Orientation week on the outside

One of my early jobs when I left the social research sector was designing interventions for “first in family” students to help feel more included in TAFE and University courses and achieving stronger outcomes in access, aspiration, retention, and attainment for them. Below is a fictional account based on the numerous discussions I had with students over this period.

The train doors open with a sigh that feels like permission. On the platform, the city is already in motion – students with tote bags, staff in lanyards, posters for clubs, and a volunteer in a bright T-shirt handing out a campus map that looks like a small country.

A first-year student I’ll call Mia steps off the train and pauses for half a beat, because her body is catching up with what her mind has already decided – I’m here. I’m actually here. She’s the first in her family to go to university. No parent or older sibling has done this before. There’s no inherited shorthand for the jargon she’s about to encounter, and no family lore about which lecturers are kind, which subjects are traps, or how you ask for an extension without sounding incompetent.

Her mum hugged her hard at 5:40 a.m. and tried to make it light. “How exciting!” she said, and she meant it. And then, as Mia turned to go, her mum added – “If it’s too much, love, you can always come home.” The line was meant as comfort. It landed like pressure.

Mia’s commute is just under two hours each way if everything goes right. First there is the bus from the edge of town to the station. Then the train to the city. Two hours is the optimistic version – the version without missed connections, without rail replacement buses, and without the day her brother needs the car because the ute won’t start again.

She’s doing Orientation Week because she’s been told, by every glossy brochure and earnest Vice-Chancellor video, that O-Week is where you “find your people”. But already she can see the fine print that isn’t written anywhere – O-Week is built for the students who live nearby, or who moved into colleges. It is built for the students who can say yes to spontaneity. Mia is not one of those students. She has a shift tonight.

At 9:30 a.m. the main lawn looks like a festival. Music. Giveaways. Groups in matching hoodies chanting something about their faculty. There is a free barbecue, a stall pushing a networking breakfast, and a kind of brightness that already feels expensive. Mia walks past students comparing accommodation. Some live in student housing. Another says her parents helped with a studio for first year, just to make the landing easier.

Mia’s accommodation is a bedroom at home, and home is not close. That fact changes everything about how university is lived. It affects whether she joins clubs, whether she can attend evening tutorials, whether she can stay back for the casual coffee catch-ups where friendship happens, and whether she can say yes when group work gets pushed to 7 p.m. because everyone else can manage it.

She is physically present on campus and socially distant from it, a commuter in a culture that quietly assumes residency. Researchers who have looked at regional and remote university students and public transport describe commuting and transport access as a real participation barrier, shaping engagement and retention intentions. The academic language is careful. The lived reality is blunt – if you can’t easily get to campus, you can’t easily belong. Mia is trying anyway.

She approaches a stall for a society she’s vaguely interested in, something about politics and public debate, and the student behind the table smiles and says, “Come to drinks tonight! It’ll be so good.” Mia smiles back automatically, and her brain does the calculation instantly – last train home, cost of a drink, cost of an Uber if she misses the train, the fact she has work at 7 p.m., the fact she’ll need to be up at 5:15 a.m. tomorrow. “Maybe,” she says, and hears how flimsy it sounds. She walks away with a pamphlet she will never use. She collects pamphlets the way some people collect guilt.

Mia works nights at a supermarket. It’s not glamorous. It’s also the difference between enrolling and dropping out. She works because Youth Allowance doesn’t cover enough, because her family can’t subsidise her in the way some families can, because the cost of being a student includes a long list of things no one puts in the slogan – transport, textbooks, printing, a laptop that can actually handle the software, placement clothes for certain courses, and the quiet social costs of participating in a campus culture that often assumes disposable income.

A large share of Australian university students now work while studying. One 2024 Australian student wellbeing survey reported 86% working while studying. https://www.studiosity.com/hubfs/Studiosity/Downloads/Research/2024%20AU%20Wellbeing/Australia%20Student%20Wellbeing%20Survey%202024%20.pdf  You don’t need to treat that figure as holy writ to recognise the pattern – paid work is normal. The question is how much work, and at what cost.

