Catch 'em young, send 'em up

20 May 2010 - 00:17 By Jonathan Jansen
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Jonathan Jansen: There is a solution to the damaging loss of money and talent that comes with tens of thousands of South African students dropping out of university.

Universities lose funding resources, parents lose out on hard-earned savings invested in their children, students lose confidence in their ability to gain a university education, and the country fails to gain another skilled graduate from university.

All round, the consequences of failure and drop-out are devastating for student, family, university and country. Until now, few universities have come up with imaginative solutions to an old problem - the high drop-out rates.

Here's a brilliant idea proposed by a friend: Send high school students to university before they finish high school.

What?

Tshepo is a Grade 10 student at, say, JB Mkhize high school in a rural township school. Nobody in his family has ever gone to university. Tshepo is very smart and longs to go beyond Grade12 to study further and get a decent job.

Despite the fact that Tshepo finds himself in a school with a 30% pass rate in the senior certificate examination, he passes all his subjects and finds himself among the top 5% of learners in his school.

Because of his natural talent and personal efforts, Tshepo will pass Grade 12, but the gap between a poor school education and a demanding university training will be too much for the young man. He is destined to drop out.

So the university goes to Tshepo and offers him the option of going to university every Saturday morning from 9am to 3pm where he can do either PsychologyI or ChemistryI or AccountancyI over a three-year period - during his senior high school years.

Tshepo jumps at the opportunity and gains the one thing that first-generation university students desperately need - university knowledge.

He learns how to take summary notes in large classes.

He learns to use the computer as a tool for learning.

He learns to find his way through a university library using both online resources as well as sources in the stacks.

He learns to work on complex problems in psychology or accounting in groups consisting of talented but equally disadvantaged students from other schools.

He learns to consult with tutors and professors.

He learns to find his way through the campus buildings.

And he learns to find his own voice in classrooms, laboratories and seminars.

In other words, by the time Tshepo reaches university in three years' time, he has already been there. This is the crucial difference between Tshepo and first-year students who come in cold . he already has the critical knowledge needed for success that is called university knowledge.

Of course, he will learn disciplinary knowledge in one of the three subject areas over many Saturday classes; but what he also gains are the skills and the confidence to negotiate his way through what is often a frightening experience: university life.

The arguments against this innovative thinking to address the problem of high drop-out rates are predictable. For example, there will be those who ask: What about the scaffolding knowledge that Tshepo needs to do well in a first-year university course?

Well, many university courses, such as Psychology, are not dependent on what you know from school. In addition, since school knowledge in fields such as accountancy is often weakly learnt and weakly linked to university-level accountancy, the bridging knowledge can be built into the design of the first-year curriculum.

Of course, this kind of innovation demands the best university teachers and an intensive model of academic support. A strong mentorship programme is critical and open, regular feedback is important to guide Tshepo over the three-year period. But once these foundations have been laid, Tshepo would have the competence and confidence to deal with the rigours of university life, including lousy university teachers.

Here's the brilliance of this model: Should Tshepo pass one of these three courses while at high school, which I have no doubt he will, he can gain the credits for the course once he registers at the university offering this plan. In other words, Tshepo would not have to pay a cent for the course and, in addition, he will have a lighter first-year load than other students.

But the benefits run downwards as well: Tshepo will now probably do much better in the Grade12 examinations because of the skills and the confidence gained through his university-level courses over three years.

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