“We can’t get students to attend.”
It’s a familiar frustration across universities, education providers, student accommodation providers and student support services.
We create programs, book rooms, organise speakers, promote events and send reminders. Students register. Sometimes enthusiastically.
Then, on the day, half the room (or more) is empty.
The usual explanations come quickly. Students are busy. They’re overwhelmed. They lack confidence. They have competing commitments. They’re not motivated enough.
All of those things may be true.
But what if we’re asking the wrong question?
Instead of asking why students don’t turn up, perhaps we should be asking what happens between a student deciding to attend and actually walking through the door.
Because registration is an expression of intention. Attendance requires action. And there’s often a considerable gap between the two.
The cost of an empty chair
Low attendance isn’t simply disappointing.
Consider the staff hours spent developing, promoting and delivering programs that never reach their intended audience. Consider the industry partners who give their time, the financial resources committed and the students who miss opportunities to build skills, confidence and connections.
Then consider the students who may need that support the most.
The student who doesn’t know anyone. The international student who worries about their English. The student who has never attended a networking event and can’t imagine walking into a room full of strangers.
These aren’t necessarily disengaged students.
They may be students who wanted to participate but couldn’t quite overcome the barriers between intention and action.
And if we accept non-attendance as inevitable, we risk designing more programs that encounter exactly the same problem.
Five questions that could change student engagement
Through our work delivering employability and confidence programs, we’ve found it useful to examine engagement through five questions.
They’re deceptively simple, but they shift the focus from what the institution or accommodation provider is offering to what the student is experiencing.
1. WHY: Why should they care?
We often promote programs by describing their content.
“Learn networking skills.”
“Improve your resume.”
“Attend our employability workshop.”
But students don’t necessarily want a workshop.
They want what the workshop might help them achieve; A job. New friends. Confidence. A sense of belonging. A clearer future.
If the value isn’t immediately relevant to their lives, why would they prioritise attending?
The first question is whether we’re communicating what matters to the student, rather than what matters to the program organiser.
2. FEEL: How will it feel?
Imagine being an international student who has never attended a professional networking event.
You receive an invitation promising an opportunity to meet industry professionals.
Sounds valuable.
But what might you be thinking?
What do I wear? What do I say? Will everyone know each other? Will my English be good enough? What if I embarrass myself?
We frequently promote the benefits of an event without acknowledging the emotional experience of attending.
And those feelings can be powerful enough to override good intentions.
We tell students that networking is important, then invite them to a room full of strangers without necessarily teaching them how to do it.
What if we started from zero?
Instead of assuming students know how to network, we could teach them the actual steps and the hidden rules. How to introduce themselves. How to start a conversation. What questions to ask. How to follow up.
And give them opportunities to practise those skills in a psychologically safe environment before expecting them to use them with industry professionals.
Our communications can play a role here too.
We need to give students an experience of the experience before they have the experience.
Help them imagine walking into the room. Show them what will happen, who they’ll meet, what they’ll be asked to do and how they’ll be supported.
When students can picture themselves participating successfully, attending may feel considerably less daunting.
3. TRUST: Why will they believe you?
Institutions and accommodation providers communicate with students constantly.
Some messages are important. Some are promotional. Many compete for attention.
So why should a student believe that this particular event will be different?
Trust isn’t built simply by telling students a program is valuable.
It can be strengthened through familiar faces, peer recommendations, authentic student stories and clear explanations of what will happen.
A student who sees someone like themselves participating may feel more confident than one who receives another polished invitation.
And trust often begins well before the event itself.
4. DO: What will they actually do?
This is where we believe many well-intentioned programs fall short.
Students can attend an excellent session, learn valuable information and leave knowing exactly what they should do next.
But knowing isn’t doing.
A student can understand networking without ever approaching someone. They can learn about resumes without completing one. They can listen to advice about finding work without taking a single step towards employment.
What if we designed programs so students actually did the work while they were there?
Not just learning how to make connections, but making them.
Not just discussing confidence, but building it through experience.
And importantly, are we communicating those practical experiences before the event?
Students need to know they’re not simply coming to listen. They’re coming to participate, practise and achieve something.
Participation becomes more meaningful when students leave having accomplished something tangible.
5. AFTER: What will be different?
This may be the most important question of all.
What is the transformation we want students to experience?
How will they be different when they leave compared with when they walked through the door?
Will they be more confident? More connected? Better equipped to find work? More willing to approach someone they don’t know?
We often measure engagement through registrations, attendance numbers and satisfaction surveys.
They’re useful measures, but they don’t tell the whole story.
In our JobSquad programs, for example, students assess their confidence and job-hunting skills when they arrive and again at the end of the day.
This allows us to measure changes in how students perceive their own capabilities, rather than relying solely on whether they attended or enjoyed the experience.
And we also look at what students actually do, because increased confidence should translate into action.
The question isn’t simply whether students had a good time.
It’s whether they leave more capable, confident and willing to take the next step.
If a program ends with students receiving another list of things to do, we may have simply moved the intention-to-action gap to a later date.
The more useful question is whether the experience helped students take a meaningful step forward.
What happened when we changed our approach?
When we first delivered JobSquad, our practical employability program, 80 students registered and just 12 attended.
That’s 15%.
We could have concluded that students weren’t interested.
Instead, we started examining the barriers between registration and attendance, including how we communicated, built trust and prepared students for the experience.
Across subsequent deliveries, attendance rates progressed to 30% and then 57%.
These results don’t mean there’s a universal formula for student attendance. Different students, institutions and programs face different challenges.
But they reinforced an important lesson for us: how we engage students before an event matters just as much as what we deliver during it.
And attendance is only the beginning.
The ultimate goal is to create experiences that help students move from intention to action.
Perhaps the problem isn’t the students
Universities, education providers and student accommodation providers invest significant resources in student support, wellbeing, engagement and employability.
Much of that work is excellent.
But the existence of a service doesn’t guarantee students will use it. And participation doesn’t automatically guarantee meaningful outcomes.
Before developing another program or sending another reminder, perhaps we need to ask ourselves five questions:
WHY should students care?
FEEL – how will attending feel?
TRUST – why will they believe us?
DO – what will they actually do?
AFTER – what will be different?
Because the real measure of student engagement isn’t simply whether students turn up.
It’s whether we’ve helped them take a step they might otherwise never have taken.
Anita van Rooyen is the founder of Student Confidence and a confidence coach and human behaviour specialist.
Karalyn Brown is the founder of InterviewIQ and an employability specialist.
Together, they developed JobSquad, an award-winning, practical employability program designed to help students build confidence, connections and employment skills through action.
