Page 55 - Secondary school students’ university readiness and their transition to university Els van Rooij

Chapter 3
3.1.1Research context: Professional and university education in the Netherlands and Flanders
Both in the Netherlands and Flanders, a binary system of higher education is present: professional and university education. is makes it possible to compare correlates with student success between these two levels. To our knowledge, this comparison has not been made before, even though there could be di erences in the type and strength of success correlates, due to the di erences in learning environment and student population. In the Netherlands, in general (i.e., notwithstanding di erences between individual programmes), the learning content at universities is more abstract and less practical than that at institutes for professional education; the teaching speed is faster; more independent learning is expected from students; and large-scale lectures are more prevalent. At professional education, the focus lies on training students for a speci c profession that is usually clear in advance. In line with this, internships are a prominent part of the curriculum: Whereas at universities it is common to only do an internship (or a research project) at the end of the degree programme, in most professional education programmes students do internships throughout the programme (University of Groningen, 2017a). Furthermore, there are quite some systematic student di erences between university and professional education: e population of rst-year university students, compared to rst-year professional education students, is younger; more o en has moved out of their parental home; and consists of fewer students with a migrant background, fewer rst-generation students, and more international students (Van den Broek et al., 2017). In addition, there are discipline di erences: More university students than professional education students pursue a science degree programme (39% respectively 26%) (Van den Broek et al., 2017).
It is also interesting to compare student success correlates between the Netherlands and Flanders, because besides the shared language and distinction between professional and university education, the systems have an important di erence. e education system in the Netherlands is highly di erentiated: A er eight years of primary education students pursue secondary education at di erent levels. To obtain access to a degree programme at a research university, students need to be graduated from the six-year pre-university track, with some speci c sub-track requirements for various programmes, or they need to hold a degree from professional higher education, with in some cases additional requirements. To pursue a degree in higher professional education, the ve-year senior general secondary education track or a diploma from senior vocational education is
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