Educational subculture and dropping out in higher education: a longitudinal case study

Abstract

The paper tests longitudinally the hypothesis that educational subcultures in terms of which students interpret their role and their educational setting affect the probability of dropping out of higher education. A logistic regression model was performed to predict drop out at the beginning of the second academic year for the 823 freshmen of a three-year bachelor degree in psychology at an Italian university. The model uses both measures of students' educational subculture and incoming levels of knowledge and skills. The probability of dropping out was used as dependent variable. Results show that the probability of dropping out is significantly associated with students' educational subculture – but not with their incoming level of knowledge and skills. Our results suggest the need to recognize the meaning as a legitimate variable of research and of intervention in the field of educational success.

Keywords:

• educational subcultures
• student demand
• academic context
• dropout
• longitudinal case study

Notes

1. This point is consistent with the recommendation of many authors who advocate adopting both a collective and an individual level of analysis in studying cultures (inter alia Cohen 2009; Rozin 2003).

2. Cobern and Aikenhead (1998) suggest a similar concept when they state that school success largely depends on how well a student learns to negotiate the boundaries separating the cultural worlds of students' families, peers, schools and classrooms. The greater the disparity between science's system of meaning and the students' culturally based system of meanings, the less likely the student is to be successful in school science. Consistent with this hypothesis, Ulriksen (2009) suggests that drop-out rates can be viewed as an indication of how well the encounter between student and university (students and teachers mutual expectative on their role and study environment) passes off.

3. This is the examination that Italian students take at the end of the five years of secondary school, between the ages of 18 and 19.

4. The idea of oppositional structures of signification is also expressed in the psychoanalytic literature (see, for instance, the good/bad scheme proposed by Klein, 1967), in the huge literature on the semantic differential technique (Osgood, Suci, and Tannenbaum 1957) and within social representations theory, maintaining that representations are inscribed within themata (Markova 2003), that is, in more general dimensions of meanings having an oppositional structure.