In East Asia, higher education support policies (HESPs), as the core of the social policies targeting young people, have undergone a significant transformation since the 2000s. The aim of this article is to articulate the reformation process of HESPs by focusing on the National Student Loan system and to investigate whether support for youth is still considered a family responsibility in the post-2000s environment. The findings offer a crucial clue in understanding the transformation of the familialistic East Asian welfare regime. The analysis reveals that Japan continues to respond to the expansion of youth support through family policy, but Korea is attempting to provide support for youth directly to individuals as an independent welfare target. This implies that HESPs are gradually losing their family-oriented characteristics, although these characteristics remain present in Japan, and that the familialistic East Asian welfare regime itself may transform in the future.

Despite the continued investment in Indigenous support networks and dedicated education units within universities, levels of key performance indicators for Indigenous students—access, participation, success and completion (attainment)—remain below that of the overall domestic student population in most institutions. It remains important to determine what works to achieve Indigenous student success in higher education. This paper proposes that such methods have an integral role to play in providing a holistic view of Indigenous participation and success at university, and are particularly useful in the development and evaluation of strategies and programs. This project found no quantitative correlation between financial investment and success rate for Indigenous students. A negative correlation between access rate and success rate suggests that factors other than those that encourage participation are important in supporting successful outcomes. Those universities that have high success rates have a suite of programs to support Indigenous students, but it is not immediately clear which of these strategies and programs may be most effective to facilitate Indigenous student success rates. In this discussion, we suggest that a multi-layered determinants model is a useful way to conceptualise the many factors that may impact on student success, and how they might intersect.

Increasing Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander participation in higher education can play a critical role in transforming lives and is the trajectory to closing the gap and reducing disadvantage. Despite recent progress, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples remain significantly under-represented in higher education. Poor retention and high attrition rates of these students come at significant financial cost for the individual, community, university and government. Wirltu Yarlu, the Indigenous Education Unit at the University of Adelaide has reviewed the role student support services play in improving retention and completion rates, with an aim to improve Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander student retention and completion. The newly developed Student Success Strategy is an innovative approach to student support that aims to identify and respond to individual student needs in a more effective and efficient manner. The model encompasses a self-assessment tool designed to measure progress across several domains. Self-assessments are used to inform student specific support needs which in turn enable support staff to personalise future interventions for each student and respond accordingly in an attempt to reduce and prevent student attrition.

The current change agenda to improve the persistently lower rates of access, participation and outcomes of Indigenous Australians in higher education is a broad one that attempts to address the complex range of contributing factors. A proposition in this paper is that the broad and longer-term focus runs the risk of distracting from the detailed considerations needed to improve support provisions for enrolled students in the immediate term. To bring more attention to this area of indicated change, we revisit ‘the gaps’ that exist between the performance of Indigenous and all other domestic students and the role that student support services have to play in improving retention and completion rates of enrolled Indigenous students. We outline some principles that can guide strategies for change in Indigenous undergraduate student support practices in Australian universities to respond to individual student needs in more effective and timely ways. These are illustrated using examples from the redevelopment of services provided by an Indigenous Education centre in a Go8 university, along with data gathered from our ARC study into Indigenous academic persistence in formal learning across three Australian universities.