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HomeMy WebLinkAboutThe Goderich Signal-Star, 1969-09-18, Page 164•A OQDERICtI Si«"x�1Ai ` AR, THURSDAY. SEPTEMBER 18, 1969 TINE uLO .• THUMD b In August of this year some ' 40,000 young people in England learned they had been chosen for a university education, but for 5,000 of them it will only be the beginning of the road -to disappointment. They • will be sent down from the universities without degrees - their high hopes and self-confidence dashed. They will have become dropouts. Brian Jackson, the director of the Advisory- Centre for Education, has been making. a study of' this serious wastage in dropouts, and finally has obtained figures from individual . universities showing the average number of their dropouts per annum. From these he has delved into the question: Why do students become dropouts? His findings are of considerable interest to Canadians, whether they be administrators, teachers or students. completion of the present graduate obstacle course. The sense of threat and fear ' is heightened by '"the way the graduate student feels he is often .•treated by the faculty. In most departments he is regarded as the object, rather than the subject of decisions." Thus the report, based on research among the .' departments of 61 universities. Consider the figures. Of 10 English universities withthe lower failure rates, the percentage varies from a low of 3.4 percent to a high of 9.8 percent. But of the • 10 universities with the higher rates, the high is 40.5 percent and the low 29 percent. It is also found that failure varies from faculty to faculty,, as well as from university to university. For example, th•e ,lowest rate 'of dropout w•_as in medicine, which happens to be the subject which generally accepts students with the lowest grades in general education. Its rate is 8.8 percent. Arts has a rate of 9.4 percent; Science 11.8; Engineering 21.8, while Architecture is even higher. WH -Y DROPOUT RA -TU VARY Why should dropout rates vary so much from none university to another?. The failure rate at Reading is three times that ' at Cambridge. Sheffield more than four times, whilst Loughborough is a 10 -fold risk. Variation must, • in part, •"be due to the different standards of the entrants; to the dominance of science and engineering at some, universities, and to the birth pangs of the newly - established universities. However, all the evidence is to the effect that these things are not, in themselves, the causes of the high wastage rates. At Sheffield when the standard of entrants doubled, the faculty went on failing the traditional percentage. A, comparison of London and Liverpool showed they have entrants of very WHY STUDENTS FAIL Charles Kettering, that brilliant and perceptiv-e man, who led the General Motors Corporation Research Department for so .many years, once spoke to the 'engineering students of Detroit and said amongst many other things: "Consider the course of a, man's education from six years until' he becomes a college graduate. Each year he has an opportunity of "failing" withall its attendant disgrace. Hence we build up in his mind a failure complex. Now that is quite the wrong way to look at it. What.you want to do is to teach a man to fail intelligently, and to make him understand it is no disgrace to fail. You have got to remove the taboo surrounding honest failure." 'l'he matter of fear of failure was stressed at a recent meeting of. the American Political Science Association, which includes 15,000 students .in its membership. "Today fear is the dominant motif in the life of the graduate student, if his future depends on his successful similar ability, yet London failed twice as many engineering students as it did medics., Liverpool, on the other hand, failed more medics than engineering students. Perhaps some personal knowledge of .v Liverpool may be interjected to explain that for the past 70 years Liverpool has been very - jealous of its standard- of medicine, whilst its engineering school is relatively, of more recent development. Enquiring more deeply into the dropouts' failures, it is found that half the students dropped out in their first year; more in the • second; with only a 'small fraction sitting and failing in the . finals. That' is to say that most of the failures occurred within months of both school and university agreeing the student was of degree calibre. Few are sent down for disciplinary reasons; the most common causes being illness and academic. ,,,Those who fail for academic reasons often find they are taking the wrong subject. Some have never learnt the way to learn and study. In 1964/65, Brian Jackson contacted 90 dropouts. This year he found the, failure rate much the same as then, so he undertook to interview 50 more dropouts. For many the roots of the trouble lay with the schools, for as Lord Bowden once said: "The choice • which determines the faculty to which a student ultimately goes in a university 'is nearly always made when he is 14." There was the case of the boy who, like so many, had given little or no thought as to what he wanted to study at university. Then he was invited to tell the principal of his school ' what.,be • intended to do. Out of a blue sky he chose electrical 'engineering, mainly because it was the subject most talked about. At university he clung to his subject desperately, though it was apparent it was uncongenial to him. His tutor was remote and unsympathetic. Discussion with him was like "discussing r If you haen't any health insurance: nroii 1O! tobe oftcte� as of ONTARIO HEALTH SERVICES INSURANCE P)AN • You can apply now, as an individual on a Pay -Direct basis or through a Group, regardless of your age, health or financial means. • You'll share in the protection and benefits of "everyone''s health in- surance". in_Ontario. After Oct. 1st, every employer of 15 or more ern-' ployees must enroll every employee in OHSIP. Any employer of more than 5 but fewer than 15 may apply for Group cpveragd. • Monthly premium rates will be: Single $5.90; Couple $11..80; Family $14.75. 