‘Should I stay or should I go?’: Dilemmas and decisions among UK undergraduates

Abstract

There is increasing concern about high rates of dropout from universities, especially among students from disadvantaged backgrounds. In the UK this is related to recent changes in higher education policy, especially the imposition of a higher fees regime and the uncapping of student numbers. While recent research has explored the demography of students who drop out, less is known about the reasons for dropping out, or indeed the reasons why some students who are unhappy with their student experience nonetheless stay on. This article uses data from a longitudinal qualitative study, the Paired Peers project funded by the Leverhulme Trust, to explore this issue in detail. A typology of reasons for dropping out is offered: homesickness; loneliness and a sense of not fitting in; problems with academic study, including having chosen the wrong course; and money issues. The first two appear the most powerful; the notion of ‘fish out of water’ derived from the work of Bourdieu and Wacquant (1992) is used to explain it. The article also explores the motivation of those who experience these problems and report high levels of stress, but nevertheless decide to stay on.

In my third year my mum and sister came up to visit and I remember they came up for the weekend, and then on the Sunday when they came to leave it was just like this horrible like feeling, like ‘oh my God they’re going’ because I think I was going through quite a stressful time … I just wanted to go with them, I was like ‘I just want to go home, I don’t want to be here’. When they left I just went back in my room and I just felt like awful, I just wanted to go home … I had loads of work to get on and do because I’d had the weekend off with them so I was behind on work, I didn’t want to do it, I just wanted to be home, you know, like homesick, yeah, I just … yeah I really didn’t want to be there (Bianca).

While for many students their time at university may count as ‘the best days of my life’, for others, like Bianca, it may appear more of a nightmare. In some cases, this leads to the abandonment of study. This article attempts to present the phenomenon of dropout from the point of view of the individual students who experience the dilemma of whether to stay or go. It draws on data from a qualitative longitudinal study of the student experience in the UK. The project sought to explore the impact of social class on the students’ progress. It is widely asserted that ‘non-traditional students’ (including those from more disadvantaged class backgrounds) are in more danger of dropping out. Does our data throw any light on this issue? While recent research in the UK and Europe has explored the demography of students who drop out, less is known about the reasons for dropping out, or indeed the reasons why some students who are unhappy with their student experience nonetheless stay on. In-depth interviews with students allowed us to explore the complex experiential dilemmas faced by young people at an important juncture in their life.

The educational context

The context for this article is educational policy across Europe in which higher education (HE) is seen as part of the solution to the problems of unemployment and low productivity within the neoliberal global economy. The ‘knowledge economy’ is said to require higher levels of education among its citizens, and across Europe high targets (40% in many countries) have been set for HE participation (BIS, 2015; Vossensteyn et al., 2015). Given the high costs of a university education, whether borne by the student or the government, retention is a matter of increasing concern, and the subject of a number of EU reports (Quinn, 2013; Vossensteyn et al., 2015). Vossensteyn and colleagues highlighted that study success was a high policy concern in 50% of the 35 European countries surveyed for their report. In measuring success, retention and completion of study are taken as key indicators, and funding decisions are increasingly dependent on them (Thomas and Hovdhaugen, 2014). Thus student dropout is of increasing importance not only to governments but to individual universities in a highly competitive educational environment.

There has been considerable research across Europe highlighting factors increasing the likelihood of dropout. Social class, gender and ethnic minority status are all seen to impact on dropout rates (HEFCE, 2013, 2014; Quinn, 2013; Reisel and Brekke, 2010; Severiens and Dam, 2012). Academic ability is also highly implicated as students with lower school performance are less likely to develop attachment to their field of study and may struggle with their work tasks (Lassibile and Gómez, 2008; Mäkinen et al., 2004).

The level of institutional pastoral care and support for students is likely also to be a factor, which may lie behind the national variations in dropout. English universities, for example, have adopted a personal tutor system for all students, a policy not yet adopted by most European countries. This is designed to pick up both personal and academic problems at an early stage and provide advice and support. This may explain why Britain has one of the lowest student dropout rates in Europe. Of students at universities, colleges and technical training institutions in the UK, 16% leave their courses before finishing, according to a study of tertiary education carried out by Sylke Schnepf (2014). She found that Norway had the second lowest dropout rate, with 17% failing to complete, followed by France at 19%. Italy has the highest dropout rate of 33%, followed by the Netherlands (31%). The study compared 14 European countries using data from the 2011 Programme for the International Assessment of Adult Competency. It used longitudinal data, designed to give a more accurate result than surveys based on a single cohort and also showed that many countries, including Britain, have a high rate of re-entry: Denmark’s re-entry rate was highest at 59%, with Britain at the EU average of 38%. However, Schnepf argues that the UK dropouts face the greatest degree of disadvantage in the labour market.