Because for students like Mia, work is time poverty. It is the thing that turns university from a full, immersive experience into a compressed logistical challenge. It is the reason she can’t “just hang around” after class. It is the reason she can’t attend the extra tutorial the lecturer offers “for anyone who wants more support.”

Work is the silent timetable running underneath the official timetable. And there’s a cruel irony here – universities often sell themselves as engines of social mobility, yet the students who most need mobility are the ones forced into schedules that make full participation hardest.

Mia doesn’t describe herself as “first in family” in conversation. She doesn’t announce it. It is simply a fact that becomes visible in the moments she doesn’t know what others seem to know instinctively: how to address a tutor in an email, whether it is normal to go to a lecturer’s consultation hour, or what a distinction-level essay is supposed to look like.

Some of this is academic skill, which can be taught. Some of it is social capital – familiarity with the culture of higher education, with its unwritten norms, and with the quiet sense that you are entitled to take up space there. That is why first in family status is more than biography. It marks a structural disadvantage that deserves formal recognition.

A recent Australian Centre for Student Equity and Success (ACSES) report release on first-in-family status points to the scale of the cohort and its relationship to access and equity. And reporting on that work noted that first-in-family students make up a very large share of the student population, around two-thirds, yet are not formally recognised as a disadvantaged equity group in Australian policy settings. https://www.acses.edu.au/new-report-released-zajac-et-all-2025/  and  https://www.acses.edu.au/publication/fif-status-equity-groups-and-university-access/

Recognition is how resources get targeted. It is how scholarships and mentoring get built into the system, how data gets tracked, and how success becomes something you plan for rather than merely hope for.

Access is often talked about as ”getting in”. but it’s also about knowing how to move once you’re there. On paper, Mia has access: an offer, a student number, a timetable, a seat in a lecture theatre. In practice, she is learning two things at once – the content of her degree and the culture of the institution.

One student mentions a gap year in Europe. Someone says, lightly, “My dad did this subject, he said the exam is brutal.” Mia smiles and nods, and feels a small internal click – There’s a whole layer of university life that some people inherit like eye colour. None of this makes wealthier students bad. Most are not trying to exclude anyone. Many are kind. Many would be shocked to learn how class-coded their assumptions are. The point is that institutions can be socially selective even when they are formally open. That’s the difference between access and inclusion. Access is a door. Inclusion is a room designed so you can actually breathe inside it.

Commuters often arrive, attend class, and leave because they cannot afford, in time or energy, to linger. That means they miss the soft infrastructure of university. They miss the peer explanations after class, the study groups that form on the spot, the club meetings pushed into the evening, and the events that later turn into internships.

And when universities talk about engagement and belonging, they often measure it with instruments that do not fully capture commuter life – whether you joined a club, whether you attended events, whether you spent time on campus, whether you feel connected. Mia is connected to her course content. She is not fully connected to the social life wrapped around it. Her university experience is narrower because the infrastructure around it is narrower.

Work on regional and remote students and mass public transport points to commuting as both a burden and a complicated trade-off, sometimes offering study time, often imposing constraints that shape participation. https://www.academia.edu/101307182/How_mass_public_transportation_influences_the_retention_intentions_of_Australian_regional_and_remote_university_students

That’s a polite way of saying travel time becomes a kind of second job. There is a particular shame in being poor among people who are not. Mia learns quickly that university has many small paywalls: the recommended textbook, the software subscription, the extra transport, the meal bought on campus because lunch from home did not happen, the social rituals framed as optional but functioning as entry tickets.

