Transition Into Higher Education: Some Implications for the Employability Agenda

Transition into Higher Education: some implications for the ‘employability agenda’

A briefing paper prepared by Mantz Yorke (Centre for Higher Education Development, LiverpoolJohnMooresUniversity), with advice from ESECT and LTSN Generic Centre colleagues.

© Mantz Yorke and contributors, March 2003

The Perspectives series of employability briefing papers

This set of five papers examines the relationship between employability and higher education. Together they constitute a ground-clearing exercise, summarising some of the key themes in employability as seen from less-than-common perspectives. They will shortly be followed by the Employability Issues for … series,which will brief seven key audiences  for example, employer groups, students, LTSN subject centres  on ways of enhancing student employability in HE. This set of five is complemented by another five papers published early in 2003 by the UK Learning and Teaching Support Network’s (LTSN) Generic Centre (GC) in its Learning and Employability series.

Four of the papers in this Perspectives series explore major employability issues as they bear upon different phases in the student life-cycle  one looks at how schooling, further education and other experiences prepare students for higher education; one at the first year or level 1 experience; one at the student experience, particularly at levels 2 And 3; and the fourth at transitions to work. A fifth sets our concern for employability against overseas research and practice.

This is the second paper in the Perspectives series. The data that Mantz Yorke presents support a variety of conclusions. Three are:

Higher education institutions have adopted a variety of strategies to retain students, with varying degrees of success. Some institutions that have done better than others are identified on page 10.

Improving retention is about resources and support, especially for students likely to be ‘at risk’, and it is also a curriculum issue.

There are significant implications for employability, the upshot being that there is considerable congruence between actions to improve retention and actions to enhance student employability.

Enhancing Student Employability Co-ordination Team and the LTSN Generic Centre March 2003

Transitions into higher education Page 1 of 21

Retention and completion

Retention, completion and employability

Retention and completion bear upon employability in several ways. Plainly, student employability is not enhanced and may be damaged by a premature exit from higher education. This is a matter of concern because of the human cost of failure. It also threatens government efforts to widen participation because there is some evidence (Brennan and Shah, 2002) that wider access may recruit into higher education people who are more vulnerable than members of groups that have long had high participation rates. If these ‘new’ students leave higher education early and in significant numbers, the danger is that widening participation policies will be compromised.

Furthermore, and as it is argued in the final section, the actions that higher education institutions are likely to take to promote legitimate student success and improve retention are similar to those they might take to enhance student claims to employability. There is a coincidence of agenda: employability and widening participation polices make similar demands on the first year curriculum and associated student support arrangements and action on one front can reverberate on the other.

Retention and completion

The issues of retention and completion have risen up various nations’ political agendas as governments seek to maximise the return on their investment in higher education. Assessments of cost and benefit include not only what some term (often pejoratively) ‘wastage’, but also the employability of graduates[1]. The political concern is greatest where a significant amount of the public money is used to underwrite higher education, and is discernible in Yorke and co-workers’ surveys of ‘non-completers’ in England (Yorke et al., 1997; Yorke, 1999b); the literature survey undertaken by McInnis et al., (2000a) for the Australian Government’s Department of Education, Training and Youth Affairs; a report on completion rates in the seven universities in the Republic of Ireland (Morgan et al., 2001); the report on retention produced by the House of Commons Education and Employment Select Committee (Education and Employment Committee, 2001); the report from the National Audit Office (NAO, 2002) and Davies and Elias’s (2003) report for the DfES.

Of particular significance for this paper is the fact that about two thirds of those who leave a UK institution do so during, or at the end of, the first year of full-time study. For many students who leave a programme relatively quickly, a common explanation involves a poor choice of the programme of study. Yorke (1999b) found that, of a sample of 2151 ‘withdrawers’, 39 per cent indicated that poor choice played a part in their decision to withdraw[2]. Responses from 846 students to a survey subsequently undertaken by Davies and Elias (2003) gave a figure of 52 per cent for those who implicated poor choice in their withdrawal during their first year, with nearly half of these saying that this was the main reason for withdrawing. These figures suggest that the process through which students apply for higher education places could be improved – in part, perhaps, by switching to a post-qualification application process. The application process, however, is outside the scope of this paper.

More relevant to this paper is Yorke’s (1999b) finding that around a quarter of the respondents pointed to unsatisfactory aspects of their learning experiences as contributing to their decision to leave their programmes (Table 1)

Allowing for the possibility of an element of misattributing the cause of the dissatisfaction to the institution’s provision, the data nevertheless hint at difficulties with transition. A reanalysis of the data from the perspective of academic progress suggested that the quality of the student experience was one of three factors that tended to differentiate students experiencing difficulty with their academic progress from those for whom this was not a major problem (Yorke, 2002). The more recent study by Davies and Elias (2003) found that around one third of their respondents had been influenced to withdraw by problems with their academic progress, though this appears to have been the main cause of withdrawal in only around 8 per cent of them. Davies and Elias did not, however, explore perceptions of the student learning experience.