The British context

As Vossensteyn et al. (2015: 11) point out, ‘the European higher education landscape is diverse and includes institutions with very different profiles and characteristics’. Our study is specific to the UK and we cannot claim generalisability to other differing contexts. However, we would be surprised if our findings about young people’s decision-making did not have some resonance with the work of other researchers using qualitative methods (for example, Qintana Murci, 2016).

Student life is not for everybody: the three or four years of a degree (the norm in the British case) are highly intensive, with competing demands of advanced and independent study, learning to live apart from the family, making new friends, socialising and preparing for future adult life, and this can lead to considerable psychic and mental pressures. Dropouts are more frequent in the first year of study, as the neophytes fail to cope with these pressures or decide that they made a mistake in undertaking a degree. Higher Education Statistics Agency figures showed that over 32,000 students – including mature undergraduates – dropped out of university after a year of study in 2012/13. Of those who dropped out, 7420 transferred to another university, while 24,745 were no longer in HE. It has been suggested that this might indicate school leavers were being pressured (by parents or schools) to attend university despite not being ready or inclined to take this route (Gurney-Read, 2015).

Clearly, the dropout rate is variable between universities. In 2015, St Andrews University in Scotland had the lowest dropout rate at 0.7 and, as one might expect, the ‘golden triangle’ of the three top research universities in England – Oxford, Cambridge and London – have low dropout rates. On the whole prestigious universities with high tariff entry requirements have overall lower dropout rates, but higher dropout rates for non-traditional students who are in the minority at these institutions (Quinn, 2013). This raises the issue of ‘fit’, of students feeling comfortable in the university environment, which has been highlighted in other research (Harrison and Hatt, 2012). This issue of ‘fit’ will be a major theme of our discussion.

The risk of dropout and the associated labour market disadvantage identified by Schnepf may have been heightened in recent years by policy changes in the UK which have been seeing increasing pressures on undergraduates. Tuition fees of £1000 to replace student grants were introduced by a Labour government in 1998, and raised to £3000 in 2004, since the drive to increase the proportion of young people entering HE was seen to be driving up its cost and putting too heavy a burden on the state budget. Subsequently, in 2011, the Coalition government formed by the Conservative and Liberal Democrat parties increased fees to a maximum of £9000. This was meant to introduce a market into HE, with the more prestigious universities charging more and those who found it more difficult to recruit students going for the ‘bargain basement’ option. However, this did not happen: virtually all universities chose to charge the maximum, meaning that students left with a minimum debt of £27,000, more if they took a degree that lasted more than the basic three years. Students must also find money for three years’ accommodation and living costs, and grants to widening participation (WP) students have recently been replaced by loans, adding to the debt burden. Though the debt repayments do not start until graduates begin earning a reasonable salary, many believe this will be a disincentive to students from poorer working-class backgrounds. It is also likely, though it is too soon to have any evidence of this, that it may also inhibit later re-entry to HE.

Ironically, these changes in the funding regime occurred concurrently with a push for widening access to students from lower socio-economic groups who are, as elsewhere, under-represented in HE. A series of reports from the Social Mobility Commission focused on the role of universities in promoting upward mobility, highlighting the link between university education, professional careers and higher incomes (Milburn, 2012, 2013, 2015). The reports argued that the prestigious universities of the Russell Group (so-called because the Vice Chancellors of this exclusive group met in the London hotel of this name) were the source of a self-perpetuating elite who monopolise positions of power and wealth. Children of the rich upper-middle classes were sent to private schools which were adept in steering their pupils to these top universities. It was no coincidence that the leaders of all three major UK political parties in 2014 had gone to Oxford or Cambridge, and at the core of David Cameron’s cabinet was a group of ‘Bullingdon boys’, members of the same elite dining and drinking club at Oxford. Yet all three parties declared their support for WP, and Russell Group universities, along with the rest of the sector, were set targets which carried financial rewards or penalties for the recruitment of state school WP students.

