Drop-out rates show that the jump from cosseted second-level to you’re-on-your-own third-level can be a transition too far for many students
YOU KNUCKLED DOWN, you paid your dues, you did your time and sat your Leaving Cert. Now you’ve got the points and a place in university, and everything’s gearing up for freshers’ week when you’ll start life anew as a college student. But are you ready for what’s in store? The news this week that university students are dropping out of science and technology courses in droves raises questions about how well secondary-school students are being prepared for the demands of third-level education.
For some, the recent figures point to a disconnection between what – and how – students are taught in the run-up to the Leaving Cert, and what’s expected of them in college.
Tom Boland, chief executive of the Higher Education Authority, suggests a closer look at what he calls the “border” between post- primary education and higher education. “That crossover needs to be much more porous,” says Boland. “There needs to be much more understanding of what goes on . . . so that both systems understand the needs of the other and both systems understand what is happening with the other, so that they can work together in the interests of ensuring that students get the best possible education.”
From an academic perspective, one of the key issues is the focus on State exams in secondary school. “At post-primary level there is far too much of students learning for the test – that being of course the Leaving Cert – rather than learning to learn,” says Boland.
As a result, students come from a goal- oriented academic environment to the more loosely structured environment of university learning, and many buckle at the transition.
“It’s the difference between dependent learning and independent learning,” explains Prof Danielle Clarke, of UCD’s School of English, Drama and Film. “The fundamental distinction is that school learning is very structured, it’s quite formal. You’re told what to do, when to do it, how to do it. In university you’re told those things, but how you manage them is down to you. You’ll be given the outline of what your course consists of, but you have to do the running.”
Coming from a structured environment with daily homework deadlines, first-year students can find the longer-term project deadlines of university a challenge, with time-management issues exacerbated by the sudden lack of the school timetable scaffolding.
“On the academic side the thing that students find most problematic is that they’re trying to manage so many different things, different subjects and different students. It’s the whole scale of the thing,” says Clarke. “When you go into school, somebody says, ‘Here’s your timetable’. In UCD you sign up, you have to work out your own timetable, where your rooms are, what the different lecturers expect. The onus is all on the student.”
NIALL HANLEY ISone such student, who, having just finished his first year studying veterinary medicine at UCD, recalls the difficulties he faced this time last year as he went from school to university. "There's a huge transition," he admits. "I repeated my Leaving to get veterinary, so we were really pushed into things. I was forced to do things, and when I got into college, it was all up to yourself."
Added to the changes in academic expectations are the daily challenges for many students that come with living on their own for the first time. “It’s a very different atmosphere altogether,” says Hanley. “You’re living away from home and you’ve no parents pushing you. You can go out any night you want and not have to ask your parents’ permission.”
All of this comes most often for students as they hit their late teens, a time when they are also moving into adulthood with all the freedoms and responsibilities that come with it. Naturally, there are drawbacks.
“You could come home from school and have your dinner on the table, but in college you have to go to the shop and buy it and think about it, and cook it and watch over it,” Hanley says, sighing. “You have to put more time aside for those kind of things.”
Then there’s the sudden anonymity of a large campus, after years spent cultivating friendships and finding a place within the school system. For some students, this anonymity can be a blessed release; others find themselves lost in their new surroundings.
“You do meet people who are a little thrown by the first few months on a big campus,” says secondary school teacher Niall McMonagle, who teaches English at Wesley College in Dublin. “[In school] you knew your place in the class you were in, and you knew you were good at this or not so good at that. Now you go into a lecture theatre of hundreds of students and you don’t know anything about these people. All you know is that they are all here because they want to be here and have earned a place here, and then it’s all to play for.”
For many, making new social connections is as much a focus of the first year at university as academic achievement. “When you’re trying to make new friends and they ask you to go for a pint, it’s hard to refuse,” says Hanley, who admits that his focus on his social life in his first year may have affected his academic efforts.
“We did a bit more partying during first year in college than we did in the Leaving Cert year. I was getting really top grades in school, and I barely scraped a pass in the first year at university.” Many universities now provide students with some system of orientation to help them in the transition between school and university, though Hanley admits that the guidance received is not always focused on the academic.
“The orientation guide I was given was a fellow who had just scraped the year before me as well, so he wasn’t the best academic guide,” he says. “But he did tell me where to go partying on a Monday.” Yet, despite the resulting pressure on him once exam time came around and the necessity of having to make up for a year of socialising, Hanley has no regrets. “I just barely scraped through exams but had a great year. If I was someone’s guide I’d be telling them the same as my guide told me last year, rather than telling them to study, study, study the whole time,” he says.
Though Hanley managed to make it through to his second year, not everyone in his class did the same, with some not even getting as far as the final exams. “We had five or six drop-outs between September and Christmas, and there’s only 80-something in our course,” he says.
DROP-OUT RATESfor science, technology and mathematical courses are even higher, according to recent figures, with the rate across the seven universities in the State averaging more than 20 per cent for these subjects. Yet, according to Prof Danielle Clarke, when you take in the general drop-out rate across all the subjects, the figure is not quite so alarming.
“If you compare it with the UK, our drop-out cases are not that bad,” she says. “In the vast majority of cases it’s usually wrong subject choice or personal matters. It’s not very often to do with course delivery, although it is sometimes to do with the transition to third-level.”
Often students come through the school system with an automatic presumption that they will go on to third-level, without necessarily examining whether the time is right for such a step. “Some students just aren’t ready,” says Clarke. “There’s a sort of conveyor belt into college, and some students don’t have the opportunity to reflect on whether it’s right for them at that particular point.”
Clarke’s advice for those who do make it to university and find themselves struggling with the transition is to reach out and get help.
“It’s easy for people to drift sometimes, and in a big institution one of the difficulties is that students so frequently don’t come and tell us when they’re having trouble,” she says. “They either think that it’s only them that feels this way, or that their concerns are too trivial for us to bother with. None of those things could be further from the truth.”