S is for Students
by Alan MacEachern
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Illustration by Amanda Woodward
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Manitoba recently reported the findings of its Survey of Early Leavers, involving almost 1,500 full-time university and college students who dropped out before completing their program. In any given year, about one-quarter of the province's undergraduates become "early leavers," so the study was an opportunity to better understand a situation with a presumably significant social cost. What's especially noticeable about the report is the degree to which early leavers were satisfied with the educational system, and still left.
Sixty percent of the early leavers had enrolled in a university with a specific career in mind, and 80 percent were attending their school of choice. In other words, they were relatively focused. They may have overestimated their abilities - about two-thirds rated their communication skills at admission as "good" or "excellent" - but that's likely no different than the general university population.
The most common explanation for why they dropped out, given by 44 percent of respondents, was a realization that the program was "not for them." Another 23 percent were working to finance their studies, and couldn't maintain a job and university simultaneously. There was little indication of bitterness toward the university. Eighty-one percent described their instructors as accessible, 76 percent were satisfied with the quality of education they received and, remarkably, 79 percent were still satisfied with their initial decision to enrol. Most respondents apparently did not feel that they had been weeded out of university: 57 percent planned to return, and 40 percent were in fact already doing so.
This made me think about the master's students I see occasionally at Western - often the students with the best undergraduate records - who hit a wall within a month or two of arrival. They have hopped from high school to university, moved through their first degree, and then sail into their second with no clear sense of why they are doing so: it is as much inertia as anything else. The master's program I run is one year, so most students tough it out, even if they have come to doubt the wisdom in having enrolled. But the same sense of uncertainty occurs among undergraduates, when high-achieving high school students suddenly find themselves questioning what they are doing in this program, this university or university at all. Given that this is a four-year investment, many quite sensibly decide it is time to step back and do something else, perhaps work or travel, before continuing their education. They see this as a personal decision and not reflective of the broader system.
The Manitoba report's executive summary opens with the blunt declaration: "Overall, students who leave postsecondary institutions in Manitoba do so for reasons not primarily related to the institution." This may be strictly true. But doesn't the institution, the system, bear some responsibility for admitting so many students who turn out not to be fit or fitted for the programs they chose, or at least not ready to complete them? Add the students who muddle through or switch programs - neither group would appear in this survey - and you have a significant portion of the university community investing a lot of time and money in things that aren't really right for them.
Last month, in "R is for Role Models," I noted that there are many more works about professors than welders. (I also challenged readers to name a good book about a carpenter. To those who responded "the New Testament," there's no prize.) And the unequal distribution occurs within universities, too: fictional faculty almost always teach within the humanities or social sciences, most often in English or history. In books and movies today there's nary a sign of a chemistry department or a business school - let alone a trade school. This gives young people a skewed sense of what options are available. They are trained to assume not only that they will go to university, but also what they will take when they get there. We read about the steps to inform young women about engineering programs, but growing up on Prince Edward Island I had no idea what engineering was either. I didn't know if an undergraduate degree in history would be financially rewarding - what on PEI was? - but at least I could conceive of the program.
Universities can't dictate to culture, to make sure that the next big college movie is set in an engineering faculty or that the next J.K. Rowling is set among physics students. For that very reason, we have to do a lot better job ourselves of giving would-be new students a lot more information about what might lie ahead for them, about their options - including community college and trades. And we have to identify and promote academic role models on our own. We can't assume that either high school guidance counselors or TV will tell would-be frosh everything they need to know.
Alan MacEachern is a professor of history at the University of Western Ontario.