In such a political and policy context, the issue of student dropout assumes greater significance. Universities are obviously concerned as it affects their income and they have long attempted to monitor and control dropout rates. Government concern led to the commissioning of a report on dropout by the Higher Education Careers Service Unit (HECSU). The report drew on the data of a major quantitative study of student progress, FutureTrack, which was carried out by academics from Warwick University. The report showed that rates of dropout were higher among older students and those from lower socio-economic groups; males were more at risk than females and state-educated students were more at risk than those who had attended private schools. There were also variations according to discipline of study (McCulloch, 2014). A previous analysis by Johnes and McNabb (2004) found that propensity to drop out was higher in STEM subjects; this study, in contrast to the HECSU report, concluded that risk of dropout was higher among those from independent schools than those who had attended comprehensives. This may reflect the high degree of ‘cramming’ for exams (‘spoon-feeding’ as our student participants called it) (see Bathmaker et al., 2016) which characterises private schooling and which may lead to some over-estimation of pupils’ academic abilities; it might also reflect the fact that students from rich families have less need of a degree to get a job and earn a living; some such youths in Britain are supported by private incomes supplied by the families, the so-called ‘trustifarian’ phenomenon: they may also become entrepreneurs, performers or rentiers, or else be employed in family firms. State school students are unlikely to have such fallback options.

However, the HECSU report concluded that the higher rate of dropout among students from working or lower-middle class backgrounds was not specifically to do with money. When controlled for level of academic ability, socio-economic disadvantage disappeared. Those who dropped out were those with weaker exam grades, whatever their background. It was suggested, however, that those from poorer families were typically less well prepared for universities, both in terms of lower academic performance but also because their schools and parents were unable to offer informed guidance on what university attendance entailed; as a result, students were less enabled to make appropriate choices of courses and universities, a factor highlighted in the European context as crucial (Vossensteyn et al., 2015; BIS, 2015).

While the report offers a very comprehensive account of the demographics of dropout, it is less informative on the reasons why particular individuals drop out. This article draws on a qualitative study, Paired Peers, which has followed a cohort of students from two contrasting UK universities in the same city through three years of their degrees and is now charting their progress into the labour market. In this article we draw on our participants’ accounts to explore in finer detail what leads students to drop out and also what leads those tempted to drop out to resist and stay on.

Paired Peers: The study and its methods

The project is funded by the Leverhulme Trust and is now in its second three-year phase. The first phase recruited a cohort of students in the first year of study and followed them through three years, with twice-yearly interviews. Students came from the University of Bristol (UoB), an elite research intensive university and from the University of the West of England (UWE), a newer teaching-oriented university. The second phase picked them up one year later, at the start of the fifth year since they entered HE, and is exploring their progress in employment or further study. The overall aim is to explore the impact of social class background on the students’ university experience and subsequent employment opportunities.

To explore the effects of class, we used a research design of matched pairs. The reason for this strategy was to enable us to make comparisons between students of differing classes, taking different disciplines at two contrasting institutions from Britain’s ‘old’ and ‘new’ HE sectors. In 2013–14 UoB’s dropout rate for entrants after their first year was 2.8; UWE’s rate was higher at 8.1, though lower than that of many in its sector, reflecting the fact that it has a fairly high proportion of middle-class students.

The students were drawn from 11 disciplines: biology, drama, economics and accountancy, engineering, English, geography, history, law, politics, psychology and sociology. We sought a mix of STEM, arts and social science subjects, though our choice was restricted by the necessity for them to be taught at both universities. This meant that we were unable to choose some of the more practical subjects in which dropout is likely to be higher for reasons of technical capacity: medicine is only taught at UoB, nursing, occupational therapy and fine arts only at UWE. The sample is thus skewed to students in the more academic areas.

In each discipline we sought to recruit eight students, two working-class and two middle-class from each university. Students were selected by utilising data from a short questionnaire filled in by all first-year students in the 11 disciplines; we called for volunteers and assigned each a class on the basis of a number of indicators: parents’ occupations, parents’ educational level, type of school attended, postcode, possession of a bursary and self-reported class. This multifactorial strategy for class assignment was comparable to that employed in a similar study of young adults (Thomson et al., 2003). The volunteers were classified as clearly middle-class, clearly working-class and intermediate; we recruited largely from the former two groups. Through the twice-yearly interviews, along with other data collection methods (time diaries, focus groups, photographs, maps of use of the city) our interviewers were able to build up a rapport and trust with the students, securing a core of participants who were committed to the project. Mirroring the pattern of dropout from university, we lost a number of the students during the first year, but retained most of the rest till the end of the first phase, with a smaller number continuing into phase 2.

We started the project with an over-recruiting strategy, anticipating student attrition. Initially we interviewed 90 students. At the end of the third year of the project, we interviewed 69 with another 4 still on board. Most of those who left the cohort did so early on; more of them were from UWE (9 out of 12) and more of them were working-class (8 out of 12). We suspect that they were the less committed students who may have felt threatened by exposing their social activities or poor academic results to an interviewer. It is also possible that they dropped out of university as well as the project. Certainly, our final body of participants included many high achievers who gained firsts or high 2.1 degrees. The current sample thus may over-represent those of higher commitment and ability in relation to academic study and who are therefore less likely to quit. We also ruled out mature and part-time students who may face particular difficulties in reconciling the demands of study with those of home and work. Given this, however, it is striking how many of the participants reported stress, anxiety and having considered dropout.

