Academic failure is an important and personal event in the lives of university students, and the ways they make sense of experiences of failure matters for their persistence and future success. Academic failure contributes to attrition, yet the extent of this contribution and precipitating factors of failure are not well understood. To illuminate this world-wide problem, we analysed institutional data at a large, comprehensive Australian university and surveyed 186 undergraduate students who had failed at least one unit of study in 2016, but were still enrolled in 2017. Academic failure increased the likelihood of course attrition by 4.2 times. The students who failed and persisted attributed academic failure to a confluence of dispositional, situational, and institutional factors. There was a compounded effect of academic failure on already-vulnerable students resulting in strong negative emotions. Viewing persistence as an interaction between individuals and their sociocultural milieu opens up different avenues for research and considerations for support.

Ensuring student success has long been on the research agenda in higher education. In this study, we seek to understand if the changes students make in light of academic failure are consistent with this literature. Little is known about students who fail but subsequently persist in their studies. Through an online survey with students who had failed and persisted, we identified drivers for persistence and how students adapted in response to academic failure. Thematic analysis showed that the majority of students did not seek institutional support following academic failure but they did seek support from peers, family and friends. These adaptations occurred at multiple levels: dispositional, situational and institutional. Drivers reported were internal (desire to complete) and external (desire to meet expectations). Although the majority of our students showed positive adaptations following academic failure, a significant portion reported no changes to their academic strategies. The paper poses the question of how students who fail can be better supported to continue successfully.

In Australia, there has been a sustained investment in widening participation activities by the federal government through the Higher Education Participation and Partnership Program (HEPPP) and a sustained effort by universities and their partner schools to create high-quality widening participation programs. However, there is limited longitudinal evidence on if and how these widening participation activities influence the application rates to university by school leavers from low socio-economic status (SES) backgrounds. This article draws on a large mixed-methods study which aimed to investigate differences in university application rates between students from low SES backgrounds in urban versus rural, regional and remote (RRR) schools in Queensland. The research found that widening participation programs had a positive and statistically significant influence on application rates to university in highly engaged schools. We propose the concept of a virtuous circle of sustained widening participation activity to explain the positive results in highly engaged schools.

The Best Chance for All was developed in 2018 as a long-term policy vision for student equity in Australian tertiary education. We argue in this article that COVID-19 has exacerbated the issues that the policy vision sought to address and has increased demands on and of post-secondary education. Specifically, we argue that the magnitude of the social and economic challenges presented by COVID-19 warrants holistic policy responses that enable the transition to a connected tertiary education system; one designed to deliver choice and flexibility for lifelong learners. A roadmap for this transition exists in the form of The Best Chance For All. The vision can be actuated through demand driven funding arrangements across tertiary education that are coherently aligned to optimise the performance of both the higher and vocational education sectors and are underpinned by sustained investment in equity outreach and support.