Fair enough?! Investigating the specific challenges of diverse university first-year students

ABSTRACT

The transition into higher education (HE) is a particularly challenging process for students due to a large variety of difficulties and requirements. Moreover, increasing student numbers and diversity in European HE have complexified the issue of the successful transition to university. Consequently, it is important to further develop our understanding of the heterogeneity of students and the specific challenges that impact their successful and less stressful transitions into higher education. This paper contributes to this scientific endeavour. More precisely, a study was carried out among 1,048 first-year students from a French-speaking Belgian university . Using latent profile analysis, our results yielded five profiles representing different combinations of achievement predictors (high school grade, socio-economic status, informed-choice, and self-efficacy beliefs). When comparing the profiles, our results further highlighted key differences in the way students experienced the specific challenges associated with the transition and succeeded at the end of the first year. The discussion of the results allowed us to provide practical implications and future perspectives on the thorny issue of diversity into the transition to HE.

KEYWORDS:

• Academic success
• person-centred analysis
• transition
• first-year academic studies
• Belgian French community

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Ethical approval

All procedures performed in studies involving human participants were in accordance with the ethical standards of the Institutional Review Board of the Faculty of Psychology at the Université catholique de Louvain. Informed consent was obtained from all individual participants included in the study.

Additional information

Funding

The author(s) reported there is no funding associated with the work featured in this article.

Notes on contributors

Mikaël De Clercq

Mikael De Clercq, PhD, is a researcher in educational psychology at the Académie de Recherche et d'Enseignement Supérieur and at the Université catholique de Louvain, Belgium. His research interests focus on student’s experience of academic transition in the first year at the university and in the doctoral studies. More information about her can be found on http://www.uclouvain.be/mikael.declercq

Michaël Parmentier

Michaël Parmentier is a PhD and postdoctoral researcher in vocational and organizational psychology at UCLouvain, Belgium, and at Université de Lausanne, Switzerland. His research interests mainly pertain to educational, job, and career transitions over the lifespan with a specific focus on the role of emotion and anticipation of the future during these transitions.

Florence Van Meenen

Florence Van Meenen is a PhD student (FRS-FNRS) at the Université catholique de Louvain, Belgium. Her research focuses, on the one hand, on students' experience of transition to university and, on the other hand, on the cognitive processing and use of peer feedback by university students.