Reason / % giving this reason
Teaching did not suit me / 31
Programme organisation / 27
Inadequate staff support outside timetable / 24
Lack of personal support from staff / 24
Quality of teaching / 23

Table 1. The impact of the quality of the learning experience on the decision to withdraw (N = 2151). (Data extracted from Yorke, 1999b, p.38.)

Another important aspect of institutional performance is the widening of participation. Both retention/completion and widening participation have clear implications for employability and graduate employment. This paper seeks to bind completion, widening of participation and employability together by considering a critically important phase, the transition into higher education (post-acceptance) and the student’s early experiences. In so doing, it touches on all aspects of the ‘student life cycle’ (HEFCE, 2001) save the first (aspiration raising).

The paper begins by summarising ‘macro-level’ data for England that have been drawn from the most recent set of performance indicators for UK higher education (HEFCE, 2002), in which retention/completion and student demographic data are prominent, and touches on the way that the retention and participation issues have been treated in press reportage since the indicators were first published in 1999. This opens up a consideration of why some institutions appear to be achieving completion rates better than might be expected even where demographic considerations could be seen as being disadvantageous to these institutions. The paper then draws on studies conducted for HEFCE and on wider research into the student experience in order to suggest some strategies that might assist institutions in their quests to optimise both completion rates and student employability.

Performance indicators for English HEIs

The performance indicators published by the funding councils in the UK (e.g. HEFCE, 2002) show a considerable variation between institutions as regards their projected completion rates. Completion rates are generally higher in the ‘old’ universities than in the new universities and colleges[3], as is shown in Table 2.

Institution type / N / Mean % / SD / Range
(a) Percentage of entrants from socio-economic groups IIIm, IV and V
Old university / 43 / 20.0 / 6.0 / 9-35
New university / 36 / 32.5 / 6.6 / 19-48
College / 14 / 32.8 / 5.2 / 26-45
(b) Percentage of ‘mature’ entrants on first degree programmes
Old university / 43 / 12.3 / 7.8 / 4-34
New university / 36 / 30.8 / 10.5 / 16-60
College / 14 / 29.4 / 9.1 / 14-50
(c) Percentage non-completion (projected)
Old university / 43 / 9.6 / 5.3 / 1-29
New university / 35 / 22.1 / 6.8 / 12-45
College / 13 / 17.0 / 6.2 / 11-30

Table 2. Performance data for UK HEIs (source: HEFCE, 2002).

Notes: Small and specialist institutions are excluded.
Non-completion data were not recorded for two institutions.

Various factors influence completion rates, as the HEFCE tables acknowledge. Two factors that bear on non-completion are

whether or not the student is a ‘mature’ student on entry, and

the social class of the entering student.

Summary data are also provided in Table 2, from which it can be seen that the old universities are clearly differentiated from the rest of the higher education sector. The old universities tend to draw a greater proportion of their intake direct from school (entry typically at age 18) and from those with higher ‘points scores’ in the A Level examinations. They are better resourced than most other UK institutions by virtue of greater research income and – particularly in some cases – fund-raising. The new universities and large colleges tend to have a greater proportion of ‘mature students’ (those entering full-time higher education after a period spent outside the education system, and aged at least 21) and entrants from the lower end of the socio-economic spectrum. The small, specialist institutions tend to be atypical because of their narrowly-focused cohorts. It is noticeable that the college sector, in which institutions are generally smaller than are universities, has lower rates of non-completion than the new universities[4].

The close association between non-completion, percentage of mature entrants to first degree programmes, and the percentage of first degree entrants from socio-economic groups [SEGs] IIIm, IV and V (loosely, working class entrants) is shown in Table 3. Teaching quality assessment data, which are very rough and ready ‘measures’, were included in an earlier analysis (Yorke, 2001c) but, because of ‘clustering’ of performances towards the upper end, had a negligible statistical relationship with completion data.

Non-completion / % mature entry
% mature entry / 0.80
% SEG IIIm, IV, V / 0.79 / 0.74

Table 3. Correlations (Pearson r) between categories of institutional performance.

Note: Universities and general colleges included, small and specialist institutions excluded.

Mature entrants are roughly twice as likely not to complete their programmes than young entrants. Young entrants from SEGs IIIm, IV and V are roughly three times as likely not to complete their programmes than those from the other SEGs[5]. The relevant tables in HEFCE (2002) indicate clearly that non-completion is negatively correlated with entry qualification: those with high A Level scores are more likely to complete their programmes. Data such as those in HEFCE (2002) lead to two different kinds of conclusion, depending on the values being brought to bear. In bald terms, these can be stated as follows:

1. ‘the access movement is not a success, as regards degree programmes’, and students should be aiming for, perhaps, vocational qualifications[6];
2. institutions need to do more to assist mature students and students from SEGs IIIm, IV and V to succeed.

