Student success is a design choice

If We Want Students to Succeed, Universities Must Stop Pretending Their Lives Don’t Exist: Student Success is a Design Choice

The following keynote was delivered by Western Sydney University Interim Deputy Vice-Chancellor, Education and Students, Professor Karen Nelson, at the ACSES Policy Symposium Dinner on Tuesday, 8 September 2026 (please check against delivery).

I acknowledge the Turrbal and Yuggera people as the owners of the lands we are meeting on this evening and I pay my respects to their Elders past and present. I acknowledge the presence of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people and our Senior First Nations leaders who are attending the dinner this evening.

I’m honoured to be asked to speak with you this evening, thank you to Shamit and Ian for the invitation. It’s particularly lovely to be speaking with you after dinner, when everyone is relaxed, well‑fed, and therefore more likely to agree with me.

Student success

Tonight, I want to talk about something that sounds simple but is, in fact, one of the most complex challenges facing Australian higher education: student success. Not the glossy marketing version. Not the “we have a strategy” version.

The real version — the one that is about flourishing, wellbeing, positive emotions, self-efficacy, confidence, agency, power and control, achievement, outcomes and attainment. And student success that is shaped by colonisation, intergenerational poverty, hunger, housing, culture, identity, wellbeing, and the everyday pressures that impact on students’ lives long before they enrol in classes.

Let me begin with a moment from 2008. Denise Bradley — whose name I invoke often, but whose courage we sometimes forget — The late and formidable Emeritus Professor Denise Bradley set out a vision for a higher education system where a student’s postcode or circumstances of birth did not predetermine their future. She reminded us that higher education transforms individuals, communities, and nations. It does, I am one of those stories.

Sixteen years later, the Australian Universities Accord has taken that ambition and raised it dramatically: an 80 per cent tertiary participation target and 55 percent of students aged 25-34 years old to have at least a Bachelor’s degree. Eighty per cent participation, 55 per cent attainment rate. It’s bold. It’s inspiring. And — let’s be honest — it is going to be utterly impossible to achieve if we continue as we have been. If we continue as if academic success will somehow just happen.

Because it doesn’t. It never has. And pretending otherwise is one of the great fictions of our sector.

Access is not enough

Reaching the 80 per cent participation / 55 per cent attainment targets are not simply a matter of enrolling more students. We could fill our physical and virtual classrooms tomorrow and still fail spectacularly. And that 55 per cent target must be evenly achieved for all demographic and geographic cohorts, not just an average. We know the Bradley 40 per cent target is not evenly distributed and the 20 per cent rate for students from poor backgrounds has stalled at 16 per cent.

The target will only be met if we create a system that is designed to optimise the participation and success for students who have historically been excluded or underserved. As we heard from the wonderful students on our panel this morning, we must reshape our higher education system for:

If we don’t radically change the design of our system with the view to transforming outcomes for these groups, the 80 per cent / 55 per cent targets are not targets at all. They are a mathematical impossibilities dressed up as aspiration.

Why do we need to change the system? Well, here is the uncomfortable truth.

For years, we’ve comforted ourselves with the idea that if students, irrespective of their backgrounds and circumstances, have access to the same curriculum, the same teachers, and the same support services, they will have the same chances of success.

That has never been true.

It is even less true now.

You were here this morning, you heard from our students, they were quite clear - students — especially those from the groups I’ve just mentioned — are studying in conditions that some people find it hard to imagine.

National surveys show rising food insecurity, housing precarity, and inadequate income support. None of these have improved in the past decade. All are compounded by very concerning levels of poor mental health and wellbeing.

Many students are working more than 20 hours a week just to survive.

Others are caring for children, siblings, or Elders.

Many continue to face racism or discrimination on campus.

And yet we continue to ask — why their participation rates and outcomes differ, and one of my particular favourites, why don’t we just provide better support?

Seriously!

