Page 17 - Secondary school students’ university readiness and their transition to university Els van Rooij

Chapter 1
e education system in the Netherlands particularly lends itself for transition research due to the high level of external di erentiation. A er eight years of primary education (including Kindergarten), children are allocated to one of the three levels of secondary education, based on their cognitive abilities as examined by a national test and judged by primary school teachers. e highest level of secondary education is called ‘voorbereidend wetenschappelijk onderwijs (vwo)’, which literally translates as ‘preparatory university education’ or, in short, pre-university education. Pre-university education takes six years (from grade 7 to grade 12) and is attended by about 20% of all secondary school students (CBS, 2016). Graduating from pre-university education provides students with an entrance ticket to university, with for some university degree programmes additional requirements regarding the completed secondary school coursework. Approximately 80% of all pre-university students enter university directly a er graduation (CBS, 2016). Of the remaining 20%, many do so a er a gap year. is then makes preparing for the transition to university a main goal of pre-university education, as the vast majority will experience this transition.
Compared to comprehensive systems, in which secondary school graduates will enter di erent types of postsecondary education or the labour market, this relative homogeneity in the next step can be seen as a bene t: It should be easier to speci cally prepare all students for one type of postsecondary education than to make sure some of them are adequately equipped for higher education, some for vocational training, and others for the labour market. Consequently, the research in this thesis is speci cally transferable to countries that have education systems in which students are also streamed into di erent levels of secondary education (i.e., where there is at least a distinction between an academic and a vocational track), such as Austria, Germany, Greece, Ireland, Russia, and Switzerland (Buchmann & Park, 2009). Nevertheless, the results also hold value for comprehensive systems, since in many of these systems there is some degree of internal di erentiation, e.g., Advanced Placement (AP) and International Baccalaureate (IB) courses in the United States. ese courses contain rigorous, college-level coursework and their aim is to prepare students for postsecondary success (Santoli, 2002). In that sense, this is comparable to the Dutch pre-university secondary school track. With regard to AP, Dougherty, Mellor, and Jian (2006) even claim that the percentage of students who take and pass AP exams is an indicator of the percentage of students a school is preparing to graduate from college. Moreover, since AP or IB course completion is o en required for entry into speci c college
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