Student retention & graduate destination: higher education & labour market access & success
PUBLICATION YEAR: 2010
TITLE AUTHOR(S): M.Letseka, M.Cosser, M.Breier, M.Visser
KEYWORDS: GRADUATE EMPLOYMENT SURVEY, GRADUATES, HIGHER EDUCATION, STUDENTS (COLLEGE), UNIVERSITIES
DEPARTMENT: Equitable Education and Economies (IED)
Web link: http://www.hsrcpress.ac.za/product.php?productid=2272&cat=1&page=4
Intranet: HSRC Library: shelf number 6219
HANDLE: 20.500.11910/4388
URI: http://hdl.handle.net/20.500.11910/4388
If you would like to obtain a copy of this Research Output, please contact Hanlie Baudin at researchoutputs@hsrc.ac.za.
Abstract
Student attrition has been a perennial theme in South African higher education throughout the past decade. In its National Plan for Higher Education (2001), the Department of Education attributed high dropout rates primarily to financial and/or academic exclusions. Four years later, it reported that 30% of students dropped out in their first year of study and a further 20% during their second and third years. Against this backdrop, the erstwhile research programme on Human Resources Development initiated a research project to investigate more thoroughly why students dropped out, what led them to persist in higher education to graduation, and what made for a successful transition to the labour market. The chapters in this volume variously address these issues in relation to one or more of seven institutional case studies conducted in 2005. Although the data analysed pertain to the 2002 cohort of graduating/non-completing students and to institutional data for 2004/5, their currency is confirmed by the recent interest expressed by the new Ministry of Higher Education and Training in exploring ways for 'continuously improving the access and success, particularly of black students, at all levels of the system' (Budget Speech, Minister of Higher Education and Training, June 2009). The HSRC research programme on Education, Science and Skills Development spans three major social domains: education; science and innovation studies; and the world of work. The education domain focuses on issues of access, quality, relevance and equity at the primary, secondary and tertiary levels. Science and innovation studies explores the link between technology, innovation, and economic development. The world of work researches labour markets, skills, and human resources development. The strength of the programme resides, however, in its unique ability to harness research work at the interface of these three domains.-
Related Research Outputs:
- Uniformity and disjunction in the school-to-higher-education transition
- Poverty, race and student achievement in seven higher education institutions
- The HSRC's graduate employment survey 2000: phase 7
- Inequalities in higher education and the structure of the labour market
- Introduction
- Lecturers' perceptions on the academic performance of conventional and distance education students at UNISWA: a comparative study
- First employment experiences of graduates
- From racial liberalism to corporate authoritarianism: the Shell affair and the assault on academic freedom in South Africa
- Mathematics literacy of final year students: South African realities
- Remuneration of graduates: as on 1 October 2000
- Chasing credentials and mobility: private higher education in South Africa
- The focus of an undergraduate social science curriculum for Southern Africa: historical consciousness, human rights and social and development issues
- Employment experiences of graduates
- Doctors in a divided society: the profession and education of medical practitioners in South Africa
- Book review: Musisi, N.B. & Muwanga, N.K. 2003. Makerere University in transition 1993-2000. Oxford: James Currey Publishers, p. 103
- Going global: working with South Africa's universities
- Review: "the African university in the 21st century"
- 'Shutting up the crazies': reflections on feminists, whiteness, intellectuals and black aliens inside and outside the academy
- Changing gender profile of medical schools in South Africa
- Scholars in the marketplace: the dilemmas of neo-liberal reform at Makerere Universtity 1989-2005