The result, students say, is a vicious cycle of falling campus attendance: as fewer students attend class in person, attending class in person becomes even less appealing, and universities offer fewer in-person opportunities because students are not showing up.
“I had this very naive vision of, ‘Oh, wow, I’m going to meet so many students from many different places’ – [but] a lot of students don’t attend, just because they have other work and life commitments,” she says.
He says he went to university in 2019 looking for the picture of campus life his parents had painted: “That kind of traditional sitting on the quad, going for beers and talking about your readings … everyone’s on the lawn at the same time and you run into people.”.
Australian expectations for university life date back to the pre-1980s ideal of study without work, according to Dr Thuc Bao Huynh, a research fellow at Monash University’s Centre for Youth Policy and Education Practice.
Struggling to juggle university and work and given the option to do their coursework online, Jedd Brockhouse’s classmates at La Trobe University in Melbourne’s north see no point in coming on campus.
