Students are dropping out of higher education institutions at an alarming rate. The Rhodes University Sociology department will examine, at this week’s seminar, the reasons for these high dropout rates and the reasons why students do in fact graduate.
The lunch time seminar, taking place on Thursday, 22 April, at the department, will be presented by Moeketsi Letseka from the department of Education Studies at UNISA. Before joining UNISA Letseka was a Senior Research Specialist at the Human Sciences Research Council (HSRC).
This seminar titled "Student retention and graduate destination” is based on a book of the same title, edited by Letseka, among others, which was recently published by the HSRC.
In the book the author states, "Student attrition has been a perennial theme in South African higher education throughout the past decade. In its National Plan for Higher Education (2001), the Department of Education attributed high dropout rates primarily to financial and/or academic exclusions.
“Four years later, it reported that 30% of students dropped out in their first year of study and a further 20% during their second and third years. Against this backdrop, the erstwhile research programme on Human Resources Development initiated a research project to investigate more thoroughly why students dropped out, what led them to persist in higher education to graduation, and what made for a successful transition to the labour market.”
The chapters in the book “variously address these issues in relation to one or more of seven institutional case studies conducted in 2005. Although the data analysed pertain to the 2002 cohort of graduating/non-completing students and to institutional data for 2004/5, their currency is confirmed by the recent interest expressed by the new Ministry of Higher Education and Training in exploring ways for 'continuously improving the access and success, particularly of black students, at all levels of the system’ (Budget Speech, Minister of Higher Education and Training, June 2009).”
Click here for the free downloadable text