Rethinking success

As a sector we are hamstrung by the idea that ATAR predicts success. Well, as Andrew Harvey reminded us yesterday, of course it does, because it is a measure associated with students who are already academically enabled.

However, not only does the ATAR only explain only a small proportion of variance in university performance, more importantly it is entangled with the very inequities we aspire to dismantle - socioeconomic status, school resourcing, and other structural disadvantages.

So, the real question that has exercised me for more than two decades, is not why some students fail. It is why do we continue to design universities that make success harder than it needs to be - for the very students we need to succeed?

Marcia Devlin told us more than a decade ago that students from low‑SES backgrounds and university norms are socio-culturally incongruous.

Fong‑Emmerson and colleagues told us that Indigenous students are expected to thrive in environments that rarely reflect, respect, or respond to their identities.

Maria Raciti reminded us that place matters — deeply.

None of this is new.

What is now new is the scale of the challenge — and our willingness to confront what it means.

Because if we take these insights seriously, then the conclusion is unavoidable:

Universities must fundamentally rethink the way they are designed and operate.

Not as a nice‑to‑have for the equity students.

Not as an add‑on.

But as core business focused on student success.

Why do we need to do this? Well, remember the characteristics of the students we need to reach that 80 per cent target and let’s be clear

These are not “external” issues.

They are the conditions in which learning happens.

These issues shape the precursors of learning — students’ social, emotional, and cognitive engagement. They are the difference between retention and attrition. Between opportunity and inequality. Between our current system and a system designed to optimise student success

What needs to change

Here’s a few ideas – there are more, but this is a dinner speech!

Policymakers must stop treating support for learning as discretionary. If we are serious about 80 per cent participation, we must be serious about:

Belonging, wellbeing, and cultural safety must be recognised as indicators of educational quality — not optional extras.

Institutions must redesign themselves around the realities of contemporary student life. That means:

These are not fringe services. They are the infrastructure of equity.

And all of us operating on the understanding that engagement is relational.

The relationships between students and educators are critical — as long as we attend to the whole student.

Putting students at the centre

This newly designed system, would have “students at the centre.” Not just their learning, but the reality of their circumstances and its impact on their lives as learners.

Putting students at the centre means acknowledging that universities are social institutions embedded in communities, and that they, like the communities they serve, are facing profound economic, cultural, and structural pressures.

And it means acknowledging that the conditions for learning are not created by students.

They are created by us.

My advice to university leaders

Now, because this is a dinner speech, I will keep my advice simple.

But of course — simple does not mean easy.

First, develop a deep, evidence‑based understanding of the students who attend your institution. Not the mythical “average student” or the ones you would like to have, the real students who attend your institution.

Second, systematically build the learning conditions that enable those cohorts to thrive. That includes:

Third, align everything within your institutional control — policy, practice, culture, systems — with student success. Be deliberate and intentional about proactive support (we know what the issues and signs look like). Identify and remove administrative and academic practices that are barriers. And invest in the professional development of staff so that success‑enabling conditions become part of the institutional fabric.

Nation-building work

This is not glamorous work.

It is not headline‑grabbing work.

But this is nation‑building work.

If we want to honour Bradley and O’Kane — if we want an Australia where opportunity is not inherited — we must stop pretending that academic success is determined only by what happens inside or outside the classroom after students commence university.

It is determined by history and circumstance, by what institutions do, and by the extent to which equity infrastructure becomes the institutional fabric.

The big question is no longer whether universities should step into roles once considered beyond their remit or not.

The question is whether Australia can afford for us not to do so.

Conclusion

So tonight, as we enjoy good food, good company, and perhaps another glass of wine, I want us to hold onto one simple truth:

Student success is not a mystery. It is a design choice.

And if we choose well — if we choose equity, belonging, cultural safety, flexibility, and humanity — then we will not only meet the Accord’s ambition.

We will build a higher education system worthy of the students and communities who have entrusted us with their futures.

Thank you.

ENDS.

11 September 2026
Media Unit