What the Southern Cross Model is
The reform is a change to the shape of the timetable rather than the content of the degrees. In the university’s words, instead of studying several subjects across a traditional semester, students study in six-week terms, usually taking one or two units at a time. The idea is that a student carrying one subject for six weeks, rather than four subjects for thirteen, has fewer things to drop when life gets complicated, which for a university with a large share of mature-age, regional and first-in-family students is not a small consideration. Southern Cross began piloting the model five years ago and has since rolled it out across the whole university.
The numbers
The case for the model is now a numerical one, and the university has put the figures on the table. On its own whole-of-university data, student success rates have risen 16.3 percentage points since 2019, from 74.8 per cent to 91.1 per cent, and commencing attrition, the share of starting students who do not return, has fallen 16 percentage points, from 35.1 per cent to 19.1 per cent. Satisfaction has moved the same way, with unit satisfaction up from 79 to 86.8 per cent and teaching satisfaction from 83.4 to 89 per cent.
| Measure | 2019 | Latest |
|---|---|---|
| Student success rate | 74.8% | 91.1% |
| Commencing attrition | 35.1% | 19.1% |
| Unit satisfaction | 79% | 86.8% |
| Teaching satisfaction | 83.4% | 89% |
These are the university’s own figures, and worth reading as an institution reporting on itself; but the direction is consistent across four separate measures, and the work has drawn outside notice. Professor Thomas Roche, Pro Vice-Chancellor (Academic Quality) and Dean of Southern Cross College, recently presented on retention in the model at Advance HE in the United Kingdom.
The argument underneath it
What makes the reform more than a scheduling tweak is the premise behind it, which
Professor Roche put bluntly. Universities often take the approach of ‘fix the
student, not the university’,
he said. “But when one in three students is
starting university and not coming back for second year, that is not okay. That is not a
problem with the students, that is a problem with the university.” He said the model
was never dreamed up “to innovate for innovation’s sake” but to address
student success, retention and completion. A recent graduate, Bachelor of Occupational
Therapy graduate Andria Cozza, described the felt difference of the shorter terms:
The six-week terms make the whole thing feel less like a marathon and more like a
series of sprints you can actually train for.
Our read
Two honest notes keep this in proportion. The figures are the university’s own, and the results are whole-of-university, spanning the Lismore, Gold Coast and Coffs Harbour campuses and the online cohort rather than the Northern Rivers alone, so the reform belongs to the institution, not to one town. With that said, the substance is real and it matters locally. Southern Cross is the region’s university, and the group of students the model is built for, the ones balancing study against work and family and distance, is exactly the cohort a regional university serves. Our read, and we label it as ours, is that the most interesting thing here is not the scoreboard but the premise: a university that looked at a one-in-three first-year drop-out rate and decided the problem was its own timetable, not its students, and then changed the timetable. That is a rarer move than the numbers, and it is the reason this is worth watching as other universities look at the same figures.