The first-year experience of non-traditional students in Danish science and engineering university programmes

Abstract

To understand student drop-out from university, research must explore students’ first-year experiences and the challenges they encounter. This article analyses the first-year experiences of non-traditional students in Danish science and engineering university programmes. Focusing on identity theory and the framework of integration processes provided by Tinto, the article presents the challenges experienced by students from non-academic backgrounds and by students with ethnic minority backgrounds. The analysis presents four themes that are experienced as particularly challenging for the students: (1) a strong career focus which is hard for the students to maintain in their transition into university; (2) how the students from some non-academic backgrounds encounter the challenges they meet with limited resources; (3) how they spend time and resources on their family and how this affects their integration in the programme; and (4) the process of academic and social integration are particularly challenging as they require students to submit themselves to the cultural expectations of their studies, which can be hard to understand for students from families with no prior experiences of academia. The article discusses how these experiences can be understood within an identity framework.

In the past few decades, it has been an objective of educational policies throughout Europe that the student body (European Commission/EACEA/Eurydice, 2015). Science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) are often emphasised as areas with low completions rates and where diversity is challenged (Henriksen, 2015). To attract and retain a more diverse student body in higher education, STEM research has focused particularly on gender imbalance (Danielsson, 2011; Henriksen et al., 2015a; Sinnes and Løken, 2014; Tonso, 1999), a focus which is supported by stakeholders such as the Horizon 2020 agenda, where gender is a crosscutting issue (European Commission, 2016). However, gender is just one of the more relevant parameters. Socio-economic background, ethnicity or disabilities, for example, have not attracted the attention of stakeholders to the same degree, although they are of equal relevance in understanding equal access to higher education (Gorard and See, 2009; Gorard et al., 2006).

Though the composition of the student population in STEM higher education has gradually changed over the past few decades, these changes are more pronounced in some fields of higher education than in others. For instance, while the socio-economic background of students has become more balanced in some fields of study, it is still quite uneven in other fields, e.g. medicine (Thomsen, 2012).

Also, the risk of non-completion is unequal in relation to students’ backgrounds. A UK-based study found that ethnic minority students and students from families with no prior experience of higher education are at particular risk of leaving before completing their course (Quinn, 2013; Wong, 2016). A Danish study based on national register data found that students whose parents had higher education were less at risk of dropping out than their peers whose parents had limited or no education (Ulriksen et al., 2015b). A prognosis from the Danish Ministry of Education showed that a smaller share of young people from ethnic origins other than Danish complete a higher education than their peers of Danish ethnic origin (Uddannelses-og Forskningsministeriet, 2015). Thus, there is a need for a closer look at the unequal risk of dropping out between different groups of students within STEM.

First-year experiences and drop-out in higher education

A substantial amount of the research on student drop-out has focused on students’ academic preparation (Ulriksen et al., 2010). However, a review issued by The Higher Education Funding Council for England pointed out that ‘the limits of the explanatory power of prior educational attainment as a predictor of success are now widely recognised … prior qualifications account for only a part of the attainment gap’ (Mountford-Zimdars et al., 2015: 25).Similarly, Yorke and Longden (2004) argued that there is not one single reason for students not completing the study programme they have entered, but rather a number of elements related to a students’ choice of programme, their experiences of the programme and the institution, and how well they coped with the demands of the programme and events in their lives occurring outside the programme and the institution (Yorke and Longden, 2004: 104).

Tinto’s model of student departures from college (Tinto, 1975, 1993) included a number of elements, such as the student’s pre-entry attributes and qualifications as well as their commitment to the programme they are entering to understand why some students decide to leave university. At the heart of the model are the experiences of the students after they have entered higher education, and the social and academic integration occurring during this process where the students develop a sense of belonging and becoming a part of the academic community. Academic integration concerns the student’s experiences of the academic content of the programme and their interaction with the staff. Social integration concerns the student’s relationships with fellow students and their becoming a part of a social network and a social environment, and developing a sense of the institution and the programme as being the right place for them, or for someone like them.

