Degree completion in short professional courses: does family background matter?

ABSTRACT

Many studies have found a greater risk of dropping out among students from modest social origins compared to those from families characterised by high levels of education. This paper investigates social differences in student completion rates in short professional programmes, such as nursing, social work, early childhood and primary school teacher education. These programmes differ from regular undergraduate programmes, both in terms of student recruitment patterns, as more students are recruited from less privileged backgrounds, and through the types of jobs they lead to, which almost always grant the degree holder employment in the public sector. By using Norwegian register data on students starting a higher education degree programme in the period 2000 to 2010, we investigated how completion rates in nursing, social work, early childhood and primary school teacher education varied according to gender, grades and parental educational level. We found significant differences based on grades and gender but surprisingly small differences related to parental education. These findings were contrasted with earlier findings regarding patterns of completion and dropout in more disciplinary-oriented programmes. Conceptually, the analyses draw on the work of Tinto and Gambetta.

KEYWORDS:

• Social inequality
• degree completion
• drop-out and higher education

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. There are, however, some notable exceptions, such as Yorke and Longden (2004) and Mastekaasa and Hansen (2005).

2. Primary effects are caused by differences in academic ability between social classes, which, in turn, affect educational attainment.

3. In order to study dropout and completion in higher education one must let sufficient time pass from study start, and give students time to start a programme and finish it, which usually takes more than the estimated three years to an undergraduate degree. This is the main reason why we are using data covering the cohorts starting in 2000 to 2010, as this gives us ample time to observe if student have managed to complete or have dropped out.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Norwegian Research Council under [Grant number 283556].

Notes on contributors

Håvard Helland

Håvard Helland is a sociologist (dr. polit. from the University of Oslo). Among his research interests are inequalities in education and in the labour market, social closure, educational choice, educational fields, ethnic minorities’ educational and labour market careers, the study of professions and professions’ labour markets, and social divisions within the highly educated middle class.

Elisabeth Hovdhaugen

Elisabeth Hovdhaugen is Research Professor at NIFU. She is a sociologist (Ph.D. from the University of Oslo). Among her research interests are Recruitment and drop-out in higher education, Student flow, students’ time consumption and Gender equality in academia.