VET News

Student Support Services Valuable to Prospective Students

NCVER summarises its research report, Drivers of student training choices – a focus on student support services

Choosing a vocational education and training (VET) provider can be an overwhelming process for prospective students, particularly with the large quantity of training providers and study options on offer. There are several factors that influence students when considering a training provider, some of which were explored in a National Centre for Vocational Education Research (NCVER) research report released in August 2023.

Previous studies have explored influential factors, including views of trusted influencers, course timetables, location of the training, perceived quality of training provider and affordability. Despite this, the extent to which these factors influenced student choices and interacted with each other, as well as the potential role of student support services, remains uncertain.

NCVER’s research report, Drivers of student training choices – a focus on student support services, investigated the influence of the availability of student support services on students when choosing a prospective training provider. It compared student support services with other influences on student choice of training providers including course cost, delivery mode and travel time. It mainly focused on health and welfare support, career counselling and job-search support, and tutoring and guidance on study skills.

The research found that course cost, travel time and course delivery were found to be the most influential factors for students when choosing a training provider; however, the availability of student support services was also a key consideration. Ultimately, students were more likely to consider training providers that offered student support services over training providers that did not offer student support services. There were varying levels of student support services offered across training providers, with any form of support considered more valuable to students than none.

Despite course cost being the most influential factor for students, students were willing to pay additional costs to access student support services, including tailored one-on-one support or group sessions.

The research also found that student support services were considered important for students across all equity groups. Training providers could benefit by promoting in-depth information on the student support services they provide for students across all student cohorts, rather than only for certain demographics such as people with a disability or Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples.

The Drivers of student training choices – a focus on student support services report is available for download on the NCVER website.

This research was conducted by manually scraping a random sample of 100 RTO websites and their social media and MySkills pages. The information served as the basis for creating a discrete choice experiment, with a sample of 650 participants between the ages of 16 and 64. It is one of the first Australian VET research investigations to use a discrete choice experiment to explore drivers of student training choices and to focus on student support services.

The National Centre for Vocational Education Research (NCVER) is the national professional body responsible for collecting, managing, analysing and communicating research and statistics on the Australian vocational education and training (VET) sector.

Date posted Feb 1, 2024