The academic and social integration processes require the student to embark on a continuous negotiation and reflection process of becoming a part of the programme (Holmegaard et al., 2014). Recent research has increasingly focused on the importance of the student’s identity formation in relation to their entering higher education (Ulriksen et al., 2010). The focus on identity is related to the conceiving of entering and staying on a university study programme as a process of socialisation and becoming a part of an academic culture and community (Davies, 2012 [2006]). According to narrative psychology (Bruner, 2004; Polkinghorne, 1988), we understand and develop who we are through the construction of narratives. Through these narratives, we seek to construct a coherent sense of meaning of the past and present experiences, our interpretations of the present situation and our ideas of where we are going. The narratives are constructed in a particular context and are therefore liable to change, but they also have some continuity because we, inter alia, seek a sense of coherence. It means that an identity is not something stable that we have or are, but something that is negotiated and constructed continuously. Developing an identity as a STEM university student therefore requires the student to construct a narrative of being a student that is sensible, integrates experiences on the programme with the student’s prior experiences, balances the cultural requirements of the programme with the resources and expectations of the student’s cultural background, etc. (Ulriksen et al., 2013).

Therefore, the integration processes Tinto (1993) describes are also processes of constructing a viable narrative of being a student, where the student must be able to integrate the academic experiences into an identity and a sense of belonging that is recognisable and viable not only for the student him-or herself, but also for the student’s social environment. The negotiation and integration processes occur in an interaction between the experiences and social and cultural background students bring with them and what they encounter on the study programme (the teaching and learning activities, the curriculum of the programme – the content as well as the sequencing of the modules – and the culture(s) of the programme, for instance, what are considered legitimate interests). Ulriksen (2009) posits that any educational programme implies a particular student with particular interests, aspirations, attitudes, etc. in order to function. Therefore, when students enter a programme, they have to negotiate and balance their prior knowledge, experiences and expectations with the implied student of the programme they enter and with the experiences they have as university students. Consequently, the student’s social and cultural backgrounds play important roles in this integration and socialisation process.

Finally, like Yorke and Longden (2004), Tinto’s (1993) model includes that a student’s decision to leave could be affected by events and conditions outside the institution. These could be financial or health-related issues, family obligations (e.g. being a parent), or it could be other, more attractive opportunities emerging (for instance, entering another programme). Although some of these events and conditions could be decisive in their own right (e.g. if the student falls ill), others would be part of the negotiation where their importance and consequences are weighed against the experiences in the programme and the institution. In other words, just as social and academic integration are interrelated, so do the conditions within and outside the institution affect each other and the consequences the students draw from the experiences and conditions.

Non-traditional students and the drop-out process

Because student non-completion is related to the formation of identity in the encounter between the cultural context of the university programme and a student’s background, prior knowledge and experiences, it is plausible that students from non-traditional backgrounds will face more challenges than traditional university students.

In the present article we use the term ‘non-traditional’ as a general term for student groups who have previously been a minority in Danish higher-education programmes and who to a wide extent still are. This means that in many STEM programmes women are non-traditional, but they would be considered less so in the humanities programmes. Students from lower socio-economic groups and of ethnic origins other than Danish are also non-traditional in STEM programmes.

Importantly, even though the group of students who have hitherto been the majority may become outnumbered by other groups (for instance, male compared to female students), the group that has traditionally been in the majority may still be dominating in terms of the culture and norms in the discipline and at the institution. Since disciplines should be regarded as cultures (Becher and Trowler, 2001) and as fields of struggle for position and influence (Bourdieu, 1988), the culture and practices of a particular discipline and study programme may still be dominated by a group of students who are no longer in the majority. Therefore, even though female students are the majority in some STEM disciplines, the culture of a discipline may still privilege masculine practices (Allegrini, 2015). Furthermore, even when male students are in the minority, their minority experiences to some extent differ from those of female students (Madsen et al., 2015).

Previous studies have found that non-traditional students experience a sense of being the ‘other’ while the ‘normal’ student is perceived to be a white, middle-class or upper-class male (Allegrini, 2015; Archer et al., 2015; Johnson et al., 2011; Read et al., 2003). Read et al. (2003) found that the non-traditional students (in terms of age, class and ethnicity) sought institutions with a student body like themselves, and consequently refrained from applying to enter elite institutions even when they were qualified to do so. Still, even having entered an institution that appeared ‘friendly’ and with other students like themselves, the non-traditional students’ encounter with the university culture made them feel alien and non-authentic (Read et al., 2003).

The importance of the cultural and social aspects as well as the priority of sameness given by many ethnic minority and working-class students touches upon a dilemma related to the focus on integration. Tierney (1999) argued that Tinto’s model de facto required that minority students should commit cultural suicide and conform completely with the culture and values of the majority. However, although there is definitely a need for a nuanced understanding of the socialisation and enculturation processes when students enter higher education (Braxton et al., 2000; Tierney, 1999; Tinto, 2006–2007), this should also include the power issues at stake in the socialisation process. Students may not comply entirely with the implied student (Ulriksen, 2009), but if their practices differ too much from what is the norm and what is expected, the students may experience difficulties with being recognised and accepted as legitimate members of the disciplinary culture and eventually of the study programme. This lack of recognition may lead to a marginalised position in the disciplinary community and, for some non-traditional students, to eventually opting out altogether.

