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Abstract
Study careers of minority students in Dutch higher education are still less successful compared with the careers of majority students. Minority students still seem to experience more difficulties than majority students. Vincent Tinto’s twin concepts of academic and social integration are used here to explore the experiences of minority and majority students in Dutch higher engineering education. Based on a small‐scale interview study, it is shown that ethnic background does not seem to be a decisive, unequivocal factor in the extent to which students are integrated in institutions of higher education. Student answers show differences according to ethnic background in both social and academic integration, and these differences vary according to the year in which the students are found. The paper ends with some suggestions for further exploration.
Notes
1. See http://www.nces.ed.gov
2. Percentages are based on the number of ‘new’ first‐year students and the number of graduates 4 years later. This number of fourth‐year graduates includes students that have taken longer to graduate. This may cause a distortion in the results. However, if one assumes that the percentage of ‘delayed’ students in this group of fourth‐year students is constant, the difference in the percentage of majority and minority students remains the same.
3. A relatively large percentage (not representative of national samples) of ethnic minority students was interviewed in the fourth year. In that year, we specifically approached ethnic minority students, given our research goal of looking at differences between groups of students.
4. Some of the interview questions in the first year were slightly different compared with the fourth year. In the first year, one of the questions was: How do you feel about working together? Whereas in the fourth year, students were given a choice: Do you prefer to work together, alone or dependent on the situation?