{"id":70714,"date":"2023-11-14T23:34:07","date_gmt":"2023-11-15T04:34:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/world.edu\/?p=70714"},"modified":"2023-11-14T23:34:07","modified_gmt":"2023-11-15T04:34:07","slug":"student-success-how-are-the-first-weeks-at-university-decisive","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/world.edu\/student-success-how-are-the-first-weeks-at-university-decisive\/","title":{"rendered":"Student success: how are the first weeks at university decisive?"},"content":{"rendered":"

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\nSuccess or failure in higher education are often measured quantitatively, in percentages by sectors and types of baccalaureate obtained, or even according to the socio-professional\u00a0origin of the parents<\/a>\u00a0without sufficiently taking into account other more qualitative factors.\u00a0Thus success is measured according to the success rate from L1 to L2 or even according to obtaining the license in three or four years.<\/p>\n

Is it a failure to have a license in four years, but by having deepened your knowledge or by having clarified your professional project?\u00a0Is it a success to obtain a master’s degree in 5 years at the end of which you realize that you took the wrong direction?\u00a0Likewise, if students who have already repeated a year or failed a previous baccalaureate have a tendency to drop out more quickly than others, few studies show what happened to them a few years later.<\/p>\n

For Bernard Charlot<\/a>\u00a0, even if social factors exist, they do not explain everything.\u00a0To try to understand when the student experience turns into success or failure, it is interesting to look at the student’s personal history and their experience.<\/p>\n

In this logic, we tried, in\u00a0ethnographic research<\/a>\u00a0, based on the diaries of students enrolled in around twenty universities of varying sizes and formal and informal interviews to better understand the issues of the first weeks at university. : how do students experience this entry into a new educational world?\u00a0What work strategies do they develop?\u00a0What are their professional and personal projects?<\/p>\n

Alain Coulon<\/a>\u00a0had already mentioned that university success was linked to the students’ capacity for active integration into the university environment and the hypothesis could be formulated that everything is at stake in the first 100 days of the student at the university and that this ability to fit in depends on factors which are not only linked to the relationship with academic knowledge and its prerequisites.<\/p>\n

A heterogeneous student population<\/strong><\/h4>\n

The university has experienced an explosion in its numbers since the 1960s.\u00a0According to\u00a0Hugr\u00e9e and Poullaouec<\/a>\u00a0, from 2008 to 2021, the number of students increased by 25%, while at the same time the budget fell by 12%.\u00a0Enrollment in French higher education has increased eightfold in 50 years for both demographic and academic reasons.\u00a0Indeed, according to the same authors, more than 80% of a generation obtains a baccalaureate compared to 10% at the beginning of the 1960s. Three-quarters of them enroll in university.<\/p>\n

The term student corresponds to an ease of definition to constitute a common notion.\u00a0However, the typical student does not exist.\u00a0Fran\u00e7ois Dubet<\/a>\u00a0proposed the construction of a typology of the student experience through the combination of three elementary dimensions: the nature of the project pursued, the degree of integration into university life and commitment to an intellectual \u201cvocation\u201d.<\/p>\n

The objectives for which high school students enroll in higher education are very varied: knowledge for knowledge’s sake, the desire to prepare for a career, to be a student for the sake of being a student, the desire to test oneself in studies considered difficult, the possibility to think about various projects… To take a sporting metaphor, we also distinguish several categories of students arriving at university:<\/p>\n