Theoretical framework and analysis

Theoretically, our research drew on a conceptual toolbox derived from the work of Pierre Bourdieu (1984). In particular, we utilised his concept of differing forms of capital (economic, cultural, social and symbolic) applied to a specific ‘field’ (HE); a distinctive feature of the work on class at Bristol is the attempt to integrate recent cultural work on class (for example, Bennett et al., 2009) into a more longstanding approach to class analysis which highlights material aspects (Atkinson, 2010; Bradley, 2014). A key issue was to investigate what types of capitals the students had acquired before university from their class backgrounds, what use they made of them during their study, what capitals they gained from their university experience and whether these helped them to secure middle-class jobs and middle-class status. However, more relevant to this article are Bourdieu’s notions of habitus and the related metaphor of a ‘fish in or out of water’. Bourdieu speaks of moving out of one’s class habitus as being like ‘a fish out of water’ (Bourdieu and Wacquant, 1992). A fish in its natural element is at home, swimming and breathing as required effortlessly, without even being aware of it; while the fish out of its element struggles to survive.

The transcripts from the interviews were entered into nvivo and coded; codes reflected our theoretical perspective but also encompassed empirical themes identified by iterative close readings by the team. For this article the material is drawn from the narratives of the students who dropped out over the three years but also on questions asked in interview eight as to whether the participants had ever considered dropping out and why they had not done so. The answers were analysed and four clusters of reasons for dropping out were identified: homesickness; ‘fish out of water’; academic issues; and money problems. These are discussed below. The final section draws on the responses given as to why students chose to stay on.

Dropping out: ‘I just want to go home.’

Of the initial sample of 90 we know of only 5 who dropped out of their courses, plus 1 who was suspended for a year. Of these five, three were middle-class, two working-class, three were female and two male, and four were from UWE. It is instructive to compare the cases of Felix, a middle-class student taking engineering at UoB, and Tracey, a working-class politics student at UWE, both of whom felt they had chosen the wrong discipline. Felix attended the parties we gave for the students at the end of the project years. He appeared highly motivated, poised and confident. He had attended one of the top independent schools in the country. However, his assessment results were not as good as expected and he experienced depression (as we have implied, not uncommon among our participants). We lost touch with him in the third year but were told by another student that he had decided to study medicine and was currently doing voluntary work in a hospital to help with his application to medical school.

Tracey, on the other hand, appeared lacking in confidence and struggled to fit in the politics seminars. It is worth considering her case in detail, as it might typify those from working-class backgrounds who feel like fish out of water and struggle to stay in HE. She came from a very disrupted background in a deprived neighbourhood, with family breakup, parental illness and frequent changes of school. She described one school as characterised by ‘riots’ in which she got hit by flying objects. Clearly this had affected her personality and confidence:

I’ve been quite bright most of my school life, until I got older, but yeah they’ve always been like happy to work with me and try and push me … With other kids, probably not so well. Like until recently I’ve just not been very sociable … I got bullied and things like that a lot when I was younger.

Tracey was accommodated not in UWE’s student village but in a midtown privately owned student block, which was cheaper but which she described as a hotbed of drugs and drinking. She got on with the students who lived there, but unfortunately not with the students on her course:

Although they’re doing the same course as me … I find some of them … snobs I guess … yeah I just find them like intimidating. I don’t know whether I’ve got like a Brummy accent and I might sound a bit like slow sometimes but … yeah I just find some of them are like really patronising towards me and I’d just rather not speak to them.

This intimidating behaviour combined with Tracey’s own lack of confidence silenced her in her classes:

It’s always the same people who put their hands up in the lectures, but it’s because there’s like 50 people in the room and I’m never going to talk in front of 50 people in a lecture just in case I came out with something ridiculous.

Although she came to UWE full of enthusiasm, wanting to build a better life for herself and with ambitions to work for Amnesty, by the end of the year she reported hating her course and had fallen into a ‘downward spiral’ of non-attendance and poor marks:

When I got here I kind of expected that I might find it difficult, but then … because I was quite enthusiastic at first, I was really like making an effort to keep up, and now I’m just kind of like … I don’t know, overwhelmed with it. And I just know it’s going to get harder and harder and I can’t even handle the first year of it … I think it’s because I just kind of changed what I wanted to do now, like my thoughts on what I want to do in the future have changed so it’s just like … it doesn’t all match up any more.