The correlations in Table 3 are confounded by other variables that were not available for inclusion but which are themselves correlated with institution-level data on social class, ‘maturity’ at entry, and non-completion. One is ‘subject mix’, identified by Johnes and Taylor (1990) as accounting for much of the variation between the then universities (in modern UK parlance, the ‘old’ universities) as regards completion rates. Some old universities have medical, dental and veterinary schools (for which subjects the completion rate is high[7]), so this will tend to ease their overall completion rates upwards.

The biggest confounding variable, though, is entry qualification, to which the funding councils can obtain access[8]. The entry profile of an institution can therefore be produced as a matrix in which various parameters can be related. A range of entry qualifications was identified by HEFCE, and these were used in the performance indicator tables to allow for entry qualification in the construction of ‘adjusted sector benchmarks’ for students’ completion of their programmes.

The projected completion rates for full-time students starting first degree courses in the academic year 1999-2000 are given in HEFCE (2002, p.92ff). The percentage rates are, in effect, estimates of the level of non-completion. The assumption is made in this paper that those who transfer to another institution do in fact complete their new programme of study: in practice, a small proportion of these will not, but the error involved is probably negligible. Benchmark performances have been calculated for the percentages of students who neither gain an award nor transfer to another institution.

Widening participation

The Westminster government’s target is that 50 per cent of young people (i.e. those under 30) will have experienced higher education by the year 2010. There has, over the last two or three years, been considerable political pressure for institutions with relatively low participation rates from socio-economic groups IIIm, IV and V to increase their enrolment of students from such backgrounds.

However, this is easier said than done. Table 4 implies something of the problem of encouraging entry from pupils from disadvantaged areas. At the level of the local education authority, the data relating to school performances in England show that in all regions of the UK, high A-Level points scores tend to be negatively associated with social deprivation, as measured by proxy as the proportion of pupils entitled to receive free school meals. In other words, people from the higher social classes, who do not get free school meals, do better at ‘A’ level.

Region / Correlation between deprivation and A-Level points
North East / - 0.76
Yorkshire and Humberside / - 0.74
North West / - 0.67
London / - 0.62
East Midlands / - 0.55
West Midlands / - 0.46
Eastern England / - 0.36
South East / - 0.30
South West / - 0.06
All England / - 0.54

Table 4. The correlation (Pearson r) between deprivation and ‘A’ Level points scores, by region in England, 2001. (Source of base data: DfES website.)

Table 4 shows that the largest negative correlations are to be found in those areas dominated by large cities, and a more fine-grained analysis would probably show that the effect was even more marked in the inner city areas. The effect is probably considerably stronger than is represented in Table 4, since entry to ‘A’ level is class-biased – and of course Table 4 cannot include those who choose not to enter an ‘A’ level programme.

There are a number of examples of institutional and consortia-based initiatives designed to recruit students from disadvantaged backgrounds (Woodrow, 1998; UUK, 2002). These include outreach activities of various kinds, pre-entry preparation arrangements, and curricula specially designed to accommodate those who may take longer than the norm to acclimatise to the expectations of higher education. The cost implications are readily apparent.

An aside on press reaction to the publication of performance data

The press has tended to divide into two camps: newspapers that take the view that widening participation is to be desired, and those that think it has already gone too far. The two camps’ treatment of the completion issue aligns with their stances on participation. Where criticism has been particularly strong regarding those institutions with low completion rates, there has been little acknowledgement of the demographic factors likely to be impinging on student success. The ‘Laura Spence affair’ which erupted in 2000 subsequently drew attention away from completion and towards participation issues in newspaper reportage[9].

There has been a lot of political point-scoring (some of it fair, some muddled, some mischievous, and some plain wrong), which is of significance in that public opinion (or, more accurately, the opinion purveyed by the press) has an impact on the political approach to higher education.

Theory relating to retention and completion

Tinto’s (1993) model of student departure (shown in simplified form in Figure 1) is open to criticism in a number of respects (Yorke, 1999b; Braxton, 2000), but nevertheless provides a useful framework against which the experiences of students can be set. In brief, Tinto argues that students enter higher education having set of pre-entry attributes and with a set of purposes and commitments. They experience the academic and social aspects of higher education and are, in their varying ways, integrated academically and socially. Their experiences encourage them to re-evaluate their purposes and commitments and, in the light of this re-evaluation, decide whether to continue or to leave.

Figure 1. Tinto’s (1993) model of student departure (simplified).

Tinto makes the point strongly that an institution should focus primarily on its educational programmes on the grounds that, if the educational experience is good, retention should be a consequence (unless of course factors outside the educational experience – e.g. financial difficulty, illness – are sufficiently powerful to force an early departure).

Beating the benchmark

An analysis of the performance data published in 2000 showed that six English HEIs[10] had, at that time, projected completion rates that were better than the benchmarks calculated by HEFCE’s statisticians despite having at least one demographic index that could be argued to be likely to affect completion adversely (Yorke, 2001b). Initial inquiries of institutions suggested that their success might be attributable to their approach to the student experience. HEFCE funded, through its ‘Action on Access’ programme, a study designed to find out more about the basis of the successes (Thomas et al., 2001).