Across Australia, the university experience has changed.
Lectures have gone online and face-to-face contact has taken a back seat as the post-pandemic uni sector struggles financially.
Two students who went to the same university 30 years apart share their radically different experiences.
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Janette Wright can still remember the ins and outs of a Friday night at university in the 1990s.
An afternoon chemistry class, followed by a bottle of prosecco on the lawns, and a night at the university bar.
Unlimited drinks for $5 and drink-sculling competitions.
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Lecture halls full of hundreds of students, with 35 contact hours each week.
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Whole days milling about campus and making friends.
Dr Wright was 18 years old and had just stepped out of high school and into university life on campus.
“My memory of uni is that it was so much fun, it was the best time of your life because you were here as a student, that was your job,” Dr Wright says.
“Your job was to be here and the adulting world and the rest of life was sort of going to happen after that.”
The university experience could not be more different for Elijah Anderson.
Mr Anderson has just finished a degree at the University of Tasmania in Hobart — the same institution Dr Wright attended.
But their experiences are 30 years apart.
Mr Anderson started his on-campus degree in 2018, initially as a full-time student but later part-time.
Two years in, the pandemic hit, and, like everyone around the world, he was dropped into the ocean of virtual learning.
But even after restrictions lifted, the final few years of his degree never fully returned to an in-person experience.
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“It took almost two years after it happened to get almost everything back,” Mr Anderson says.
“[But] lectures, I found, for most classes never went back.”
Are students happy with their uni experience?
The National Tertiary Education Union (NTEU) says Australian universities are relying on online resources in order to cut costs, amid a “governance and funding crisis”.
In 2024, 76 per cent of undergraduate students responding to the nationwide Student Experience Survey said they had a positive education experience at university.
But when rating peer engagement, a lower 58 per cent said they had a positive experience.
At the University of Tasmania, the state’s only university, that number was just 38 per cent.
Other universities across the country recorded a mix of largely positive or negative peer engagement experiences.
The Gold Coast’s Bond University topped the list with an 86.7 per cent positive rating, while regional NSW’s University of New England was the worst, with just 26.5 per cent.
The COVID pandemic led to a boom in online learning, which, for some, hampered the student experience.
NTEU president Alison Barnes says campus culture has changed since the 1990s.
“Particularly after COVID when lots of teaching moved online, we’ve seen that change in campus lifestyle,” Dr Barnes says.
And what happens when student experience and engagement go bad?
“It puts students at risk of dropping out or failing units, so it has an impact of whether they stay at university,” Dr Barnes says.
Dr Wright and her friend Giselle sit in a room at their old student accommodation, reminiscing about their university days.
Their glee is contagious as they flip through old photos.
They have returned to Jane Franklin Hall for its 75th anniversary.
Dr Wright, who works as an anaesthetist in Melbourne, met lifelong friends and her husband while at university.
“The beauty of the University of Tasmania was [that it was] a tight-knit, small university,” she says.
“Everyone was able to cross paths with lots of other people.”
The UTAS Uni Bar was the meeting spot for Dr Wright in the 1990s.
It’s where she and her friends would meet after a day of university, attend a gig or even sit an exam.
“It was a good place to congregate and meet as a central place,” she says.
That bar sits empty now.
The venue used to be run by the student union and then the university took over the lease.
Last year, UTAS announced it would not be renewing the lease.
Mr Anderson says the “U-Bar” became a place he went for gigs but not much else.
“It had lost that appeal to the students by the time I was there,” he says.
“I never really saw anyone there, to be honest.“
He says while the pre-COVID years of university were fun, it still wasn’t the vibrant community — as depicted in American movies — that he had expected.
“I don’t know if that’s just Australian university culture or if that’s just how it was because of the times we live in.”
On-campus or on-line?
A growing number of Australian university students are choosing to study online rather than in the classroom.
External and multi-modal enrolments went up 3.6 per cent and 9.9 per cent respectively between 2023 and 2024.
Dr Barnes says online teaching is valuable and important, but universities are seeing online modes of learning as the “cheaper option”.
“If it’s going to be done, it has to be done really well, otherwise it comes at the expense often of staff wellbeing,” she says.
Jack Oates Pryor is the president of the UTAS student association.
He says he takes issue with how the university labels an “on-campus” degree.
“The university currently delivers some on-campus degrees, of which the lectures are 90 or 100 per cent delivered … via the student portal online,” he says.
“This is a sometimes a pretty disconnected student experience.”
For Mr Anderson, it was.
“I’m quite a social person, so I wanted to be able to network with people and meet new friends and all that sort of stuff,” he says.
“I thought that I was going to be able to study on campus when I signed up for on-campus degree.”
Dr Wright says she is glad she had a completely on-campus undergraduate experience.
“I would have found it a lot more of a lonely experience to just see most of the content online,” she says.
“What you miss is all the little side conversations that happen, like chatting to someone as you come in … everything else that gels people together in a community.”
Mr Anderson says he wishes there was an option to have all his course components delivered in person.
He says he didn’t make any friends once the components moved online.
In a statement, UTAS deputy vice-chancellor Natalie Brown said universities had three times the number of students now compared with the 1990s, and the flexibility of studying online had been critical to that.
“Like many regional universities, we serve a student population that is more likely to study online … around twice as many students at regional universities study online compared with the national average,” she said.
She said face-to-face classes were supported by online resources.
“Delivering quality learning online typically costs at least as much as face-to-face teaching and often more because of the high-quality production and digital resources required.”
A sector in crisis
A Senate inquiry handed down a report in December that recommended legislative fixes to refocus universities on serving the public good.
University leaders have described the current situation as a “perfect storm” of funding challenges.
“We’ve seen funding cut to our universities over many, many years … the sector needs to be funded adequately if it is going to meet the needs of students and of Australian society,” Dr Barnes says.
Mr Oates Pryor says although he acknowledges the issues with the sector, he still thinks the fresh-out-of-school undergraduate experience is important.
“I certainly don’t think that that kind of ‘traditional student experience on campus’ is perhaps a priority of universities right now,” he says.
The university experience has also been shaped by an increased need for students to work more on the side.
“Anecdotally, for a number of years we’ve seen more and more students working in order to make ends meet to support themselves,” Dr Barnes says.
“That puts pressure on the learning experience.”
A positive of the online university experience is that some students who are working can more readily access the lectures in their own time.
“Low [socio-economic] students have the same right to access and to achieve a university qualification as those who can afford to take time away from work to attend a course in person,” Ms Brown says.
“This is why we are delivering courses with online options as well as on campus, and we will continue to do so.”
Mr Anderson worked full time during his studies, then dropped to part-time study, to be able to afford rent and other necessities.
He says most of his friends worked either part- or full-time while studying.
“They had to fend for themselves, and they’re paying the rent that Hobart has, and trying to make ends meet.
“It was challenging.”
With 11 campuses spread across southern Tasmania, some describe the current set up of UTAS as “splintered”.
“It is certainly not the vision of the university life that we were perhaps sold as incoming students,” Mr Oates Pryor says.
Credits
- Reporting: Scout Wallen
- Photography/Videography: Ebony ten Broeke
- Video production: Paul Yeomans/Magie Khameneh
- Digital production/digital editor: Daniel Miller
