Transition from high school can be traumatic

The adjustment from high school to university is truly a lifestyle revolution, and can be much more dramatic than most students or their parents anticipate.

About 18 per cent of high school grads will make the transition from high school to first-year university this year. The reasons for this seemingly low number include university admission standards and the high cost, including fees, accommodation, transportation and miscellaneous living-away-from-home expenses.

Then there is the spectre, always hovering, of the 14 per cent or so of first-year students who drop out, according to the Persistence in Post-Secondary Education in Canada report, which analyzed data from Statistics Canada’s Youth in Transition Survey.

Most first-year students, who by definition were high performers in high school, take a hit on their gradepoint averages. That’s discouraging, and some kids, for the first time, will wonder if they are out of their depth, if this was a mistake and whether they should try something else.

In terms of grade-point-average calculations, students find themselves competing with other higher-perform- ing students like themselves and less against students who are less academically inclined. That shouldn’t affect grade distributions, but it does if grades are distributed across a “bell curve.”

Again, first-year students expect courses to be more challenging, but find at the same time that the level of effort that brought success in high school does not yield the same results in university.

A Statistics Canada Youth in Transition Survey concludes that nearly half of all students surveyed saw their marks decline by one full letter grade. About 23 per cent saw their grades plummet by two letters or more. Only 2.5 per cent of students saw their grades improve, and about a quarter maintained averages consistent with their high-school marks.

In large lecture halls, some students feel isolated. In high school, teachers know students by name, but in university, not all professors are as approachable.

This brings back a flood of memories about the hesitant young man who, having graduated from an allboys beach-side high school class of 25 or so in 1961, found himself as just one of a throng of hundreds of “freshers” trying to find their way at the big-city University of Sydney (New South Wales).

Courses were based not on any kind of teacher-student relationship but on hundreds of us being packed into the Wallace Theatre, frantically taking lecture notes without any real idea as to what was significant for the course and what was just musing on the part of the lecturer, who spoke, uninterrupted, for the entire hour and then left. No questions, no discussion. Interspersed with the lectures were small-group seminars, presumably related to the topic, if we could figure out what that was.

Of course, things have changed for first-year students in 2015, but the dropout numbers still indicate that first-year university can have devastating long-term consequences on self-confidence and willingness to take on new challenges.

And that is just the academic side of things. New friends, independent living, new interests, maybe a first serious relationship, all play a part in making the big adjustment away from family, high school and friends who grew up together.

So what to do? How to avoid becoming part of that first-year dropout rate? University life is not just about studying, but when it comes to keeping up with courses, that is certainly the priority, no matter what it takes.

Fortunately, access to reference material is much easier in 2015 than it was in 1961. In the age of technology, students need to use every door to information recommended by lecturers and seminar leaders. They need to be twice or three times as sure that they understand course expectations more thoroughly than they did in high school.

Beyond academics, first years should jump right into university life: Clubs, teams and activities are all geared to the entry-level student. Those opportunities are the things that most of us eventually remember in later years as some of the best years of our lives.