As a result, she had been sucked into the party culture in her residence, involved with students who were struggling with psychological problems; she described a culture of persistent drug use (ketamine and marijuana) which dragged people into apathy and depression. One friend, with whom she subsequently started a relationship, tried to kill himself. ‘It all got a bit dark really’, she told us. This led her to decide politics was not for her, and that she would like to transfer to a counselling course (unavailable at UWE). As far as we know, her final decision was to drop out and go travelling with her boyfriend, who had already quit.

The question in interview eight revealed that quite a number of others had considered giving up at times, reporting stress and anxiety as major factors. Interestingly, the occasions they described to us mainly occurred in the second and third years. This links to the fact that many participants, especially the young women, found the final exam preparation and process very stressful and hard to cope with.

From the stories of our participants, including discussion of their friends’ experiences, the four clusters of reasons for dropout or considering dropout emerged: homesickness; loneliness and a sense of not fitting in; problems with academic study, including having chosen the wrong course; and money issues. The first two appear the most powerful. These causes of dropout are similar to those found in a previous study of a cohort of students from two Scottish universities (Christie et al., 2014).

Homesickness

The quote from Bianca which started this article speaks resonantly of the pain of parting from family and home. Jasmine also spoke of her homesickness as a reason for considering leaving:

Interviewer: Did you ever genuinely feel like dropping out?

Jasmine: I think I did and I can’t recall which year it was. I often thought it to be honest, every time I sort of felt homesick I thought ‘well I could just go home now and just screw it’… I think the things that were happening around me, i.e. falling out with my housemates, made me think about being homesick, therefore I wanted to go home.

Holly, who quit after her first year, spoke about her closeness to her mother, a single parent and how they missed each other. It also did not help that she was struggling with the coursework:

I’m struggling I’m going to be honest. I don’t know what I expected to be honest. Because I’ve got friends that go to uni and I suppose I don’t hear about the bad things, they just say how great it is, but it’s really hard, it’s harder than I thought it would be. There’s so much work to do all the time.

All three of these young women came from backgrounds that could be described as working-class; none of their parents had been to university. The alien nature within the family circle of the experience of university attendance may contribute to this strong sense of distressing separation from loved ones. Middle-class youths have grown up in anticipation of this process of departure and are perhaps more likely to have already experienced such separations, at boarding school, travelling to relatives abroad or on exchange visits. The strength of attachment to family, especially to mothers, was a more general theme among our sample of working-class young women. This is also highlighted in recent research into working-class women’s career paths in England and Spain (Orrnert, 2016; Quintana Murci, 2016). Working-class men can be homesick too, as in this account from a working-class UWE student:

One of my close friends dropped out of uni in the second year, we were living together, because, yeah he just didn’t go in to university. He was so lazy it was ridiculous. I think he was really homesick, like … Like he probably shouldn’t have gone to university in the long run because he was so close to his family and I find that very strange as I have never been close to my family, and he would constantly be on the phone to them sometimes, which I just thought was ridiculous. He’s a grown man and he’s doing that.

‘Fish out of water’, isolation and ‘not fitting in’

There is an element of ‘not fitting in’ in Jasmine’s account and this was something many people struggled with, especially in their first year. Some of this was related to class habitus, as discussed above, with working-class students at Bristol suffering particularly in this respect. Zoe told us how she was the only student in her hall of residence from a state school and how out of place she felt, while Beth spoke of difficulty in relating to the middle-class students on her geography course. Lifestyle differences can be painful. Though never seriously considering leaving, Christopher, a middle-class student at Bristol, was isolated in his first year:

When I first started it took me a while to get into it … particularly not the freshers’ scene in the first year, so I felt a bit out of place initially just because I couldn’t pretend to enjoy that. I didn’t want to go to listen to crappy music. Dress up in pyjamas and go to a club.

Lilly, a middle-class girl studying history at UWE, also spoke of her loneliness and her relief at returning home at the end of the first year:

I think my first year was probably the hardest. Like there were points of real loneliness. I think because I don’t make friends particularly quickly. I think because I came to uni in a relationship and invested quite a lot in that, so while other people were making friends I wasn’t necessarily giving as much to making friends as other people, and then when that finished it’s a bit like ‘ooh, it’s a bit different’.

Lilly’s difficulty in making friends might partly be related to coming from a solidly middle-class family with high cultural capital, although she did not express it at such. Certainly some middle-class students found it difficult being at UWE, despite the fact that it is much more heterogeneous in class and ethnic terms than UoB (see Bathmaker et al., 2016). They were the ones here who experienced lack of fit.

