University attrition prevention strategies are typically generic, centrally managed, whole of university strategies that have emerged from an examination of whole of university attrition data. This paper takes an intra-organisational comparative approach, through the examination of faculty and program attrition rates of students who joined an Australian university in the first term of 2004. The faculty with the highest attrition had a rate two and-a-half times that of the faculty with the lowest rate, and in programs with 40 or more students enrolled the program with the highest attrition had a rate over five times that of the program with the lowest rate. The paper identifies five practical implications of these findings and concludes that investigating the causes of these differences will help in understanding student attrition. It also suggests that universities wishing to reduce student attrition may benefit from adopting integrated and situated strategies that take into account faculty and program differences.

While diversity and commonality are not necessarily contradictory aspirations in relation to contemporary teaching in higher education, they exist potentially in a state of dynamic tension, fostered by market-based and government-induced policies that strive to have the largest and widest possible client or customer base while reducing costs by standardising delivery and assessment. This paper explores this dynamic tension between diversity and commonality through three empirical cases of different types of students at Central Queensland University in Australia: Indigenous, pre-undergraduate and international students. The paper presents an analytical synthesis of the particular teaching strategies developed by academic staff working with students in each case: experiential learning, transformative learning and culturally situated pedagogy. The authors argue that these strategies constitute a potentially effective means of helping to resolve the dynamic 2 tension between, and of unravelling the Gordian knot linking, diversity and commonality in Australian contemporary higher education.3

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