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Telephone 482-1111 ' ONTARIO HEALTH SERVICES INSURANCE PLAN ONTARIO DEPARTMENT OF HEALTH The dropouts your legal case with the judge,' instead of your own lawyer," After two wasted years he discovered that what he wanted to do was English and to become a schoolteacher. Here, is an excnple of how a university, which to most is a delightful. environment, became tmthis boy a black maze through which he could not grope his way, Yet another student complained that her tutor could talk of nothing but math. Another did not ever see his tutor because "he did not know him." Sent to a university to read Chinese, a girl eventually became a telephone operator, complaining of "lack of conscience among her teachers." Overcoloured as, these accounts may be, they aso consistent that they cannot all be wrong. When you drop from a university you drop a long way. You drop in the esteem of future employers. Straight from school you might be the "bright boy with good averages;" bat when you say you failed university, your employers don't want you. But in the end, as with the termination of an unfortunate marriage, they were better off. The failed mathematician as a librarian; the failed linguist as a Woolworth's manager and the failed statistician as a primary school teacher. They had all discovered laboriously, if painfully, their true level, and their true aptitude. The scale of loss is devastating and indefensible, yet-- many ewmany students are thrown out because thej' made the eardinal error of choosing a faculty where the lecturers or professors were unskilled in the subtler arts of • imparting knowledge, or where a regular percentage was failed regularly annually and automatically, no matter how much the level of ability varied. An authoritative commission which looked into the appallingly high percentage of dropouts in English universities recommended: "It should be an essential part of . the responsibility of any university department to investigate this problem carefully, and in regard to individual students who, in any given year, fail to complete •a course successfully." There has been -little responseto date,' but now that the universities have been named, with the percentages' of their dropouts, there is more hope that action will be taken. ,• • HOW TO REDUCE THE DROPOUT RATE ' Bringing the university wastage down is a many-sided matter, which' requires simultaneous lines of attack. First at the scbool level, where the standard of counseling and career advice must be first class. Then at universities, we can no longer tolerate teachers who -havereceived no training, guidance ' or, preparation in the arts of teaching and tutoring. • For the universities where the dropouts are lowest are those where the tutorial system is at its best. There can be no doubt that were the-whyole intake of a university havinga dropout rate of 34 per cent, sent to one with a three per cent rate, nothing like 34 per cent would fail. Conversely, if the intake from the three per cent university was sent to the 34 per cent one, they would be failed in the same' percentage as prevailed at that university. Perhaps ,teachers and tutors should learn to assume the, attitude that for a pupil to fail, when there is no doubt of his aptitude and interest in the chosen faculty, is a stigma on mentioned above. employed, it should be possible to reduce the. -overall wastage from 14 to 4 per cent thtoughout the country. Jackson, who is a lecturer in -.English at Cambridge University adds: "It is a matter of competence ,and caring by the university authorities. The present situutioh causes enormous annual loss to the taxpayer, but who can say what price the students pay?" Judging from Jackson s -Tollow-up '• of a proportion of the dropouts, he. feels convinced that most of the trouble lies. with the teachers rather than with the quality of the students; not an altogether unexpected discovery. It has'also been the reason for much of the the tutor. Far too often *the • untrained "teacher" fails to realize that he must appear, in effect, as the servant of the student. Far too often the "teacher" assumes the role of master; preening himself with his superior knowledge, but q-bliviou`s to- his capacity to impart knowledge. It should be possible to resit exams in the fall. One school cut its first year rate from 16 to nine per cent by such means. The possibility of allowing an extra year's course might also be more general, for it is the readiness of the medical schools in England to use such devices, which keeps their rates of wastage so low. If the problem groups could be identified in their first year and the "safety net" measures • 0 legitimate unrest in the colleges and universities, for in a double ' sense, the universities fail their students. Canadian educationalists might ponder the. figures for numbers of students accepted annually for a ' uni'ersity • education. In England in 1969, one out of every 1,250 of the total population gets t� a university. In Ontario, based on the just published 1969 figures, it is one in 286 aliproximately. Did it ever occur to our mentors that we, in Canada, have become infected with "Degree worship"? That many who pursue pure science end upas routine shakers of test tubes? 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