MANY university students never talk to their lecturers about ideas from class, exam results or career plans, according to a study of life and learning on campus.

"Somehow universities, with all the financial constraints that they face, are going to have to find a way for students to interact with staff," said researcher Hamish Coates from the Australian Council for Educational Research.

Released today, his survey of 25,000-odd undergraduates at 30 universities is the biggest yet and one of the rare studies to go beyond a popularity contest by asking students what they actually do inside and outside lecture halls.

Just over 50 per cent of students never talked careers with their teachers, 46.7 per cent never raised for discussion ideas from class and 32.2 per cent did not raise their results with lecturers or tutors.

"Why is it that half of students are walking out of universities never having talked about their career plans?" Dr Coates said.

hri Tallon, a student at Macquarie University about to shift from environment/law to arts/law, said that unlike many other first years, he had a very clear idea what he wanted to do: help reconfigure school education around environmental sustainability.

But he was unsure whether to study education, geography, law or environment, and found advice more readily off campus than on.

"It has been tricky to find the direct person to talk to (on campus)," he said.

The 2009 Australasian Survey of Student Engagement directed by Dr Coates found a level of staff-student interaction strikingly lower than that in the US.

In the ACER study, which also takes in New Zealand students, 12.5 per cent of first year students and 9.8 per cent of third year students said they "never" get timely feedback on their academic performance from teachers.

"One would hope the figure would be zero," Dr Coates said.

He said student-to-staff ratios, which had ballooned over the past two decades, were partly to blame for low levels of interaction.

These ratios were unlikely to improve, given the retirement of many academics, the bleak outlook for federal funding and plans to expand student numbers.

"We have to innovate and teach smarter," Dr Coates said.

One tactic might be more information online, backed up by intensive use of small group learning, he said. His survey shows that busy students already spend just three hours a week on campus and more than three-quarters have used an online learning system.