Those like Lilly and Christopher, who do not fit in to the sometimes raucous student culture or who felt excluded for other reasons, do, however, usually succeed in finding like-minded friends by their second year. Zoe, for example, who often questioned her choice to study law at Bristol, was happier and more settled when sharing a flat with working-class students from UWE.

Academic struggles and wrong choice of course

Stress has emerged as a major theme in our study. Stress is related to loneliness, to relationship breakups, accommodation difficulties, but above all to worries about performance in academic assessments. The first year is particularly testing as students from all class backgrounds found difficulty in adjusting to independent learning after the structured learning environments of their schools (Bathmaker et al., 2016). Academic anxiety was another major cause of students’ thinking about quitting:

Really in second year I was like ‘oh my gosh’. I think it was harder then as well because it seemed like such a long way. And you know at the end of third year things were really tough and really stressful with essays but I was like ‘the light is at the end of the tunnel’. (Megan, working-class, UoB).

My first essay that I had to write for second year, I was really stressed about it, I think it was just because it started to count. And in my first year I’d been getting like 52s and 53s while I’d been trying, so I was like ‘what am I going to do, I can’t get that when it counts because I want to get a 2:1’. So I came back to Cardiff and I was with my dad and I was like ‘maybe I should just drop out’ (Cerys, middle-class, UoB).

Cerys considered changing her course and moving to UWE, thinking it might be easier, but was deterred by finding entry requirements were still high. Her case highlights the pressure that today’s young people are under to succeed and the fear they have of failure. Walkerdine et al. (2001) in their study of young women highlighted the role of middle-class parents in pushing their children to succeed academically.

As mentioned, a number of students, like Felix and Tracey, drop out because they feel they chose the wrong course. Jade, a working-class student who came to study psychology at UoB, described her switch of degree from pharmacy:

Originally I went to X University last year. I started doing pharmacy, absolutely hated my course … It was a 4 year Masters degree so it means you’re committed to it, it was kind of sending you to like a job. And I had a bit of a panic on and I thought ‘I don’t want to do this’. Stayed for six weeks and then I thought ‘I need to drop out’. So I dropped out just before like tuition fees, it didn’t cost me much but it was fine. For like two weeks I was a bit like ‘what do I do now’. Went back to college just to see what to do and they were really, really helpful, they helped me re-apply to uni.

Jade was able to move to another course partly because fees had not been brought in: as discussed above, the current fees regime may make it difficult for poorer students to switch in this fashion. Nonetheless, past experience shows that such students often do return to HE.

Money problems

We might agree with the HECSU report that money per se was not a reason for leaving university, but it can compound a situation of stress and dissatisfaction. Many of our working-class participants took term-time jobs to fund living costs, while middle-class students told us of allowances and bailouts from their parents, as fully described in Bradley and Ingram (2012). For example, Holly got into money difficulties and therefore had to increase her hours at the supermarket where she worked, and this in turn impacted upon the struggles with her assessments:

I thought … money would be really easy because you get a loan, and it hasn’t been easy. I was a bit silly with my loan in the first month, I spent all my money, and now I’ve got no money left to pay for my rent. So I’ve had to like bump up my hours at work to get more money. I think that’s as well why I’m struggling with work.

Garry, a working-class student at UoB, who worked part-time in a supermarket, told of friends accumulating too many hours at work and consequently dropping out. Garry used this as a cautionary tale in relation to his choices:

It’s just nice to have a bit of money to, yeah, spend on nice things each month. But I could live without it, it’s not essential so if they can’t change my hours then I’m probably just going to quit, yeah. Which would be a shame, because obviously I know a lot of people there … but I’ve seen what can happen … a couple of my friends that used to work there, they went to UWE and both of them dropped out after their first year, basically because they were working too much overtime … Sacrificing your degree … so I’m just going to learn from their mistake and not commit myself to working any extra hours during term time at university.

Staying on: ‘I was brought up brave’

We have highlighted the stress and pressure the majority of our participants experienced, particularly in their final year. Indeed, a number told us they were so stressed that they had been unable to concentrate their thoughts on what to do next and what career options to pursue: they felt they needed a year to recover and collect their thoughts about future choices. Those who make such a decision, however, will fall behind in the highly competitive race for jobs.

