The risk of being excluded: non-traditional, disadvantaged and underachieving students

1! ! Chapter 2 The risk of being "excluded": Non-traditional, Disadvantaged, and Underachieving students Teresa Padilla-Carmona*, Dan F. Stănescu**, José González-Monteagudo*** *Department of Educational Research and Assessment Methods, University of Seville, Spain ** National University of Political Studies and Public Administration, College of Communication and Public Relations, Bucharest, Romania *** Department of Theory and History of Education, and Social Pedagogy, University of Seville, Spain Key-words: at-risk students; progression; drop-out; widening participation; higher education. Introduction The first problem in studying inclusion in the higher education setting concerns the difficulty in definition and identification of at-risk students. On the one hand, we need to clarify what exactly “progress”, “success” and “inclusion” in higher education means. Not only is a matter of definition but a question of how progression is measured and monitored. 2! ! On the other, we have an ever-increasing diversity in the student body that often leads to correlate socio-cultural factors with low performance and drop-out. Under such assumption, the so-called non-traditional students (NTS) have been considered as disadvantaged students (DS) that are more likely to underachieve or even drop-out. The NTS/DS often have poor performance though there is not always a clear relationship between all the characteristics commonly attributed to the NTS/DS and poor performance. Hence, this chapter will try to characterize how higher education performance (“progression”) can be understood as well as to identify which group of students can be considered at-risk of exclusion so that the interventions in the field of HE can be more effective. An overview on participation and progress in Higher Education This section provides some statistical information on access and progress in higher education in Europe in order to delimit the extent to which underachievement and dropout can affect the students’ population. Several international research reports (Eurostudent project being the most noticeable) thoroughly account for the ever increasing number of new publics entering higher education as well as for the socioeconomic conditions under which they live and study. According to the last Eurostudent report (Eurostudent V, 2012-2015), in 17 out of 29 participating countries, more than half of the students’ parents have attained higher education. Students without HE background are underrepresented in all Eurostudent countries except Norway. Last OECD report (2014), Education at a glance, showed that more than half of 20-34 year-olds in tertiary education have at least one parent with that level of education (56%), and slightly more than a third (36%) have at least one parent 3! ! with upper secondary education as highest level of attainment. In addition, the proportion of 20-34 year-old tertiary students whose parents have not completed an upper secondary education is small: about one tertiary student in ten has parents with below upper secondary education (9%). It is worthy to note that, according to Eurostudent V, the students without HE background more often have a delayed entry into higher education, are older than students with HE background, favor non-universities over universities, tend to be better represented in Bachelor than in Master programmes, and tend to prefer engineering over humanities subjects. As to age of new entrants in HE, on average across OECD countries, 82% of all first-time entrants into tertiary-type A programmes and 58% of first-time entrants into tertiary-type B programmes in 2012 were under 25 years of age. The share of older students, however, varies greatly between countries, being the Nordic countries the ones with large shares of students older than 25 (Eurostudent V). Eurostudent V (2015) also provided information about access routes. According to it, most students entered HE through regular routes but alternative routes do exist: 8% students accessed by upper-secondary qualification-adult learning; 5% through special exams aiming at some student groups; 4% by accrediting prior learning; and 3% through special access courses. More students entering through these alternatives routes can be found among students without HE background, among older students, and among delayed transition students. Additional information about other social, cultural and economic conditions of HE students at Europe can be found in Eurostudent V, which informs that: - In two thirds of Eurostudent countries, about 10 % of students have children. 4! ! - In more than half of the Eurostudent countries, at least 40 % of students not living with parents engage in paid employment alongside their studies. The employment rate varies especially with students’ educational background and age. Employment during term-time is more common among students without higher education background. Older students also engage in paid jobs more frequently than their younger peers. - In two thirds of the Eurostudent countries, the share of second-generation migrants is around 10 %. - In three quarters of the Eurostudent countries, 5 % of students report that any health impairments they may have present a big obstacle. According to this information, it seems clear that the student body in European higher education has undergone significant changes leading to an increased diversification. Most of the existing widening participation data and research across countries relates to access to