College Dropouts: Student or University fault?

[piercehawkeye45]

http://www.mndaily.com/articles/2007/04/16/71562

Originally Posted by MNDaily

Now at the end of the term we are reminded once again that at every major university, certain courses fail predictably large numbers of undergraduates semester after semester, year after year.
Thirty, 40, and (if we include drops and withdrawals) even 60 percent failure rates are not uncommon, especially in introductory courses, such as mathematics, chemistry and biology, but also occasionally in the social sciences and humanities as well.

An institution whose avowed purpose is to educate students, you might think, would naturally interpret high failure rates as a sign of failure on the part of the course or teacher. Yet such self-indictments are rare, for lack of student success can always be attributed to a host of other causes. Here are two of the most popular.

Blame the victim

Since students must take responsibility for their own learning, it follows they must also be responsible for their failure to learn. Some students (the best and the brightest?) always manage to get through every course, and where some succeed, neither the course nor the teaching as such need be faulted for high failure rates.

The problems must lie elsewhere: for example, in 1) character faults that make students apathetic or lazy or lacking in proper study habits; 2) inadequate finances that force them to work low-paying jobs to pay for fancy apartments - or high tuition; or 3) being products of a secondary education system that leaves students (especially Americans) woefully unprepared for university-level work.

Praise the culprit

If the inadequacies of undergraduates are assumed to be pervasive and generally acknowledged - whatever their cause - then any course that does not fail a significant proportion of its enrollees cannot be doing its job.

"Gate keeper" courses exist for that very purpose, preventing masses of students from entering the promised land, and even in disciplines where there is no danger of admitting too many majors, high failure rates are often taken as evidence of academic rigor. Such courses, it is claimed, help maintain high intellectual standards by refusing to "dumb down" the content or succumb to the pressures of grade inflation. Hard subjects make for hard courses, and when the going gets hard, students start failing.

Now, what's wrong with all the clichés by which a university shifts blame for student failure away from itself?

If students could in fact take complete responsibility for their learning, and hence for their failures, then teaching them wouldn't be necessary at all. But they cannot. The responsibility for education rests as much with the educators as the educated, and so just as every instance of student success redounds to the credit of the teacher, the course and the institution, so also every failure constitutes an institutional failure.

It makes no difference whether the students are under prepared by the secondary schools they come from; it is a university's job to teach the students it admits. For it makes a promise by admitting them - not to hand out free degrees, obviously, but to offer a series of learning opportunities suited to their talents and needs. And when it admits only the upper 25 percent of high school students, there's not much excuse for a university's inability to find ways to make virtually every student successful, not by changing the curve or "social passing," but finding methods that actually work.

If too many students are failing when all of them are taught the same way, then something new needs to be tried. If too many students are failing when they're in large lecture courses, then something new needs to be tried. If too many students are failing when good mentors have already been made available, then something new needs to be tried. If too many students are failing when general education students are enrolled in the same course as pre-majors, then something new needs to be tried.

But how many is too many? What is the percentage that should trigger self-reflection, self-doubt and change on the part of the institution? At what point must we admit that it's not the students who are failing the courses but the courses that are failing the students?

That question only the conscience of the university can answer.

Personally, being a current university student, I think it is mostly the student's fault while teachers can play a big role in it too. I know of many students that just give up when they don't understand the material, blame the teacher, and do nothing to get extra help. But these students aren't part of the controversy, no matter how hard a teacher tries to teach, these students will most likely fail out.

The controversy comes when most of the students are starting to do very bad on tests, assignments, and that. In my Calculus class right now, the average test scores for our first two midterms were 48 and 55 out of 100 and I'm pretty sure the midterms do not get curved. If the average is that low, is it the students fault, or maybe the professors, or maybe just the material is too hard, or a complex combination of the first three?

Another controversy comes when a student does go to class every day, works with other classmates to understand the lessons, and goes to the TA/professor's office hours yet still doesn't understand the material. For all the hard work, should we sometimes lower standards for these types of people to succeed or should we keep our higher standards and let nature sort them out?

Opinions or experiences?

[Hime]

It depends on a lot of different factors.

Sometimes life just gets in the way, as in the case of people who become seriously ill (I know people who have dropped out or taken time off due to clinical depression), get pregnant, or have cash-flow problems. While obviously a reduction in school costs would decrease these instances, it wouldn't completely eliminate them.

Some people get to college and then decide that they're happier doing something else. That isn't somebody's "fault," it's just another kind of education. Bill Gates is one famous example of a college dropout who isn't complaining about it.

Then there are the instances where it is the fault of the school. My alma mater, George Washington University, is notorious in the academic world for not doing a good job of letting students know about graduation requirements, deadlines, policy changes, etc. The advising system does not support the size of the student body, and this results in low graduation rates. The correlation here between the lower-than-average number of students who graduate in four years or less, and the recurring problems with the advising system, suggests to me that it is the school's fault.

And then, there are some students who just have no idea what it takes to be in college. When my fiance taught in a community college, he had students come to him in his office and say "hi, I've missed 17 out of the 20 class sessions, but now that the final is in a week I really want to pass the class. What can I do?" People like that tend to drop out because they're not really invested in the first place. Even a great school can't do much with someone who doesn't even go to class.

[SteveDallas]

I agree with Hime, it depends.

Having said that.... I lean toward siding with the universities. If a particular student can't pass the introductory courses, how will they pass upper-division courses? If you look at math, well, I know math profs who teach "general math" courses (i.e. a notch below "college algebra" or "precalculus") where students can't successfully learn to apply the pythagorean theorem or calculate percentages of a number--things that, arguably, they should have learned long before they got out of high school. You can argue till the cows come home about whose "fault" this is, but I personally feel people like that shouldn't be enrolled at a university. (Ditto for those who can't read and understand a book, or write a coherent paragraph.)

