The Social Space of Educational Strategies: Exploring Patterns of Enrolment, Efficiency and Completion among Swedish Students in Undergraduate Programmes with Professional Qualifications

ABSTRACT

The aim of the study was to analyse enrolment patterns, and study efficiency and completion among students in programmes with professional qualifications, using microdata from Statistics Sweden. The programmes were Architecture, Medicine, Nursing, Law, Social work, Psychology, andEngineering (year 2001–2002,n = 15,918). Using the concepts from Bourdieu’s sociology, data was analysed with Specific Multiple Correspondence Analysis. Different patterns emerged and were constructed as different dimensions of the social space of educational strategies in higher education, patterns of enrolment, efficiency, and completion. The students’ relative positions in the social structure were analysed by the type and amount of their cultural capital. The most important factors for differences between coherent intensive and scattered extensive enrolment patterns were programmes, gender, mother’s socioeconomic index, parents’ education, and type of university. Regarding efficiency, the most important factors were programme and type of university. The factors most important for graduation were gender and type of university.

KEYWORDS:

• Higher education
• enrolment patterns
• dropouts
• educational capital
• multiple correspondence analysis
• professional education
• university

Acknowledgements

The author wishes to thank Sverker Lundin, of Gothenburg University, who offered excellent support with sequence analysis and data preparation in Mathematica ®, and Brigitte Le Roux, of the Université Paris Descartes, and Sciences Po, Paris, for valuable consultations on the GDA analyses and the reviewers for valuable comments on the manuscript.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

ORCID

Carina Carlhed http://orcid.org/0000-0003-4494-8015

Notes

¹http://ec.europa.eu/europe2020/index_en.htm

²Public finance studies expert group (Author’s translation).

³A normal timeframe would be within one year of the last registration in the programme.

⁴http://english.uk-ambetet.se/highereducation/highereducationinstitutions

⁵A normal timeframe would be within one year of the last registration in the programme.

⁶’Other Europe’ refers to countries in Europe besides Sweden and the other Nordic countries and Eastern-Europe. The standardised classification comes from Statistics Sweden.

⁷The standardised classification comes from Statistics Sweden.

⁸Labels of parents’ work sector modalities and father’s socioeconomic status are omitted in the graphs due to readability.

⁹Labels of parents’ work sector modalities are omitted in the graphs due to readability.

¹⁰Earn a diploma within 5 years from expected graduation point.

Additional information

Funding

The Swedish Research Council [Grant 2009:6065].