higher education rather than to completion of study (Quinn, 2013). Much more attention has been paid to open up higher education institutions to new publics than to ascertain to which extent these new entrants progress along their academic life and success. Performance, progression and completion in higher education The difficulty in definition and identification of disadvantaged, at-risk students always arises when dealing with issues of widening participation in HE. There are not universal terms to represent a heterogeneous group not always visibilised under a specific name or category. A first attempt to identify them consists on differentiating between: 5! ! • Underachieving students which in most cases can be characterized as those who do not finish the programme in the scheduled time and spend more semesters/years. They are “delayed” students (late graduates or inactive students as characterized in some higher education institutions) or students with marks under the average. • Drop-out students, which refers to those students that do not finish their degrees, many of them might change the degree and not necessarily abandon university. According to Siegle and McCoach (2009), most definitions of underachievement involve a discrepancy between ability or potential (expected performance) and achievement (actual performances). Hence, underachievement is commonly seen as a discrepancy between the level of student's performance and her academic potential (Reis and McCoach, 2000; Matthews and McBee, 2007). Reis and McCoach (2000: 157) proposed an operational definition of underachievement and they asserted that “underachievers are students who exhibit a severe discrepancy between expected achievement (as measured by standardized achievement test scores or cognitive or intellectual ability assessments) and actual achievement (as measured by class grades and teacher evaluations)”. Most of the definitions of underachievement consider the underachievers as gifted students (e.g., Siegle, 2012) that fail to succeed in educational settings. However, in the context of this chapter, we refer to underachievers as those who have skills/competencies to achieve a good academic performance, but do not achieve as much as they could due to several factors. Each student may under-achieve for a somewhat unique combination of reasons (Siegle and McCoach, 2009). The reasons underlying poor performance of the underachieving students have been traced to psychological, relational and social-community factors. There is some agreement in considering that there is no single cause that explains this 6! ! underachievement but there are numerous factors, both inside and outside of the formative setting that can contribute to it (Crosling, Heagney and Thomas, 2009). These include family and community dynamics, school/university curriculum and teaching methods and personality features. As to drop-out, there is no generic and universally agreed definition of retention, dropout and completion rates. The commonly held conception of retention is the extent to which learners remain within a higher education institution and complete their programme of study within a given time frame (Jones, 2008; Quinn, 2013). As a consequence, drop-out students are those who leave university early and do not complete their studies. However, the term "drop-out" itself is complex (Quinn, 2004) and can be controversial as it implies failure. It does not necessarily reflect the reality that most students wish to or will return to education at a later stage. Some researchers (e.g., Field and Kurantowicz, 2014) refused to use the term ‘drop-out’ in a pejorative sense and rejected the idea that withdrawal from a programme is invariably wasteful, for the individual or for society. According to Merrill (2012), the term non-completion better addresses the experience of many early leavers who reported identifiable gains from their time at university and had left for positive reasons. The research conducted by Quinn et al., (2005) also found that some drop-out students did not consider leaving early higher education as a disaster, had sound reasons for withdrawing and recognized that they had gained skills, confidence and life experience in spite of not having completed higher education. According to these preliminary considerations, this chapter deals with the identification of the students’ groups that can be at risk of exclusion at higher education. Though drop out is not necessarily a negative process if it derives from positive reasoned decisions, we do consider that this phenomenon sometimes concurs with an individual sense of failure 7! ! and represents a setback in people’s life plans. From the institutional perspective, withdrawal is a sensitive matter and raises questions about the efficiency and effectiveness of higher education institutions (HEI). Even more important is the social dimension of higher education and the need to fulfil the aspirations of the London Communiqué (2007:5) that “the student body entering, participating in and completing higher education at all levels should reflect the diversity of our populations”. That implies for HEI to remove any obstacle, especially those related to social and economic background. If not, all widening participation policies and efforts are doomed to failure as HEI are opening their doors to new publics but neglecting the real progression (performance, completion, success, retention or achievement, whatever the term we prefer) of some students. Non-traditional and disadvantaged students During the last decade, the profile of the students