Abstract
Ph.D.
Annually, many students apply and are accepted into Technical Vocational Education and Training (TVET) colleges countrywide. These students are accepted based on a National Qualification Framework (NQF) level 1 qualification. No pre-selection of students takes place and all eligible applicants are admitted. Many of the students who are selected for programmes in the Engineering, Business, and Information Technology departments experience great difficulty coping with the academic work because of the difference in academic standards and expectations of Secondary School education and the TVET college sector.
The high attrition rate of students at Technical Vocational Education and Training (TVET) colleges and other tertiary institutions throughout the world has been of concern to these institutions of higher learning.
“At the college under investigation only 103 of the 1108 students that initially enrolled completed the qualification in 2009”(Govender, 2010:7)
This research examines the high attrition rate of a cohort of first year students enrolled at a TVET College in Gauteng, South Africa. The motivation for doing so is first, because the first year proves to be an important year in the process of persistence and second because the largest proportion of institutional leaving occurs in the first. This research study also places student attrition within an institutional context and highlights issues at local level where there is potential for improvement that would result in better outcomes for all stakeholders.
Tinto’s longitudinal model focuses on the departure from institutions of Higher Education (HE) and, as such, serves as a starting point for this research. It is used within the framework of the third-generation Cultural Historical Activity Theory (CHAT) and serves as a research lens in order to view a bigger picture of student integration within a TVET college.
To obtain a good understanding of student attrition or dropout at the TVET college, the researcher makes use of a mixed methods design including both qualitative and quantitative data. Elements of the phenomenological approach were chosen to form the basis of the research design. The reason for using the elements selected is that the study describes the...