Page 12 - Secondary school students’ university readiness and their transition to university Els van Rooij

1.1 Introduction 1
Are students who graduated from secondary education ready for university? More speci cally, are they ready to adjust academically? Many of the 47,316 students who started their university studies in the Netherlands in September 2016 (VSNU, 2017a) have probably not given this question much thought. Going to university is an exciting new phase in life, with all the adventures that come with it, especially for students who move out of their parents’ house and start to live on their own in a new city. However, many students do not know what to expect or have unrealistic expectations about university in general (Heublein et al., 2017; Smith & Wertlieb, 2005) or about the speci c degree programme they have chosen to pursue (De Buck, 2009). Even despite the lack of (accurate) expectations, the transition from secondary education to university may turn out quite well if the student nds himself or herself t in perfectly into the new environment. However, for a substantial number of students this is not the case. In the Netherlands, 33% of all rst-year students in the academic year 2014/2015 did not continue in the same degree programme they had started: 7% le university altogether and 26% switched programmes (Inspectorate of Education, 2017). Apart from the negative consequences this has for universities regarding costs and success rates, it could also have negative psychological and nancial e ects on the student, e.g., the feeling of failure and the loss of money on an un nished study programme. Moreover, the number of students who do not cope with the transition e ectively is probably a lot higher than these dropout rates suggest, since not all students who have a di cult time will quit or switch. In a sample of rst-year students at a university in the United Kingdom, Lowe and Cook (2003) found that one out of four to one out of three students faced considerable di culties in adjusting to postsecondary education. ese adjustment di culties may cause academic problems, such as underachievement, and psychological problems, like depression (Leung, 2017; Lowe & Cook, 2003).
Besides the mismatch between expectations and reality, there are several other reasons for dropping out, switching programmes, and going through a di cult stage in life during the transition to university. An important reason concerns the di erence between the heavily regulated secondary school learning environment and the university environment that makes a strong appeal to a student’s self-regulation capacities, in combination with a signi cant increase in the amount and complexity of study content. A lot of research into rst-year
Introduction
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