UK: One student in three fails to qualify

As many as one in three British students in some universities drop out or fail to qualify, according to the Higher Education Statistics Agency.

Although drop-out rates have hovered around 7% for the past seven years, the agency’s latest projection shows that in some institutions between a third and a quarter of students under the age of 21 will either leave before the end of their course, or fail to qualify.

Overall, drop-out rates have remained fairly steady since 2000. The rate slightly improved in 2004-05 with 7.2% of full-time undergraduates leaving after their first year compared with 7.7% in 2003-04.

A higher proportion of mature students left university than their under-21 counterparts: a rate of 14.4%, but this was an improvement on 2003-04 when 15.6% dropped out.

An agency spokesman said one in 10 or fewer of the younger age group dropped out at more than three-quarters of the institutions but in 7% of them nearly a fifth left early. For older entrants, the drop-out rate varied from 2% to 22% at the majority of universities.

The agency’s latest statistics on ‘projected learning outcomes’, which are based on students’ current performance, showed that drop-out rates vary widely among the nation’s 168 higher education institutions.

At Bristol University, only 4% are expected to fail to qualify whereas at Bolton just over a third are unlikely to make the grade.

The Labour government won a landslide victory in 1997 with a strong commitment to education. In 2001 it pledged to increase the proportion of school leavers going on to further and higher education to 50% by 2010.

Despite the introduction of tuition fees in 1998, the Department for Innovation, Universities and Skills recently announced that last year 640,850 students obtained higher education qualifications, a rise from 633,045 in 2004-05, and that student numbers rose from 2,480,145 to 2,522,035 during the same period.

More statistics: www.hesa.ac.uk