It is important to emphasise that many students, from both universities, from all disciplines and from different classes, experience these difficulties, but as we have seen, only a handful give in and drop out. What makes them grit their teeth and stay on? We asked this question to those who told us they had considered dropping out. The responses were fairly predictable: they had already invested so much emotionally and materially in attending university, especially if they had made it through two years or more. In particular, they did not want to let down parents, who had contributed to that emotional and material investment, as Jasmine told us:

The thought ‘well my parents are going to kill me if I drop out, I’m going to be in debt for no reason’ and I did have some really close friends up there who I could just tell anything to so they kept me going.

Jasmine’s response indicates the importance of support systems in helping people through the tough periods.

The financial implications of dropout are also important, as Jasmine’s account shows. For working-class students this is a particular issue, as it can propel them back into the poverty they are going to university to escape:

Having no money as well, I used to feel like rubbish when I had no money, everyone would be going out and I’d be like ‘oh I’ve got like £4, I can go and see a film or I can go out for one drink’ (Jasmine).

Like if I’m being really honest I’m just really bad at quitting things … Yeah, and the knowledge obviously that, you know I’d worked hard to get there and what I wanted really in life, you know it would be a lot easier to get with an English degree – with a degree anyway (Megan).

Megan’s account also stresses the psychological element of ‘not being a quitter’. Though ironically she sees it as a weakness, not permitting her to bow out when things have taken the wrong turn, for most it is a virtue, having the strength and stoicism to persist in the face of difficulties: per ardua ad astra.

I think there were times when I thought ‘Oh I can’t do this anymore’, but I never really genuinely considered dropping out, I think it was just times where, exam time when I was feeling really stressed and really bothered by it all but I never really thought about quitting. I’m not the kind of person to quit if that makes sense (Justin, working-class, UoB).

Similarly, Lilly, despite talking about the loneliness she experienced, saw university as something you ‘had to go through’:

Er … no, never felt like dropping out. I think that’s because uni was determined as something I was going to do like from when I was really young, so it was just a kind of process that you had to go through.

Her comment can be related to the fact that for the middle-class youths going to university, it was seen as an inevitable life stage, something that it was considered normal for everybody to do, as we have reported in previous publications (Bathmaker et al., 2016; Bradley et al., 2013). It is a stage in building a middle-class lifestyle, in line with parents’ expectations, and only those from really wealthy backgrounds can easily contemplate giving up.

We note a different emphasis from working-class students, who stress their own determination to make something of themselves. While the middle-class have their commitment to a degree predetermined for them, with parents and teachers exerting pressure on them (see Bathmaker et al., 2013; Bradley and Ingram, 2012; Bradley et al., 2013 for full details), working-class students like Ruby, studying English at Bristol, have to build their own commitment:

Interviewer: You mentioned you were quite stressed, did you ever feel like dropping out of your course?

Ruby: No, never, never. It’s in my personality, I am just so ambitious and if I put my mind to it I have to do it and I have to complete it, that’s just me … You know the times when I was sort of crying and thinking ‘oh I just can’t do this any more’ I was still determined to do it, I would still be ‘yeah I definitely need to do this’ and it’s ‘I’ve put my mind to it so I need to finish it now’.

Discussion

In this section we offer some interpretation setting our findings in a broader context, while acknowledging that as this is a qualitative case study alternative interpretations are possible. Our findings offer some support to the view that dropout is related to academic capability and personality factors as exemplified in the stories of, say, Holly and Felix. However, we hope we have shown that class and disadvantage have helped to shape the choices made by these young adults as is evidenced by other studies from different countries (Lehmann, 2012; Quintana Murci 2016; Reay et al., 2009, 2010). As Wright Mills (1959) pointed out, public issues often manifest as personal problems. Although our sample is small and has limitations discussed in the methodology section, we suggest that personal difficulties and desires to change course may be more typical of middle-class students who drop out, while the working-class quitters are more likely to suffer from homesickness, lack of fit and study difficulties. While our study deals with a single country, we suggest that the pressures of contemporary life, the link of HE to economic success in a precarious world and the increasing cult of individual responsibility for success or failure (see also Furlong and Cartmel, 2007; Orrnert, 2016; Quintana Murci, 2016; Roberts, 1995) are likely to cause similar effects across Europe.

A key finding of the Paired Peers research has been that middle-class students enter HE as part of an expected and necessary transition route into career and adulthood. Schools and parents have primed them on what to expect. Although they may hit the same kind of problems as their working-class counterparts (such as depression or loneliness), the structure of expectations, theirs and their parents, is likely to carry them through. If they decide that they have chosen the wrong course, they are more likely to receive parental financial support to change to a new course. Thus Hannah switched to study medicine after completing a degree in psychology (her parents were doctors), while two male students from Bristol were funded to do law conversion courses.

