Failing Students in Higher Education (review)

Failing Students in Higher Education is a compilation of essays by higher education researchers and practitioners in the United Kingdom that grew out of a symposium on academic failure at Lancaster University in the late 1990s. As one of the editors stated, "Underpinning the structure of this book is the belief that academic life and learning has to be understood holistically, with an awareness of the social and political context alongside the cognitive and affective components of intellectual activity" (Peelo, p. 1). It is through the authors' discussions of learning, success, and failure that they address links between research and practice and strive to advance discussions on why students fail, what higher education institutions can do about failure, and the impact of the assumptions of higher education faculty and staff about student academic failure on strategies to reduce incidences of failure.

What is failure? The editors chose the title of the book deliberately to focus not only on students who do not meet academic standards but also on the concept that the system of higher education fails students. Chapters cover the range of individual choices and responses that lead to students voluntarily withdrawing from postsecondary institutions and being academically dismissed. Other chapters cover the higher education policy issues related to student dismissal and withdrawal and the assumption, built into the system itself, of a certain amount of student academic failure.

I immediately saw interesting parallels between national events and policies in the United Kingdom and the United States. For example, students in both countries experienced broader access to higher education in the mid- to late-1940s, when national policies were created to educate returning servicemen. Also during this time and a couple of decades later, both countries experienced increased structural development of higher education institutions with new colleges and universities being created. Both countries also experienced tension (certainly in varying degrees) between providing access to higher education and maintaining quality in universities.

Peelo, in the first chapter, "Setting the Scene," introduces the book and describes its organization. He also provides interesting commentary about student withdrawal, different kinds of withdrawal (e.g, voluntary, academic dismissal, stop out), and theoretical approaches to withdrawal (e.g., Tinto). A key issue for many authors in this book is how students experience the learning environment. Peelo seems to find that Tinto's theory is useful for discussing some aspects of student withdrawal but less so in explaining and exploring how students learn and how their learning experiences affect academic withdrawal.

After this first chapter, the book is separated into three parts. Part 1, "Policies and Patterns," focuses on the social and political environment as it relates to student learning. The five chapters in Part 2, "Teachers and Learners," report practices in higher education and discuss specific programs and experiences of higher education practitioners relative to instructional design. Part 3, "Working with Students," also focuses on specific programs but seems to take a more theoretical approach to the teaching and learning enterprise.

Parry, in "A Short History of Failure" in Part 1, gives an overview of policy changes in U.K. higher education over the past forty years or so. The chapter touches on some of the contradictions in the United Kingdom's higher education policy environment that has led to a deemphasis on academic withdrawal in the 1960s, followed by a recent emphasis on and interest in reducing withdrawal.

Yorke's chapter, "Academic Failure: A Retrospective View from Non-completing Students," features results from two studies of noncompleting students in 1996 and 1997. Yorke also summarizes the main findings of retention literature (much of it published in the United States) by noting the circumstances when academic withdrawal is most common: student lack of commitment, difficulty in choosing academic major, background characteristics (e.g. lower income, older, lower...