Hence, the integration and socialisation processes will differ for different students in different STEM programmes. The students will be interpreting, balancing and negotiating the conditions in interaction with their own experiences, capital and habitus (Bourdieu, 1984) that are closely related to their cultural, ethnic and socio-economic background.

It is the aim of this article to explore the first-year experiences of non-traditional students in Danish STEM higher-education programmes with the purpose of identifying challenges these students meet and their navigation in handling them. In particular, we study the experiences of two groups of non-traditional students on STEM programmes: students from a less privileged socio-economic background and students of ethnic origins other than Danish. Students from the latter group may also be part of the former, but due to their ethnic origin they may experience particular challenges when entering a STEM higher-education programme.

We are not only interested in understanding the challenges encountered by the individual non-traditional student, but we explore how some ways of student navigation are included by the social and cultural context of a given STEM study programme, while others are excluded. We will focus on two elements in particular in our analysis of non-traditional students’ first-year experiences:

• Identity and the socialisation process involved in forming an identity as a higher-education student;

• Integration, academic as well as social.

We focus on student experiences after having entered higher education and, as suggested by Harvey et al. (2006), we approach the problem as an issue concerning the first-year experience in general rather than retention and drop-out in isolation. Concerning the students’ pre-entry attributes, we do not ask whether students’ pre-entry attributes have a role to play, but rather in what way these attributes interfere in the way in which the students cope with their experiences in higher education.

Methods

The context of the study

The present study was carried out in the context of the Danish higher-education system. While studies of working-class students in higher education in the UK found that financial concerns played an important role in the choices of these students (Reay et al., 2005), a recent Danish study did ‘not find that working-class students have been deterred from attending university for financial reasons, nor have they had experiences of financial constraint in their upbringing’ (Thomsen et al., 2013: 471). The difference between the two findings presumably reflects a difference between the English system with tuition fees and limited financial support for students and the Danish system where studying in higher education is free and where most students receive a monthly state educational grant to cover their living expenses. However, studies show that both social and ethnic mobility are challenged in the Danish system. More students with an ethnic background other than Danish drop out of university (Jakobsen and Liversage, 2010), just as students from families with limited or no education are more at risk of leaving university than students whose parents attended higher education (Ulriksen et al., 2015b). Hence, Denmark provides an interesting case for understanding the more subtle drop-out mechanisms as economic challenges appear to be less important, and social mobility in Denmark is quite high compared to other countries (Vinther-Jørgensen and Thomsen, 2014).

Interviews

The analysis builds on qualitative, narrative interviews with 22 students and is part of a larger study focusing on students’ choice and transition into STEM higher education (see, for instance, Holmegaard et al. (2014, 2016) and Henriksen et al. (2015b) for the context of the project). A total of 134 students from 6 upper-secondary school science classes completed a survey a few months before completing upper-secondary school. The survey included questions concerning the students’ experiences of and attitudes to STEM and their reflections about their choice of higher education. Of these, 38 students were selected and interviewed before they finished upper-secondary school, and 22 of these students were subsequently interviewed between 2 and 5 times during their first year in higher education. Of the 22 students who were interviewed during their first year in higher education, 14 had parents who had not completed higher education, while 8 came from families with an academic background. Five of the 22 students came from families with different ethnic backgrounds from Danish. Three of these had parents without an academic background; two had parents with academic degrees from their first country.

The interviewees were selected to display a variety of students, but the interview guide did not address cultural or socio-economic issues. Unless the students themselves raised these themes during the interviews, the interviewer would not ask questions specifically on these issues. This means that the present analysis is based on the experiences related to the students’ social and cultural background that they themselves considered relevant.

The interviews were conducted using a semi-structured interview guide (Kvale, 1996) and carried out from an explorative narrative interview approach (Hollway and Jefferson, 2000). The primary focus was allowing the students to elaborate and share their narratives. The role of the interviewer was to investigate the students’ narratives, their meaning making and experiences with follow-up questions. The interviewer carefully considered how to prompt and position the interviewee, as the interviewer is perceived as a co-constructor of the interview (Andrews et al., 2008).

