A chara, – Let’s talk about dropout rates. I read that the most recent statistics for dropout rates in Irish third-level institutions released by the Higher Education Authority (HEA) say that the increased percentage of undergraduate students not progressing to second year is up from 9 per cent to 15 per cent and this seems to be a problem (Education, February 29th).
This exercises people who count such things but sometimes they are looking at the wrong problem.
I asked a group of first-year critical skills students if they knew anybody who had dropped out of their college courses. Most of them had.
I asked if they knew why and their answers suggested that students drop out for all kinds of reasons.
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Some of the reasons they listed were people being unprepared for the shock and overwhelming feelings about coming to college in terms of the degree of independence expected of them. So immaturity is one factor. Some found that they had made decisions in school when they were 15 or 16 about subject choices for the Leaving Cert that led them to take courses that held little or no interest for them at eighteen or nineteen.
So unfulfilled expectations and the realisation that comes with that is another factor. Some cited long commutes and lack of accommodation. While others remarked that some people availed themselves of the opportunity to make money by either working or taking up an apprenticeship and that this was at least part of the motivation to drop out.
The conversation reminded me of an encounter I had with an 18-year-old student a number of years ago who I saw was struggling with assignments and who I wanted to inform about student support and which has, since then, made me consider dropout rates not as being problematic but being an expression of agency.
This student made it very clear to me that at 18 years of age he was in control of his own destiny and that there was nothing I or his parents, or anyone else, could do about his time in university.
This brought home to me that some first-year students realise that they are adults. As adults they start to think for themselves and begin to make up their own minds about who they are and what they want to be and do. It is actually a liberating act and should be seen as such.
It would serve the higher education sector better to worry less about dropout rates and pay more attention to putting in a process for managed disengagement or “friendly decoupling”, to borrow a term, as well as thinking more seriously about “re-engagement” rates.
The problem should be about how to reengage somebody who went to college, left and now feels like a failure as far as higher education is concerned. These people are not failures, just people who have made an informed decision; they tried it, didn’t like it and went and did something else.
Instead of now being locked out of third-level education they should be enabled to think that they are taking a break and will be welcomed back when they are ready.
The Aontas Adult Learners Festival recently celebrated widening participation and access for people who never had the chance of going into third level in the first place.
In all the talk about lifelong learning, the HEA would benefit by putting more energy into thinking about how to get people back into education in their twenties, thirties, forties, fifties, sixties, seventies, eighties . . . – Yours, etc,
Dr DEREK BARTER,
Department of Adult and Community Education;
CHIDIEBERE PRAISE BENSON,
STEPHANIE KEANE,
LILY GALLAGHER,
EANNA WARD,
TARA TRAYNOR,
Critical Skills Experiential Learning,
Maynooth University.