From life crisis to lifelong learning: Rethinking working-class 'drop out'

3 Reasons for leaving university:
exploring the meanings of ‘drop out’
Introduction
As we have seen in Chapter 2, early withdrawal from university is strongly framed in
terms of lack and failure. But how do students understand it? Our research allowed
us to explore the meanings of withdrawal as interpreted by the students themselves,
rather than by policy makers or institutions, drawing on the interviews with 67
participants. The pattern of withdrawal in our study mirrored the findings of other
retention research (for example, Yorke, 1997; Thomas, 2002), which see students as
most likely to leave in their first year. Most of our participants had left in the first year
with half of these leaving in their first semester. Although only one participant had
made it to their third year, 13 had returned to university for a second year before
ultimately leaving. Our analysis indicated that the reasons for leaving were complex
and involved a range of factors. In this chapter, we will chart these factors and
explore their meanings.
Being on the right course
Our participants had been enrolled on a range of courses, from the more traditionally
academic such as social science to the more vocational such as nursing. There were
gendered aspects to their choice of subjects with more males choosing subjects
such as engineering and computer studies, and more females entering subjects such
as business and marketing (see Table 1).
A distinction was made by students between being prepared for university and being
prepared for the course they had chosen. Indeed, choosing the wrong course was
given as the main reason for leaving by many of those involved in the research.
Almost without exception, students felt that they had made poorly informed subject
choices. The process of choosing a university and a course was ‘rushed’, particularly
for those who entered via Clearing, and left many leafing through a prospectus with
no real sense of what they should be looking for other than they thought it would be
‘interesting’. However, with little guidance from family, university or schools, the
reality of the course often proved different to expectations. Families provided support
but it was undirected support without a reserve of knowledge about HE to draw on.
Families were happy for them to go but often equally as happy for them to withdraw:
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