All interviewees received pseudonyms and sensitive personal information was revised in the analysis due to ethical considerations. (For a more detailed presentation of the collection and analysis of data, see Holmegaard (2012) and Holmegaard et al. (2014).)

Analytic approach

The analysis offers a longitudinal view of non-traditional students’ first-year experiences on STEM university programmes. All interviews were transcribed verbatim and the interviews with the 14 students with non-traditional backgrounds were analysed with a thematic analytic approach (Braun and Clarke, 2006). The six-step approach was as follows: first, to read through the transcripts and become familiar with the data; second, to identify the sequences where the students expressed experiences that could be linked to their background; third, we searched for broader themes across the sequences; fourth, the themes were reviewed, some were collapsed, others broken down and reorganised to form new coherent themes; fifth, each theme was analysed in terms of constructing the analytic narrative of the data; and sixth, the analysis was written up, selecting examples and quotes that illustrated the themes. The overall story as well as the complexity within it apply the theoretical framework presented in the previous sections.

Analysis

The following analysis is organised in four themes: the importance of seeing a clear career; the relations with life outside academia; the challenge of academic integration (negotiating the implied student); and, finally, a particular focus on ethnic minority students managing social integration.

‘What can I use it for?’ – the absence of a clear career

By the first interview in upper-secondary school, the students were at the stage of considering what to continue studying. The students from families with no previous higher-education experiences found very little guidance or advice at home. Erika, for example, said that her parents were very supportive in terms of her choosing whatever she wanted, but they could not discuss the options with her:

It’s like, if I tell my parents: ‘I want this’, they say ‘ok’ because they know nothing about science and what I am doing … They just think that I should choose whatever I want.

Other students with parents without an academic background expected the students to have a clear idea of their career perspective. This is why Djemal decided to go into engineering instead of physics, because he found it difficult to figure out what kind of jobs astrophysics could lead to. Other students explained that it was important for them that they could see a clear relevance and applicability of the content they were presented with.

However, when moving into the first year, some of the students from families with no prior experience of academia had difficulties maintaining a strong career-orientation as well as experiencing the content as applicable to life in general. Some of the students met a hierarchical knowledge structure, where they were presented with courses with auxiliary content they had to learn before moving on to courses with the kind of content the student expected to meet. Emil, for instance, entered biochemistry, but couldn’t see a clear link to a future career. This made him think about what the study programme might lead him to, and he began considering whether engineering would have been a more suitable choice for him:

If you study at the engineering university then it’s fine to have a bachelor, and it might be better if you need a job … for example we have a labcoat and have not yet been in the lab, but my friends at the engineering university are in the lab already, and perhaps that is an advantage when they apply for a job.

Another example was Cecilie who at the first interview during the first year had already decided to stop studying sports science. She explained:

A lot of the students at my study programme do not consider what they want to do after their studies, but I do. My future job means a lot to me, and my future in general means a lot to me. It is not enough that the studies are fine. I have to consider the future jobs. I don’t want to spend 3–6 years on a university degree and end up with no job at all.

When entering sports science, Cecilie found out that the most likely job prospects would be to become a teacher in upper-secondary school or a researcher. She did not want to teach, and she said that only a few ended up doing research. Therefore, she was challenged in trying to maintain strong aspirations towards a future career in the field. She found that she, to a much higher degree than her fellow students, required her study to be relevant and applicable: ‘I could not see any reasons for doing the things we were presented with. The others just did it’.

Throughout the interview, Cecilie emphasised that she perceived education to be a ticket to a secure future, while it seemed to be enough for her fellow students that the study was interesting. Cecilie said that one of the reasons for her leaving sports science was that for her ‘it is not enough to find the study to be funny. I have to think about my future job’. As such, pure interest is described as a luxury that Cecile cannot really afford. Leaving her studies was a ‘relief’ and her family supported her throughout the process:

When I chose to drop out they were like ‘are you sure that it is wise’ and ‘what will you do then’ and so on, and they asked a lot about what I think about it all … It was not like my dad said ‘you cannot drop out, then you are no longer my daughter’. They do not push me because they don’t really know what I am doing.

Like Cecilie, some of the students had difficulties maintaining a clear focus on a future career when entering the study programme. Consequently, the students had to find a sense of meaning within the study itself, which was difficult because the students also struggled with identifying the way in which the course content was relevant and applicable. Like Cecilie, some of the students asked ‘what can I use it for?’

