Melbourne`s leading universities ranked bottom in student satisfaction, compared with smaller private universities.
In the annual "Student experience survey" released today, the University of Melbourne, the University of Monash, the University of Rahab and the University of Victoria are all below the national average.
For the first time, the federal education department will release a full ranking to show students how they feel about teaching, support and resources at their colleges and universities.
The survey is part of an effort by Birmingham (Simon Birmingham), the education secretary, to "increase transparency in student sentiment," although it is considered flawed and useless by critics.
Senator Birmingham told Fairfax Media that he would use the result to determine how much money the university would receive once Tan Po government lifted the university funding freeze in 2020.
The University of Melbourne`s satisfaction fell to 77.5 percent from 79.4 percent last year, while Victoria University ranked last, falling from 77.1 percent to 72.6 percent.
On the other side of undergraduate satisfaction, the universities with the highest satisfaction were Melbourne seminary (University of Divinity), Notre Dame University of Australia, (University of Notre Dame), and Bond University, (Bond University), Gold Coast. All of these schools scored more than 90%.
The results are similar to previous findings, which show that satisfaction at Australia`s top eight schools (Go8) has been low. Go8 students are thought to have higher expectations, in part because they are more likely to come from wealthy private schools and college-educated families.
Go8 CEO Vicky? Thomson (Vicki Thomson) said she was satisfied with the extra transparency, but warned high school graduates not to rely on student survey data.
"there are some flaws in this particular investigation," she said. "I`m just warning students not to use it as a single indicator to make college choices, especially Go8.. We have trained about 80 percent of chief executives, every Nobel laureate, and 83 percent of Australia`s ambassador and high commissioner. "
This is better news for graduate students at some Melbourne universities.
In terms of graduate satisfaction, both the University of Melbourne and the Royal Melbourne University of Technology (RMIT) were above the national average, while Deacon and Swaben scored high on both.
Tan Bao government has frozen university funding until 2020, except for a few special deals. Thereafter, universities will have to be competitive in order to receive government grants and will be constrained by the growth rate of the working-age population.
Senator Birmingham says student satisfaction will be part of the decision on how much extra funding universities will receive after 2020. "We are focusing on improving satisfaction, which is why we want to link the growth in university funding to the results of 2020 performance," he said. By motivating universities to focus on areas such as student satisfaction and experience, we should see better results from graduates and employers and better value for taxpayers. "
The survey, funded by the Federal Ministry of Education and conducted by the Australian National University`s (ANU) Research Centre, will be published on Wednesday on quality indicators on the Learning and Teaching website.
Sydney`s colleges and universities share the same results, and some of the larger and more prestigious universities are poor in terms of satisfaction survey results.
