Page 28 - Secondary school students’ university readiness and their transition to university Els van Rooij

Introduction
age 15 compared to students who did not (OECD, 2017). Consequently, it can be 1 argued that students who o en engage in out-of-school academic activities during
primary and secondary education are more interested and more self-e cacious
in studying at university, because in university they will likely study the topics
that they now engage in on their own initiative. Moreover, by doing so, students already familiarise themselves with the world of research and speci c academic topics, which may make the transition from secondary school to university, as well as choosing a degree programme, easier. Out-of-school academic activities may serve as another indicator of students’ readiness for university studies in that respect.
Satisfaction with the chosen programme (Chapters 3 and 7)
So far, we have written about university readiness in a general sense only, but in reality, a student needs to be ready for a speci c degree programme, since in the Netherlands, students who enter university have to choose their major before they start their studies. Readiness in terms of content knowledge should be more or less guaranteed by the speci c coursework that certain degree programmes require, e.g., starting a physics degree at university requires having completed advanced mathematics and physics in secondary school. Readiness regarding behavioural and motivational factors has been discussed above. An important issue that remains, however, is making the ‘right’ choice: Of all available degree programmes, how does a student choose the one that suits his or her talents, interests, and values best? Choosing a programme is a high stakes choice, as it (partly) determines which careers will be (easily) accessible to a student later in life. Besides, choosing wrongly can be costly, nancially, but also time-wise (a student is very likely to lose a year by switching programmes), and emotionally (quitting a programme may feel like failing). So, there is a lot of pressure to make a good choice, but this can be very hard for adolescents. An important step in choosing is self-orientation (Germeijs & Verschueren, 2007), meaning that students have to nd out where their talents lie, what they really like, and what kind of values they have. For many young people, having this self-insight is not as easy as it may seem. en, it is vital that students familiarise themselves with degree programmes that might suit them. is can be challenging, also since universities tend to use marketing approaches to ‘advertise’ their programmes (Hemsley-Brown & Oplatka, 2006). Especially when students have limited knowledge about a programme, the information provided by the institution could be the only source of information
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