[BigV]

I flunked or withdrew from Calculus three times. The fourth time I passed with a B or a C, I don't remember [/old fart].

Fault? Well, I did take the same teacher more than once, including the term I passed, so that variable remained constant from "experiment" to the next. I was certainly different by the end. I was a much more "together" student, plus I had already discovered several approaches to Calculus that did not work. I think I was having my first real world experience of what would become a pattern in my technical career; that is, that what I lack in brilliance, I more than compensate for in determination. I have long said that I may not get it right the first time, but I will get it right the last time.

In fact, I was on the *ahem* six year plan for my college career. Some of that pace belongs to me, the majority of it. But certainly some of it belongs to the institution as well. How can a college be "proud of its accomplishments", the performance of its students, and not own some of the same for students that don't perform. To me, it's shared, maybe 75-25, student to school.

[warch]

Universities dont want admitted students to drop out and will do many things- tutoring, probation, leaves, etc. to academically support them. For many students, college is the first time they have been in charge of their own learning, not captive in school, and they have to come to terms with their motivation and the required work demands. School can be rigorous, but it should be.

[Clodfobble]

My alma mater, the University of Texas, is well-known for having insanely difficult "weedout" classes for freshman. Class sizes are upwards of 500 and a large percentage of students fail them the first time or more. One especially difficult class is Government, because it's just never as big a part of the curriculum in high school as things like math and English. I watched very intelligent friends of mine suffer long hours of tedious memorization and generally work their asses off only to receive Cs.

And I said no way in hell am I doing that crap.

As with most Universities, it is acceptable to transfer hours in from another college. So one summer, I enrolled in the local community college and took Government as a correspondence course. The test questions were pulled directly from the sample questions in the textbook, word-for-word. After the first two tests I didn't even skim the chapters, I just committed the questions and answers to short term memory. I got an A, transferred the credits, and moved along to more interesting classes.

Screw them and their weedout nonsense.

[Aliantha]

In my opinion it's a combination of things. One is that lecturers and tutors don't get paid for being available to support students (in australia anyway). Also, most students don't know and don't know how to get more support via student counselling. Also, society doesn't value education for educations sake as highly as it could which means that in most cases it's easier for a student to quit than to keep going when it gets tough which inevitably it will in most cases.

Most students don't take advantage of all that is available to them and don't spend nearly enough time doing the work.

[DanaC]

I think a lot depends on how well the student has been prepared for university level work and commitments. We have a slight problem in the UK at the moment with this. The A-level styloe exam used to represent a break point in teaching/learning style, between the more delivered high school material and the more self-reliant, study skills related material of A-level. This meant kids got a bit of a culture shock when they moved from high school to college (pre-uni). Because so many kids entered college ill-prepared for the change in study pattern and found it difficult to adjust, the A-level course was slightly altered to make it less of a change in tone. Consequently, the A-levels now follow on more directly (skills wise) from high school, but in doing so have become less of a preparation for degree style study. Now, the break point and culture shock occurs when the student passes from A-level to degree. Added to that very significant factor are all the factors mentioned elsewhere in this thread, regarding student behaviour, changing focus/ambitions/individual university performance.

Some universities have lower entrance and survival requirements and so they often pick up those students who haven't managed to get into/maintain course requirements in the other universities, so most people who wish to stay in uni usually can do; unless what drove them out is financial burdens or other personal problems.

Most students don't take advantage of all that is available to them and don't spend nearly enough time doing the work.

I suspect that's partly to do with not really understanding what's required of them before they begin the course. No matter how many people tell them how much harder the work is at uni, they may be unlikely to actually relate that to themselves, if they have always managed to coast through high school, or laze about for most the year then rescue the situation with a few well chosen weeks of mad catch up.

Also, doing 'enough' work can be problematic for some people. For instance, I am currently doing a full time degree. It requires appoximately 8 hours teaching time and approx. 35 hours of reading and independant study. I usually manage about 25 hours a week of independant reading and independant study during term time. I am juggling with that a job which on a slow month takes up about 12 hours a week and during busy times can reach up to 30. I feel the lack of those additional hours of study. There are many people juggling far more than that. For the younger ones, there are often similar juggling feats, with many of them working in bars until 3 and 4 am a couple of nights a week. Added to that is the additional pliving in halls away from their parents for the ressure if the student is first time. It's not unreasonable to expect that a number of youngsters will get drawn into the extra curricular activities in a big way (indeed are positively encouraged to) and maybe also feel they aught to be involved in the campus nightlife scene. Everywhere I go in my Uni there are people handing out flyers for one club or another, or holding up banners for some campus event, political or party related. I'd have wasted uni if I'd have come here as a kid i know I would.

When I was teaching HS, if you brought up "what will happen to them in college" as the dumbing down started and continued to make parents happy because Jr. was getting bad grades and the parents were too chicken-shit to put their foot down or make the right call when it came to their home work, classes or meds, you just got a blank stare from anyone you were talking to.
S-why I prefer teaching college.
Finally, we have to be able to tell some kids, you are not cut-out for this.

[TheMercenary]

95% of dropping out is the students fault. I think more so today than when I went to school over 25 yrs ago.

[DanaC]

I think more so today than when I went to school over 25 yrs ago.

Why?

[TheMercenary]

Originally Posted by DanaC

Why?

Very simple, because we have created a society of people who believe they are owed an education by the system, that in someway it is a right. And when they enter the system of higher education, above 12 th grade (much different from the UK system), suddenly they are shocked to realize that the professors require that the actually produce a product for which they are 100% responsible. Not so for all schools, but by and large that is our experience.