Reconfiguring the Academic Success Matrix through Student Involvement: Implications for a Higher Education Institutions: A Case of Three Selected Universities in Zimbabwe

The article explores reconfiguring the concept of academic success in Zimbabwe, now premised on the attainment of benchmark Doctrine Education 5.0 pillars set by the Ministry of Higher and Tertiary Education, Innovation, Science and Technology Development and enforced by Zimbabwe Council for Higher Education (ZimCHE) as a quality assurance agency. It reviews academic success standards based on teaching and learning; research, community engagement; innovation; and industrialisation. Targeting, HEI quality assurance officers, managers, and students as the population, the study purposively selected three HEIs based on stated science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) mandates drawn from Zimbabwe’s 20 registered public and private universities. Questionnaire-elicited data were analysed using the Statistical Package for Social Scientists and presented in graphs derived from descriptive statistics to enhance meaning in findings. Findings show the five-fold Doctrine Education 5.0 remains news to HEI students although they passively participate as recipients, reflected in students-asconsumers rather than ‘students-as-partners’ among HEIs and later industry. Without students’ voice as HEI partners, success would be analogous to a maternity centre rating its success based on ‘state of the art equipment’ and high calibre staff without mention of babies delivered as core business therein. The article recommends the reconfiguration of the academic-success matrix to reflect the student-interests involvement, and the industrial perspective as end-line users of HEI graduates. A one-size fits-all approach to academic success is not tenable for HEIs, and their divergent mandates call for differentiated methodological approaches to achieve success. HEIs continue to rate their success in terms of student enrolment figure, infrastructural development at the expense of student-centred success criteria that assesses innovative skills capacity and industrial appraisals post-graduation. The shift to a business approach in higher education has been unmanaged, with telling implications for HEIs visions and stated missions, necessitating change. Consolidating HEI success requires Chief Executive Officers’ whose proven mandate espouses all education 5.0 deliverables, particularly innovation and industrialisation through research and community engagement, except for teaching and learning. Nothing in academia prepares Professors as Vice Chancellors for this task, reducing them to duds as their grasp of the five-fold mandate largely remains superficial. HEIs’ success criteria and students’ involvement continue to reflect education 3.0 scope when they should functionally be operating at 5.0, which is just on paper and tick-a-box-kind-of compliance to satisfy minimum quality assurance expectations. A danger of leaving important stakeholders behind until too late lingers, with potentially telling negative ramifications therefrom for all.