Crowd Pleasers. The top right of the chart – where what we might call the Student Magnets live – is almost empty. Very few institutions manage to both attract students and hold them through to completion.

Part of the problem is measurement. QILT satisfaction scores are captured only from students who complete. Students who drop out do not take the survey. That creates a perverse effect: as retention improves, more disengaged students remain in the cohort that is surveyed, which can pull satisfaction scores down.

But Magnet status isn’t completely unattainable: it just requires solving a genuinely bifactorial challenge. You can’t optimise for one dimension and assume the other will follow. Academic Powerhouses need to ask: How do we keep students and make the experience worth staying for? Crowd Pleasers need to ask: How do we hold onto more students without diluting what students love about us?

The starting point is to challenge historical assumptions. Does the modern student need a three‑year undergraduate degree, or are new degree types a better match (for example, two-year applied degrees)? Does the academic calendar reflect the realities of working students? Do we have genuinely data‑informed, predictive student supports in place? And we should be cautious about crude comparisons. An Academic Powerhouse benchmarking itself against a Crowd Pleaser (which has different cohorts, different missions, and different measurement artefacts) is like comparing apples, not to oranges, but to broccoli.

Still, getting honest about where your university sits, then building a realistic roadmap that everyone understands, from the Chancellor to the cleaner, is essential. Social licence increasingly depends on educational performance, and that means targeting both satisfaction and completion, rather than trading one off against the other.

If we go a level deeper, a confronting predictor of whether a student will stay emerges: the ATAR. Among top‑performing school leavers (ATAR 95–99.95), only around 6 per cent drop out of university entirely. For students with an ATAR of 30–49, that figure is closer to 48 per cent. It’s a flip of the coin for these students which is a terrible current reality.

More strikingly, this relationship hasn’t shifted over time. Completion rates within each ATAR band in 2021 look almost identical to 2012: ATAR 95–100 sits at roughly 96 per cent completion, while ATAR 30–49 sits around 59 per cent. After a decade of widening participation policy and equity investment, the gap has barely moved.

The sector has tried (and for good reason) to move beyond ATAR, a figure that captures a narrow slice of academic aptitude at a single point in time and tells us nothing about motivation, finances, caring responsibilities, or belonging. And yet ATAR remains one of the strongest predictors of completion. That should bother us, not because ATAR is destiny, but because it reveals a deeper problem: we are admitting students into institutions that are often not set up to support them.

Academic skills support remains largely opt‑in. First‑year experience varies widely. Retention efforts are rarely targeted at scale, at the cohorts most likely to leave. Some institutions are responding differently. Victoria University’s Block Teaching Model and the University of the Sunshine Coast’s PACE Model are examples of using ATAR as an educational design input, not just an admissions threshold. (At least in Victoria University’s case, the results have been encouraging.) Yet across the sector, while every institution knows its incoming ATAR profile, few use it to allocate support resources, adapt curriculum design, or trigger early interventions. If they did, the scale of retention issues would look very different.

Where you grow up largely determines your ATAR (tertiary admissions rank). And ATAR, in turn, remains one of the strongest predictors of higher education completion. Some people call this the “postcode effect”. So much for the lucky country!

To illustrate, we mapped socioeconomic disadvantage against secondary achievement across both Victoria and Melbourne. Advantaged suburbs produce students with high study scores and, consequently, high ATARs. Disadvantaged suburbs don’t. It is a postcode lottery, and it is consistent everywhere we looked.

Getting into university against those odds is one thing, but finishing is another. A low‑SES student who gets there has already beaten significant odds. What stops them finishing is rarely academic ability. It is everything else: food insecurity, housing instability, and mental health without a safety net. This is a human services problem as much as an education problem.

A handful of universities globally have addressed this at scale:

1. At Georgia State University, low income and minority students now graduate at or above the rate of the overall student body, thanks to proactive student advisors, predictive financial support, and transition programs targeted at human need rather than academic deficit.
2. Leeds University built a basic needs hub treating food, housing, and financial insecurity as interconnected challenges faced by students from lower socioeconomic backgrounds.
3. Southern New Hampshire University assigned a dedicated advisor to every student from enrolment to graduation, on the explicit premise that what derails students is the social and psychological load they carry, not their capacity to learn.
4. Queen Mary University of London and the University of the West of England are also good examples.

Australian universities face a genuine design problem. They were built to teach at scale and have focused on student acquisition but have not provided the integrated supports that low‑SES students need to finish. For a student from Broadmeadows or Inala, the likelihood of completing a qualification are the same as flipping a coin: it’s a 50/50 chance. There is gap between enrolling and graduating and it must be fixed by connecting what happens in the lecture theatre to what happens outside it. Until universities are designed around that reality, the maps above will keep telling the same story.

Put together, these threads point to the same conclusion. Rather than choosing between student satisfaction and completion, the sector’s greatest challenge is designing for both, across cohorts with very different starting points.

Student Magnets are rare because they require academic pathways that fit real lives, support that is proactive from the get-go rather than opt‑in, and measurement that is insightful to help inform the actions of multiple university staff in a shared and coordinated manner. That is increasingly what social licence is and what sustainable demand will be built on.

Get in touch to discuss how your university can improve both student satisfaction and completion.

Connect with Zac Ashkansy and Christine Samy on LinkedIn.