Nearly a quarter of first-year students - more than 71,000 - will fail to graduate from the university or college at which they enrolled, the Higher Education Funding Council said yesterday.Even 15 years later, most of the drop-outs will still not have achieved any higher education qualifications.
The figures, based on official projections of universities' performance, implied a waste of about £500 million a year and called into question the Government's policy of urging even more young people to enter higher education.
Not included in the statistics are the thousands of students who enrol in haste during clearing but decide that university is not for them and pull out before Dec 1.
More on this Daily Telegraph story here.
The short story is this: state further and higher education has been obliged to take ever bigger numbers. The quantity of tutors has not been similarly increased. So the amount of personal interaction between students and tutors has decline drastically. The courses are therefore less satisfying and intellectually stimulating. The quality of students taken on is, necessarily, on average of a lower academic standard than before. Meanwhile many of the practical courses are pseudo-academic (in a way that must be boring and frustrating) and not truly practical. So they lead nowhere. With all these factors combining together, it is no surprise that the drop-out rate is now so high. Nor is it a surprise that the most low-grade 'universities' giving the most Mickey Mouse courses have the highest number of drop-outs. In some cases, it is verging on one in two of the student intake.
(Also in the same edition of the Telegraph was this article claiming that most students are satisfied with their courses, a rather surprising claim given that so many leave. There is also this leader.)
Posted by James Bartholomew • Indexed in Education
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Actually when I was at University in the early 1980s, there was a fairly hefty dropout rate in Year 1, largely chucking out those who wanted a year's doss at the taxpayer's expense (student grants then).
Andrew is quite right. At some point the hard reality of life has to hit you ; you aren't going to be a brain surgeon, you can't do it.
I don't think the Universities are doing it though ! I think they've watered down everything as well.
You have to to keep the numbers up *or* you lose funding, miss targets etc., because there is a sizeable section of the population that simply isn't academically skilled enough.
I recall as a rookie teacher 20 years ago discussing A-Levels with potential pupils. I was honest with them - if I thought they might struggle I'd say so and I'd say why. These days it'd probably earn me the sack.
Posted by: Paul at September 28, 2005 07:47 AM
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For a qualification to have value, it must be possible to fail, so the cost of those who try and fail is not entirely waste. It would be more efficient, however, to extend the opportunity to fail down to 18-year-olds, or even 16-year-olds.
Posted by: Andrew at September 27, 2005 05:17 PM