entering higher education has changed, as their traits, their reasons, and their expectations also changed. This particular group cannot be seen as homogeneous, since the criteria used in defining or describing nontraditional learners are wide and various. For instance, to Correia and Mesquita (2006), non-traditional students are adult people who: dropped out school, may not have academic qualifications, have been apart from the formal academic system for quite a while, do not have previous experience in higher education, and have a low economic and social background. Many of those students enroll in low frequency courses, due to factors related to limited time for study or lack of flexibility concerning schedules. They are commonly financially independent (Crawford, 2004; Chao, DeRocco, and Flynn, 2007). Also referred to as re-entry students, returning students, mature-aged students or new students (Kenner and Weinerman, 2011), non-traditional students are usually described 8! ! as opposed to traditional or conventional ones. Taking into account the most common path, one can consider that, whereas a traditional student is defined as one that enrolls immediately after graduating from high school and completes the degree by the age of 24 (Philibert, Allen, and Elleven, 2008), the non-traditional one is an individual over the age of 24/25 (Kenner and Weinerman, 2011). On the other side, the conventional student can be described as one who is 18-24 years old, resides on university grounds, and attends school full time as a product of the support afforded by the parents or relatives, economic assistance from grants and scholarships or both (Kimbrough and Weaver, 1999; Philibert et al., 2008). On the contrary, adult learners are identified by a number of specific characteristics, some of which include: age, employment, family (in many cases non-traditional students are parents and/or caregivers), and financial responsibilities associated with it (Kimbrough and Weaver, 1999). Concurrently, some studies have included in their definition of non-traditional students, characteristics such as: gender, race, ethnicity, national origin, education, religion, finances, language, and lack of information, disability, and socio-economic status (Schuetze and Slowey, 2002; Taylor and House, 2010). In this chapter we have adopted the definition offered by Johnston (2011) whereby by ‘non-traditional’, we mean “students who are under-represented in higher education and whose participation in HE is constrained by structural factors. This would include, for example, students whose family has not been to university before, students from lowincome families, students from minority ethnic groups, living in what have traditionally been ‘low participation areas’, as well as mature age students and students with disabilities“ (Johnston, 2011, p. 5). In this volume, we will refer to the categorization proposed by RANLHE Project1 (Johnston, 2011, pp. 41-47) in which five groups of nontraditional students were identified: 9! ! • Students from low income backgrounds - For these students there are likely to be issues about their cultural capital and habitus, and how they interact with the field of higher education, as well as material constraints on HE access and completion. In this group, transition to HE is still seen by low-income groups as an uncertain process which involved considerable material ‘risk’ and cost. In fact, financial problems are clearly major influences on retention and drop out for low-income students. • First generation students - Recent research has been interested on ‘first generation students’, normally defined as students with neither parent having previously completed a degree. In this group of students it is emphasized the importance of ‘social capital’ and the way it interacts with cultural capital and habitus. • Students from minority ethnic groups, immigrants and refugees - These students have more difficult adaptation to HE, as well as more constraint factors about funding studies. Also they can expect little support from her family in choice-making or funding higher education. The language is an important factor when the studies are done in a language different from the native context. • Mature age students (including part-timers and students with work and family responsibilities) - Again such students often come from low income backgrounds and experience some of the problems already identified for people from low income backgrounds, and indeed first generation students. These problems are often compounded by additional issues arising from work and family logistics and finance, as well as a lack of confidence in their overall academic, study and IT skills due to a prolonged absence from mainstream study. • Students with disabilities - In response to student disability, some European universities are required to give students with a disability the same opportunities as students without 16! ! Di Pietro, G. 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(2008) The first year experience of higher education in the UK. Avalaible at http://www.heacademy.ac.uk/ourwork/research/surveys/fye (Accessed: 1 October 2015). Footnotes 1RANLHE (Access and Retention: Experiences of Non-Traditional Learners in Higher Education) was a European Lifelong Learning funded project developed from 2008 to 2011 in eight universities from seven countries: Ireland, Spain, Poland, Sweden, England, Scotland and Germany. More information at: http://www.dsw.edu.pl/fileadmin/www-ranlhe/index.html ! ! !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!