For some of the non-traditional students, their narratives were required to include that their study would lead to a realistic future career path. If the study programme made it too difficult to construct such a narrative, it would be acceptable to leave the study programme. Leaving higher education was not presented in Cecilie’s narrative as a huge personal defeat. Perhaps the support of the family as well as their not having any experience of higher education in the family meant that they did not expect her to necessarily complete higher education, which eventually made it easier for her to leave.

The relations to and from life outside academia

Another challenge experienced by the students from families with no prior academic experience was how their life outside university affected their studies. One example was Elisabeth. Due to problems with her parents, Elisabeth had moved into her own apartment during upper-secondary school, and the challenges she described in the transition to university had to do with her living alone, finding time to work to pay the rent, managing her own life without any support and having problems with paying for expensive books for her study programme. Also Frida encountered problems caused by family conditions. Her father was seriously ill and her mother found it hard to handle the situation, so Frida took over a lot of responsibility. She said:

At the same time I found out I suffered from dyslexia. My dad was ill and my mother was kind of ill. Suddenly there are a lot of things that are more important in life than completing an education … and get yourself a life.

In general, some of the non-traditional students experienced substantial challenges outside university. They had considerable responsibilities, limited support and few resources, and that is why they faced the challenges they encountered in their studies. But life outside academia also interacted with some of the students’ experiences in other ways, namely that some students maintained a very strong relation with their friends and family outside university. For a few students, this hindered their social integration. Emil for instance only attended lectures and did not engage in social activities at all. He preferred taking the train back to his family and girlfriend to spend time with them. This had implications when he needed a new study group and, instead of using time to do this on the study programme, he decided it was easier to study alone at home.

The challenge of academic integration: negotiating the implied student

A challenge that was highlighted in the students’ narratives was a surprise or frustration in deciphering the implied student and fitting into the cultural requirements of the study programme. Louise considered studying physics, but opted for Danish instead. She was surprised by the other students. She explained:

They are very humanistic, it’s kind of: they speak soft and low like whispering, and I am kind of ‘speak properly – I can’t hear what you say’. You know, they have those nice scarfs, and you have to drink a lot of coffee. And their hair is done in a significant bun. And a backpack is a really good idea too and riding your bike everywhere and talk friendly and lower your voice.

Louise described how she felt being different and that even though she found she knew how to become one of these girls, she could not make herself do it as it seemed too far away from who she perceived herself to be. However, she did have a hair bun and a scarf when we met her for the next interview. Other students struggled with deciphering the implied student, particularly concerning navigating the courses. Belal found it really hard to figure out what was required of him in terms of studying the right way. He got really frustrated with computer science and considered leaving his studies:

In the beginning I was almost about to drop out … I was panicking and didn’t know what to do … it was kind of standing in an abyss and looking up without knowing how to get out because I did not how to handle the assignments.

Djemal, one of the students from families with ethnic backgrounds other than Danish like Belal above, told about a situation where he decided not to take part in a discussion during class because he was unsure about how the others might react and he had the feeling that his point of view would be illegitimate. In class, the lecturer mentioned the attack on the World Trade Center on 9/11 and what made the buildings collapse. Based on something he had read in another context, Djemal was curious to hear the lecturer’s view on certain aspects concerning, for example, the melting point of steel. However, he did not ask the questions. One reason was the lecturer had mentioned that ‘“some claim that there were explosive charges down in the building and they claim that even though you can see a plane hitting the tower”, and then people (that is, the other students in class) started laughing’, Djemal said in the interview. From what Djemal had read elsewhere, there were some unresolved questions concerning temperature and other matters (that he explained in the interview), and he would have liked to ask the lecturer about this. However, he decided not to say anything because ‘I think it may not be so good a signal to send at that point, particularly because we don’t know each other that well, or they don’t know me that well’. His concern was mainly not what the lecturer would say, but rather what the other students would think and whether he would be perceived as a sensible student, or perhaps even risk being positioned as sharing political rather than academic considerations.

Social integration, the experience of ethnic minority students

In an interview with one of the students who came from a family with an ethnic background other than Danish, the student commented on the social environment of the study programme by noting that some students were rather mature, but she also observed the ethnic composition of the students. The interviewer asked her about the culture and study environment at the institution. She explained ‘there are really many immigrants at the school. That surprises me’. She said that it did not matter as such, but it influenced her language use, and ‘sometimes you happen to speak Turkish or something instead of talking Danish’ and she believed that ‘it’s better to speak Danish and improve rather than talking Turkish all the time’. Another observation was that ‘there have been formed groups of immigrants and groups where only Danes are together. But of course there are mixed groups too. I’m in a mixed group’ (Coya, first interview).