Food insecurity is one of the sharpest expressions of this. Research tracking Australian university students’ food insecurity across 2022 and 2024 found that food insecurity remained high and that some groups faced significantly higher odds. https://researchers.westernsydney.edu.au/en/publications/food-insecurity-among-australian-university-students-is-higher-an/

Again – you don’t need to turn a study into a slogan to take seriously what it signals, that for a non-trivial share of students, the “student experience” includes hunger, rationing, and skipping meals to make rent or transport work. It is here that class becomes physiological. Exhaustion is a body state. It changes cognition, memory, mood, and persistence.

And then we act surprised when students withdraw. Universities have become very good at the language of welcome. There are banners, smiling videos, and free BBQs. I do not dismiss any of that. Warmth matters. Symbolic inclusion matters. But the deeper question for students like Mia is whether the university is built for her actual life.

On that last point, there has been at least one important recent policy move – from 1 July 2025, eligible students in teaching, nursing, midwifery, and social work began receiving $331.65 per week during mandatory practical placements, as part of an effort to address “placement poverty”. https://ministers.education.gov.au/clare/paid-prac-starts-today

That reform matters because it names a truth – when you require students to work for free as part of their degree, you are quietly filtering who can complete it without harm. First-in-family students often carry a particular moral style into university – don’t be a burden, don’t complain, don’t look foolish, don’t take up too much space. It can look like humility. It can also look like silence.

Mia doesn’t go to office hours in week two because she doesn’t want to waste the lecturer’s time. She doesn’t apply for the small hardship grant because she assumes someone else needs it more. She doesn’t join a study group because she does not want to reveal she is behind. She doesn’t mention the commute because she does not want to sound as though she is asking for special treatment. This is the hidden cruelty of access narratives. We treat enrolment as the hard part. For many students, the harder part begins after enrolment, and the habits that got them there – endurance, self-reliance, not asking – become the habits that isolate them once they arrive.

If we want genuine inclusion, we have to design for the students who will not loudly demand it. That means practical changes rather than better speeches.

1. Treat first in family as a real equity lens, not a demographic footnote. If ACSES-backed work is showing the scale and the stakes, policy should catch up. Recognition is what drives targeted support, from mentoring and scholarships to institutional accountability.
2. Design commuter-first infrastructure. That can be as basic as quiet study spaces that work in the gaps between classes, lockers, somewhere to sit without spending money, and timetables that cluster required classes on fewer days where possible. Hybrid options and transport-aware scheduling for group work matter too.
3. Normalise paid work in academic design. Assessment and support should be built around realistic time constraints, not the fantasy that students have endless discretionary hours.
4. Expand small financial supports that preserve dignity. Microgrants for textbooks or transport help. So do food supports and emergency bursaries that do not force students to narrate their hardship like a confession.
5. Build belonging through structured, low-cost pathways. Mentoring can help. So can study groups built into courses, so participation does not depend on spare time, and social events scheduled when commuters can still make the trip home.
6. Measure inclusion. We already have national tools that capture parts of the student experience, including QILT’s Student Experience Survey. Use that ecosystem to ask sharper questions about commuters, first in family status, and time poverty, and then tie the answers to institutional incentives.

By early afternoon, Mia is already watching the clock, because she’s doing the day math again – if she leaves campus at 4:10, she’ll make the 4:32, if the bus connects, she’ll be home by 6:15, if she eats quickly, she can make her 7 p.m. shift, if she finishes at 11, she can still get five hours’ sleep, if she gets five hours’ sleep, she might be able to concentrate tomorrow. This is what it means to be “included” only on paper.

In the middle of the lawn, the university is selling itself as a community. At the edges, commuters like Mia are already slipping out early, taking their community back onto the train. Mia is capable. She will learn the rules. She will probably do well. She will find at least one friend who understands. But we should not build a system that depends on extraordinary effort from the students who already carry the most constraint.

If we want higher education to be an engine of mobility, we have to stop confusing admission with support. Access opens the door. Inclusion means you do not have to stand in the hallway, pretending you are not tired and pretending you are not calculating the last train home.