Modeling the undergraduate student experience, student socialisation, and fields of study differences in New Zealand

The undergraduate student experience in contemporary New Zealand is fraught with enormous difficulties. The various dimensions of student life have received increased research attention by higher education institutions, professional educational organizations and governmental agencies. However, these studies appear to serve mainly managerial purposes insofar as they focus on quality assurance while they tend to pay little attention to the potential impacts of students’ educational experience on their prospective labour market participation. Contesting the benchmarking-driven ‘official’ student surveys by drawing on interdisciplinary life course perspectives, this study conceptualizes higher education as a transitional life stage between compulsory education and paid employment. The research findings are derived from a mixed methods study that combines a large scale student survey (N=1882) and in-depth interviews (N=20) at The University of Auckland. The contribution of this independent, student-focused sociological investigation to the burgeoning higher education literature is threefold. First, an empirically plausible model of the undergraduate student experience is proposed through Structural Equation Modeling. This model captures some of the key dimensions of the learning experience as identified by mainstream higher education research, including several aspects of student satisfaction and their engagement with academic staff. Reflecting the transitory nature of the student years, ‘satisfaction with the employability facilitating aspect of the university experience’ is specified as the dependent, latent construct in the main model. A considerable proportion of this endogenous measure is accounted for by three latent variables (R2=0.41). Second, the sociological ‘determinants’ of the undergraduate experience are explored by way of comparing two sets of social background characteristics of students. The first represents conventional measures of Socio-Economic Status (SES). The second one is rooted in the concept of socialisation and it is labelled as ‘Propensity for Relational Diversity’ (PRD). It is demonstrated that PRD is more closely related to the student experience than is SES. Third, a non-traditional classification of academic fields is offered which withstands empirical scrutiny. By considering curricular requirements for practical applications in academic programmes, the research draws a distinction between ‘General’ and ‘Professional’ fields of study. It is shown that students’ overall academic satisfaction is driven by different factors in the two major groups. The findings from this nearly completed doctoral project suggest that distinct student groups have considerably different prospects of achieving upward social mobility in the era of global expansion of higher education, credential inflation, permanent fee rise, and the ballooning student loan debt.