Working-class students enter HE without a map to find their way through. They told us that their parents could not assist them in choice of course or university. We have argued elsewhere (Bradley and Waller, 2012) that just getting there has taken so much determination that they have tended to develop resilience in the face of difficulties. Moreover, we suggest that their experience of disadvantage and desire to avoid poverty in the future leads those that do succeed against the odds to develop a strong work ethic, enabling them to carry a double burden of coursework and paid employment (see also Lehmann, 2013). However, without maps a number of them, as demonstrated in the stories of Holly and Tracey, who stated they did not know what to expect of university, may simply lose their way. Difficulties adjusting to the middle-class culture of universities and pressurised academic demands are compounded for young people from working-class milieu by money worries, need for term-time working and isolation caused by resulting inability to take part in extra-curricular activities.

Though we do not have evidence of this, we fear that re-entry may be more difficult for such students. The British system differs from that in some European countries such as Spain, Denmark and Italy where dropping in and out of a course and taking five or more years to complete is not uncommon (Vossensteyn et al., 2015). Moreover, unlike Jade, students who drop out currently in the UK will have to take into account the debt they have already accumulated.

We have noted that students from all backgrounds report high levels of stress. Almost every one of our 60 current participants has mentioned it; some have also described serious episodes of depression during their studies, like Felix. This is now an acknowledged problem in the UK and universities will need to devote attention to tackling it. Increased amounts of assessment and strict submission deadlines may contribute to this, although its ultimate cause probably lies at the macro level of neoliberal economic norms and the individualistic ethos of self-responsibility which heighten fear of failure (Brown, 2003; Brown et al., 2011; Orrnert, 2016; Roberts, 1995). If this is the case, this phenomenon of increased stress may be encountered in student bodies in other European countries, although possibly less so in the Nordic states; as the work of Esping-Andersen (1990) among others has illustrated, the UK presents a notable case of a market-oriented liberal policy framework as opposed to the social democracy of Scandinavia. In fact, youth unemployment is a major problem across Europe, with shockingly high levels in countries such as Greece and Spain, which compounds the anxieties associated with academic failure or success (Quintana Murci, 2016). We suggest universities everywhere need to be more sensitive to what some students may be suffering, especially in the final year and try to provide appropriate advice and support, avoiding overload. Moreover, tutors need to pay attention to the silencing of less confident working-class students to counter feelings of exclusion. As Quinn (2013) argues, universities must be prepared to cater more readily for diversity of student needs.

A major problem, however, is the early age at which youths are being asked to make decisions and plan careers. Can we really know who we are at 18, let alone 15 or 16? A number of our undergraduates talked of plans which had gone awry. While the ‘gap year’ has acquired bad associations of young people travelling to party islands around the globe, a more pragmatic break after school to experience the realities of working life may be beneficial and has certainly helped some undergraduates form clearer views of what they wanted. The UK normative three consecutive years of study, starting at age 18 or 19, is not an arrangement that suits everyone. There needs to be more flexibility in the system to allow for part-time study, study breaks and mature entry, as is more common in other European countries and in Australia. Universities might also remove barriers to in-year transfer, such as that faced by Jade at her former university. Flexibility is one of the key recommendations made by Quinn in her European survey: as she notes,’ In Sweden students can leave a degree programme, enter the labour market and then return to study later. They do not lose the benefit of modules studied. Dropout rates in Sweden are comparatively low’ (Quinn, 2013: 87).

Finally, the party culture can hold dangers for less mature young people. This is particularly a first-year problem, and tutors might watch out for early signs of dropout such as non-attendance at classes. If data on retention becomes part of the rationale for funding decisions, universities will need to monitor progress more tightly, for example by utilising digital devices to record attendance, as noted by Vossensteyn et al. (2015) in their European survey. The increasing use of older students as ‘buddies’ or ‘mentors’ is another way to keep an eye on more vulnerable people for whom acceptance into the peer group is especially important.

Conclusions

Retention and dropout are of growing concern across Europe. As they are increasingly used as measures of successful teaching and learning and to inform funding allocation, universities have an urgent need to improve retention levels and minimise dropout. With stress levels increased by heightened competition and the threat of failure, institutions need to be alert to needs for support for students, especially in the first year and around the final exams, with improved counselling services and support for personal, financial and academic problems. Above all, students need to feel commitment to their course and welcomed by staff and other students, to make them feel like ‘fish in water’. Our research suggests that non-traditional students face compounded factors of disadvantage, so that special assistance may be needed in helping them learn the ‘rules of the game’ associated with the university habitus. Travelling without maps is not easy and may even be dangerous. All teaching staff should be prepared to act as guides.