Graduates tell us the size of their campus shaped their university experience – and the data suggests they may be onto something, writes ACU’s Vice-Chancellor and President, Professor Zlatko Skrbis.
On a recent visit to Indonesia, I hosted a dinner for ACU alumni. They had studied at one of our seven Australian campuses and had fond recollections of their experiences.
Years after graduating, the thing they celebrated most was the modest size of the campuses they studied on. They compared them to close-knit villages, places small enough that they couldn’t disappear into the crowd.
This wasn’t the first time I’d heard such stories. Every time I meet with alumni, whether at home or abroad, they tell me their experience was defined by an intimacy and familiarity that’s hard to find on most university campuses today. Which raises the question: how much does the size of a campus influence the experience of the students who learn there?
The national data offers at least part of an answer. In the 2025 Quality Indicators for Learning and Teaching (QILT) Student Experience Survey, released this month, ACU was in the top 10 Australian universities for undergraduate satisfaction, and fourth among public institutions. Among international students, we ranked third of all Australian universities.
This follows our success in the most recent QILT Employer Satisfaction Survey, which we topped for the second consecutive year – affirmation, as I see it, from the employment market as well as from our students.
The QILT results are gratifying, especially when you consider that we perform consistently well on these measures. In 2017, ACU’s student satisfaction sat exactly where it does now, at 80.4 per cent, remaining above the sector average in every year since. Meanwhile, the sector’s numbers have gone the other way, down from an average of 78.5 per cent in 2017 to 76.2 per cent in 2025.
None of this is to suggest we have it all worked out. We’re never perfect, and like every university, there’s always room for improvement.
Interestingly, the universities above us in the 2025 rankings are, with just one exception, relatively small. They include a handful of faith-based and private institutions, and two regional universities with deep local roots.
Writing in Future Campus, higher education commentator Stephen Matchett read the results as “demonstrating the student-service focus of small universities”. What that focus looks like in practice is easier to illustrate with stories than with survey data.
Take Tazarni Clarke, who for three years travelled back and forth from Echuca to our Ballarat Campus to complete her nursing degree. She found both the travel and the study demanding.
“With Ballarat being a smaller campus, I had a lot of support from the lecturers,” she says, noting that they would arrange tutors to help her with study, and took time to sit and discuss the challenges she faced.
“It helped me get through it. If I hadn’t had that support and people willing to help, the outcome would have been different.”
Tazarni plans to work as a nurse in remote Aboriginal communities.
Or consider Sharmalie Wijesinghe, an international student who arrived from Sri Lanka to study nursing in Melbourne, and within three weeks was ready to fly home. A lecturer saw her walking on campus, head bowed, and stopped her.
“She asked me my name and said, ‘You didn’t come to class yesterday afternoon, I was waiting for you’,” Sharmalie recalls. “I told her I was thinking of going back to Sri Lanka.”
The lecturer pleaded with her to stay: “Any issues, you’re going to come talk to me.”
That conversation was the reason Sharmalie finished her degree. She went on to win an award for high academic achievement, and has since spent years working in palliative care.
These are just two examples – andtherearemanymore. The conditions that make these moments possible are harder to create at a larger campus, where students are more likely to get lost in the crowd.
That’s not to say that big can’t also be beautiful. Large universities can and do deliver an excellent student experience, and there are certainly benefits to scale. Indeed, some Australian universities are responding to the pressure we face as a sector by consolidating, and the reasons given for that consolidation – more financial resilience, deeper research infrastructure, greater student choice – are logical arguments I’m not dismissing.
With some 35,000 students nationally, ACU is at the top end of what classifies as a medium-sized university. Yet our largest campus, in Melbourne, has just over 10,000 students. Our smallest, in Ballarat, has around 1,100, and the others – in Strathfield, Brisbane, North Sydney, Canberra and Blacktown – sit somewhere in between.
So while we are relatively big nationally, we’re always relatively small locally.
It’s also true that being smaller doesn’t guarantee student satisfaction. Several of the country’s small universities sit well down the list on student experience, which tells us that scale is not the only explanation.
There’s another crucial factor when it comes to student experience, and it’s something that the QILT survey doesn’t measure: mission.
As I’ve argued before, a university with a distinctive mission that it authentically embraces makes clear choices about things like how student support is structured and what it counts as success.
Students might never say the word ‘mission’, but they feel it. Daniel Ironside, who studies at our Strathfield Campus, puts it better than I could. He chose our university because “it wasn’t about churning out graduates, it was about building people”.
At ACU, our Catholic mission commits us to the dignity and flourishing of every person regardless of their background, a pursuit that is woven throughout our teaching, research and engagement.
Most of our graduates go on to work in what we broadly call the ‘care economy’ – teaching, nursing, midwifery, allied health and social work. We want those graduates to move into their fields not only with skills and a qualification, but also the values that our mission instils in them, and a key thing our small campuses give them: the experience of having studied somewhere they felt valued and part of a community.
We want them to feel the pulse of immediacy. To have empathy, the ability to connect with others, and the capacity to express emotion and relatability – from teacher to student, from nurse to patient, from physiotherapist to client, and most importantly, from person to person.
Zlatko Skrbis is Vice-Chancellor and President of Australian Catholic University.
This article is part of the Vice Chancellor’s Blog, which highlights stories, insights and perspectives from across the university.