This experience of the environment at the institution was also present in the second interview with her. By then, Coya had opted out of professional engineering and into academic engineering at a different institution because she wanted a more theoretical and research-oriented programme. In this interview, she referred back to what she said in the first interview about the many ethnic minority students (‘immigrants’) and that she did not like that the ‘immigrants’ and the ‘Danes’ got separated into different groups. It was not that the two groups did not speak to one another, but that she experienced the two groups (and she changed the labels to ‘Danes’ and ‘Muslims’) had little in common:

I notice that when I am only with my Danish friends then they make a lot of jokes about sex and having a good time and who have you been with and those sorts of thing. And that’s pretty funny, but other Muslims don’t really like that and they don’t talk about those sorts of things at all. So, there is a lot of disagreement about that kind of thing. They don’t get along that well together and they can’t find common points to talk about and stuff. It’s very different. And when you are with the immigrants, then they talk a lot about their culture and what they are allowed to do and what they usually do at home and make fun of those kinds of things. And it’s not this sex-based thing. The Danes, they don’t understand any of it if we talk about what we do at home – then we make fun of something and they don’t get it because it’s kind of an inside joke. So it’s like – I believe they have difficulties having a good time together (Coya, second interview).

At the academic engineering programme, she also found a division into groups of ‘Danes’ and groups of ‘immigrants’, although mixed groups were also found. However, she said that in general it worked okay, maybe because there were more students and more social activities, for instance a Friday’s bar. The interviewer asked if one could go to the Friday’s bar without drinking alcohol, and Coya replied that that would be alright. She said that ‘everybody drinks over there’, but ‘there are also some who don’t drink and still have a good time. Now, for me – I can get along with both because I also drink. I’m not as restricted as the other Muslims’.

Coya’s experiences from the two institutions point to two different challenges concerning the social integration of some of the ethnic minority students. The first concerns the cultural frames of reference of the students that differ due to their different social and cultural origins. This hampers social integration because it makes the informal talk and interaction more difficult. As reported by Coya, it can lead to the formation of separate groups based on ethnic origin, but if the minority students are very few it can also lead to isolation and a peripheral position for some students.

The second challenge visible in Coya’s account concerns particular cultural practices in different groups that might hinder the social integration of particular students, predominantly (but not exclusively) of particular religious affiliations. These are cultural practices related to the consumption of alcohol among Danish youth. Coya’s remark that ‘everybody drinks over there’ is not an unusual observation. Drinking alcohol is a prominent part of Danish youth culture and social life.

The close link between social activities and alcohol made Djemal reluctant to participate in social activities. Even though he is not, as he said, ‘one of the most socially outgoing persons’ (Djemal, first interview), he also stayed away from the Friday’s bars because of the drinking, and generally he had the impression that his fellow students never did anything social without drinking. He mentioned a ‘Danish’ peer who did not drink either, but while this fellow student did not mind attending the get-togethers where the rest of the students were drinking, Djemal stayed away. In the second interview, he said that somebody had talked about going to church together and afterwards going ice-skating, but that in the end it did not happen. He would have liked to participate in that, which made the interviewer ask: ‘So you would rather go to church and then ice-skating than going to parties?’ and Djemal replied: ‘Yes, definitely’.

Some of the students we interviewed were in programmes where the students were administratively put into study groups and others were in programmes with group project work. It turned out that the project groups could serve as leverage for social integration. Some spaces were organised and run by the students. This was the case for another of the ethnic minority students, Belal, studying computer science. He told us about the student-run canteen that also served as a study facility where students worked on assignments and one could get help and advice from other students, including older students. This canteen had a pivotal position in the narrative of Belal and of other interviewed students on the computer science programme. In Belal’s narrative, it became clear that the canteen was essential for his staying at the programme during the first year. It was in the canteen that he found references to resources that could help him learn the coding that the study programme tacitly presupposed he could already do, and it was in the canteen that he received suggestions about how to organise his study. Furthermore, Belal told us about LAN parties that brought students together and alcohol was not mentioned as a component there. Maybe these experiences with the computer science programme have to do with what we found in another study including that particular programme, namely that there seemed to be a variety of different identities available to the students (Madsen et al., 2015).

Discussion and conclusion

The aim of the study was to explore the first-year experiences of non-traditional students in Danish STEM higher-education programmes. In particular, the purpose was to identify the challenges these students encountered and their abilities in handling them.

