How CSU lifted its most complex cohorts to fifth in the country
If your university still relies on fixed, one-size-fits-all prerequisite frameworks to move students through professional degrees, there's a fair chance you're building attrition into your own design.
The Universities Accord has been clear about where the sector is heading: broadening participation is now a national economic necessity. We're not going to meet future workforce demand on the back of traditional 18-year-old school leavers alone. The growth is going to come from equity cohorts, first-in-family students, regional communities and mature-age learners.
And yet many institutions admit these students into legacy academic frameworks designed for a completely different generation, then, when those students leave, reach for the familiar explanation: they weren't prepared, or their lives outside uni were too complicated. That's the deficit frame at work. The sector keeps coming back to a better question, one that looks past the student's preparation and asks what the institution they walked into was really built for.
We recently sat down with Professor Renée Leon, Vice-Chancellor of Charles Sturt University, to talk through how CSU set that passive approach aside. By putting accountability squarely on curriculum design and executive KPIs, CSU climbed to fifth nationally for overall student satisfaction whilst holding a 90 per cent student progress rate across some of the most complex regional and online cohorts in the country.
The core-unit bottleneck: the case of clinical maths
To understand why traditional curriculum design lets modern equity cohorts down, it helps to look closely at a single service unit inside a professional pathway. At CSU, one of those bottlenecks sat inside entry-level maths.
This wasn't a maths major full of STEM-focused students. It was a compulsory core unit acting as a strict prerequisite for vital healthcare qualifications such as nursing and paramedicine. Students entering these pathways were failing because they couldn't get through the calculations needed to safely manage clinical medicine dosage rates.
As Professor Leon noted, many mature-age and regional students come to university via vocational pathways, or after decades away from formal study. They often don't arrive with senior high school maths behind them. Leaving a standard, abstract university maths curriculum in place put an immediate, artificial barrier in front of otherwise highly empathetic and practically capable future healthcare workers. That single unit became a real point of failure, one that left anxious students doubting themselves and, too often, withdrawing from higher education altogether.
CSU held the standard and the rigour of the clinical calculations exactly where they were, and re-engineered the unit around them. They set aside the abstract theory and redesigned the curriculum to isolate and build the exact calculation capabilities a clinical environment demands. By matching the design to the skills cohorts actually arrive with, the university brought failure rates down, lifted student progress and protected the regional healthcare graduation pipelines those communities depend on.
Making it systemic: rewriting the executive KPI framework
A philosophy of structural equity and scaffolding won't survive if it's treated as a side project run by a single student-facing support unit. Real institutional change means embedding student success into the way the university is actually governed.
At CSU, the curriculum work was backed by genuine accountability. Student progress metrics are written into performance agreements across the whole institution, from the executive team right down to the lecturers and sessional academics in individual classrooms. The university keeps a close eye on unit-level data, looking at student satisfaction and success rates at the end of each teaching session.
When a unit shows an unexpected drop in progress or a spike in attrition, the institution intervenes at the level of curriculum and resourcing, where the fix belongs. Making every area accountable for its retention data is a big part of how CSU moved from 20th in the national QILT rankings for overall student satisfaction up to fifth, and it makes a simple point: regional equity cohorts thrive when the institution takes ownership of the learning environment.
The Accord has challenged the sector to broaden participation. CSU shows the way there: hold the standard steady, and redesign curriculum to take away the barriers that were never doing any real teaching in the first place. When universities take responsibility for the learning environment their students step into, better retention and stronger graduate outcomes tend to follow.
Watch the full webinar on demand here.
At Vygo, we're focused on making student success achievable at scale, helping institutions build the systems, support and infrastructure that let more students thrive, persist and graduate.
If you'd like to explore what scalable student success could look like at your institution, get in touch with the team today.
