USyd student says Australian universities may be failing to prepare graduates after Penn exchange

Schubert, who is studying Commerce/Engineering, spent the exchange halfway through a five-and-a-half-year degree at the University of Sydney. She writes that 'The content was not harder': her subjects were pitched at roughly the same level as their University of Sydney equivalents, assessed in much the same way, with a similar weekly workload. What differed, she says, was the delivery.

At Penn, professors wrote everything by hand on a blackboard, working through each problem in real time, while at home lecturers often display pre-typed solutions and narrate over them, which she finds efficient but ultimately detrimental to learning. Penn's lectures were not compulsory, but they were not recorded either, so attendance became self-enforcing. Small weekly homework tasks, worth only a few per cent of the grade, obliged her to consolidate each week's material instead of exhuming it in the final fortnight. In classes small enough to allow it, everyone was cold called once or twice a session. At USyd, she says, a participation mark can usually be secured with one perfunctory comment, after which students are free to drift off. For someone who had never voluntarily raised a hand in an Australian lecture, she writes, this was petrifying, and it was where she learnt the most.

The biggest difference, she argues, was the students. 'Every American I met could articulate precisely why they were doing their degree and where it would take them.' They asked questions constantly and volunteered answers without fear of being wrong. In her experience, Australian lecture theatres typically play out with the lecturer pleading for a response, enduring a long silence, then supplying the answer themselves. 'Tall poppy syndrome, as far as I could tell, had not been granted a visa.'

She believes her American classmates were no more intelligent than Australian students; they had simply been asked much earlier and much more insistently what they wanted to do with their lives. Three years into her dual degree, she was not sure where it was leading, and she says neither are most of her Australian university friends. 'My ATAR, not my ambition, chose my degree,' she writes.

She acknowledges the American approach is 'no utopia', favouring families who can pay for private tutoring and admissions consultants, but says it makes teenagers confront a question Australians put off for half a decade. Another difference is how universities compete for enrolments: top American universities focus on the experience, with some building lazy rivers, while at Penn faculties hosted dinners, the Dean threw a formal, and societies handed out doughnuts and sodas. Her Penn-branded sock drawer, she writes, was 'a line item in a marketing budget'.

Australia's roughly 40 universities are almost all public, large and broadly comparable, and with domestic fees regulated, their fiercest contest is for international students. The domestic student experience, she argues, is largely overlooked. The 2025 Student Experience Survey found only 37.3 per cent of domestic undergraduates enrolled on campus attended all their classes in person; of those, 54.4 per cent felt a sense of belonging, compared with 45.5 per cent of students who mixed online and in-person classes.

She is not suggesting Australia import the American system 'price tag and inequity included', but says much of what made Penn's classrooms work would cost very little: lecturers could work through problems by hand and cold call in classes small enough to allow it, and the people who set the exam could learn the names of the people sitting it. Since the name on a testamur rarely sets a graduate apart in Australia, universities should push students towards projects, teams and societies from first year. 'Penn won me over with socks,' she writes, asking Australian universities for something worth far more: 'graduates who walk out knowing what they want to do next and how to achieve it.'