Raised issues of social background

The analysis showed that students from families with no prior experience of academia found it difficult in the first year to keep sight of the clear career path that was important to them. To become a higher-education student, the students were required to submit themselves fully to their studies and to accept the content and refrain from struggling with seeing the relevance and applicability of the content with which they were presented. Other studies support this finding. Reay (2001) introduces the expression of the embedded chooser who, by drawing on cultural capital, enters higher education with confidence and does not have to worry about future jobs, as they are certain that their degree will give them access to an attractive future (Reay et al., 2005). This is contrary to the non-traditional students who are more uncertain of where higher education might lead and they aspire towards more clearly defined careers (Thomsen, 2012)

The analysis showed that the world outside academia interacted with the students’ first-year experiences in various ways. One was that the students experienced limited support from their family and friends who did not understand or recognise what studying in higher education was like. They could offer no or little support to the students, who therefore had fewer resources available to enable them to cope with the challenges of studying. Some students experienced that family obligations made it hard to fully concentrate on their studies. Finally, some students maintained a strong relationship with their friends and family outside university. Although this could be a help for the students when entering higher education, as explored further by Cotton, Nash and Kneale in this special issue, it depends on the nature of the relationship. In this study, the challenges related to the students’ backgrounds hindered their integration process, as they did not take part in their studies in line with their fellow students. One explanation for this is what Reay (2001) describes as holding on to oneself:

The working-class students were trying to negotiate a difficult balance between investing in a new improved identity and holding on to a cohesive self that retained an anchor in what had gone before (Reay, 2001: 337).

The students from families with no prior higher-education experiences risk feeling that they are losing themselves when they negotiate their identity to become academics. As such, they are challenged in combining who they are with their families and friends with who they are expected to become in higher education. This is what Louise pointed at when she could not make herself talk and behave like her fellow students.

The absence of class issues in the students’ stories

However, the most notable finding in our study was that explicit class issues were absent in the students’ narratives. While the students in the study by Reay et al. (2005) mentioned class and social background as themes, we did not find this in the narratives of the Danish students. On the contrary, they did not report any situations where they experienced that their cultural and socio-economic background deprived them of opportunities that fellow students had due to their parents’ educational background.

Still, statistics show that even in a Scandinavian welfare state, the parents’ educational background has a ‘clear and substantial’ effect on the relative risk of leaving a STEM programme within the first three years (Ulriksen et al., 2015b: 229). This means that the effect of the parents’ educational background is apparently working ‘behind the scenes’.

One explanation for this could be that the class-based experiences do not present themselves to the students as being related to class. One reason could be that the Danish society appears to have less pronounced class differences than the English. Another reason could be that previous analyses of the interviews with the same cohort of students as in this article showed that the experience of having difficulties in the transition into university is shared by students from academic and non-academic backgrounds (for instance, Holmegaard et al. (2014) or Ulriksen et al. (2015a)). This means that what could be the effect of the differences in socio-economic backgrounds is obscured by a more general experience of difficulties in making sense of higher education. Finally, a third reason could be that the students do not notice the differences as being related to social class, but rather to individual competences and practices. It could also be because the class-based differences cannot be part of an acceptable narrative of the experiences because socio-economic background is not accepted as a viable reason for differences in the students’ cultural contexts. In either way (the students do not notice, or the students notice, but cannot articulate this in an acceptable narrative), it means that if the students should encounter difficulties during their course of study they will not necessarily be able to identify structural reasons for these difficulties that might be related to their socio-economic background and the resources available there, or they would at least have difficulties articulating them as such. This impedes their opportunity for acting on the class-based difficulties and differences, just like the teachers or the institutions will tend to neglect the difficulties that some of the students meet.

The fact that the students point to the challenges they meet as individual experiences is part of a general discourse on how individuals in late-modern societies are the creators of their own biographies (e.g. Beck and Beck-Gernsheim, 2002). Consequently, young people will be looking for individual rather than social or structural explanations for their successes or failures. The narratives they will be able to construct to make sense of these experiences will mainly focus on individual components and to a limited extent have access to integrate cultural or socio-economic explanations in their narratives.

Raised issues of ethnicity

Unlike social class, the ethnic and cultural background was present in some of the narratives of the students who came from families with a different ethnic background to Danish. For two of the four, Belal in computer science and Deniz in biotech engineering, ethnicity in itself was not a theme. They did not mention their ethnicity or that of their fellow students; neither did they make any comments concerning the social or academic integrations that were related to their ethnic or cultural background. Belal strongly emphasised the social environment and the social integration as a crucial asset for getting through the first year, as did several other students.

The two other ethnic minority students, Coya and Djemal, linked some of their experiences to their own cultural and ethnic background. As described in the analysis, there was sometimes a clash between the social and cultural practices of the majority of students and the preferences of the students with families with ethnic backgrounds other than Danish. This deters social integration, but Djemal also refrained from asking a question that could improve his academic understanding, because of his religious and ethnic affiliation and his interpretation of the gaze of others. He experienced being ‘the other’ and his decision not to ask the question in class might have resulted in him feeling even more alien and different from the others. The discrimination, therefore, acts through the discriminated himself, through his reactions to previous experiences of being ‘othered’ and his trying to fit in. It is difficult to say to which extent situations like this deter academic integration.

The experiences with social activities and the consumption of alcohol are examples of a cultural practice among the majority that de facto excludes some of the minority students or impel them to adjust their cultural practices. The exclusion not only has consequences for social integration and the students’ sense of belonging to the institution and the programme, rather it also affects their access to academic resources among fellow students.

The narratives of Coya and Djemal show that being an ethnic minority student can be experienced as being ‘other’. But it does require deliberate actions from the students, for instance, withdrawal from the majority (as Djemal did), or withdrawal from contexts where ethnic groups are formed (as Coya did) or deciding whether to drink alcohol.

Final reflections

Finally, the results showed that social and academic integration are strongly linked to each other and that together they affect the risk of drop-out. By using the notion of the implied student (Ulriksen, 2009), the analysis shows that the implied student is not only concerned with academic practices, interests and attitudes. The social environment also contains an implied student who presupposes particular practices and preferences among the students in order to be recognised as belonging. Further, the analysis shows how there is more than one way that the students can find to belong in their new study programme. One programme may hold a greater variety of implied students, even if these may hold different positions in the hierarchy in the discipline. Hughes shows how, for example, biology offers a wider range of student scientist identities than physics (Hughes, 2001), and similarly computer science has various subcultures to which the students can relate as opposed to, for example, molecular biomedicine (Madsen et al., 2015). The implied student will differ across different disciplines and this will offer the students different opportunities and obstacles in different programmes.

All students who enter higher education need to negotiate their expectations of their study programme with what they actually encounter (Holmegaard et al., 2014). Students handle this negotiation process in different ways. How well prepared the students are for encountering this process depends on their social background, the experiences and the capital they bring with them as well as on what resources they can draw on in their struggle. Students from families with no prior experiences within academia have limited resources to draw on, as our analysis has shown.

Implications of our findings are not straightforward

When it comes to non-traditional students, there are two keywords that higher-education teachers and leaders should emphasise: visibility and inclusion. When students from non-traditional backgrounds meet higher education, our results show that they struggle with understanding the governing practices within academia. Hence, they are challenged in their integration process. Teachers could make the expectations of the students explicit in the classroom. This covers all issues from how students are expected to participate, how to prepare for class, how a study group works, to more general visibility of expectations. Moreover, first-year teachers and counsellors could work on including various methods of studying, various aspirations and interests within the first-year curriculum. One starting point is for study programmes and specific courses to consider what kind of implied student they produce, what student practices are included and excluded due to the teachers’ practices and understanding of the content. The second step would be to include the various ways of becoming a student. Including content and teaching and learning activities that present the link between teaching and possible future careers could cater for the needs of those students who struggle with maintaining a career perspective.

Concerning ethnicity, the institutions and study programmes could prioritise the support of social activities that do not involve alcohol. Further, the results showed that some students were seeking the company of students like themselves. This strategy could serve as a support for some students in their handling of the unfamiliar culture at university (as mentioned by Hurtado and Carter, 1997), but it also means running the risk of impeding processes of social integration that could facilitate the students’ academic attainments. Institutions could work on facilitating social space for students to work together across different backgrounds.

The conditions for addressing these challenges are presumably different across Europe due to differences in the social and ethnic composition of the population and due to differences in the economic situation (both the distribution of wealth in the population as a whole and the funding of studies and students’ life costs). While Danish undergraduate programmes primarily have students of Danish origin (and are taught mainly in Danish), some post-graduate programmes at Master’s level are taught in English and have a substantial proportion of international students attending. The balance between students from different backgrounds on these courses is often different from the balance in undergraduate programmes. However, the challenges are similar in nature when it comes to encountering the implied student(s) of the programme and the students from non-traditional backgrounds.