PROCEEDINGS
OF THE TOMSK POLYTECHNIC INSTITUTE
OF THE ORDER OF THE OCTOBER REVOLUTION AND THE ORDER OF THE RED BANNER OF LABOR
named after S. M. KIROV

Volume 256　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　1972

ANALYSIS OF THE PROBLEM OF STUDENT DROPOUT IN SOCIOLOGICAL LITERATURE

A. A. POGORADZE

(Presented by the scientific seminar of the Department of Scientific Communism)

During the period of the full-scale construction of communist society, the Soviet intelligentsia is playing an ever greater role; its interests, goals, and tasks are inseparable from the interests of the workers and peasants, from those of our entire society. In the Theses of the CPSU Central Committee “On the Centenary of the Birth of Vladimir Ilyich Lenin,” it was noted that its relative weight and social role, under conditions of accelerated scientific and technological progress, are steadily increasing¹. The number of specialists with higher and secondary specialized education in the national economy of the USSR is continuously growing. “As a result of the development of all links of public education, an important directive of the Twenty-Third Party Congress has been fully carried out: over the five-year period, more than 7 million specialists with higher and secondary specialized education have been trained in the country,” said L. I. Brezhnev in the Report of the Central Committee to the Twenty-Fourth Congress of the CPSU². In the Directives for the five-year plan for the development of the national economy of the USSR for 1971–1975, great attention is devoted to the further development of higher and secondary specialized education. It is planned to train about 9 million specialists, including in new fields of science and technology³. Such a significant expansion in the training of specialists is connected above all with the development of the productive forces, with the fact that an increasingly intensive transformation of science into a direct productive force of society is a characteristic feature of our time. The rate of economic growth now depends to a great extent on the pace of scientific research and the introduction of its results into production. Science and technology in the modern world have become the most important arena of competition between two opposing socio-economic systems. Scientific and technological progress, the creation of mechanized and automated production in communist society, requires a significant number of specialists with higher

education. V. I. Lenin repeatedly drew attention to this. He wrote: “...in order to manage, one must be competent, one must know fully and accurately all the conditions of production, one must know the technology of this production at its modern level, one must have a certain scientific education.”⁴

The growth of the general educational and professional training of personnel is an important factor in the systematic increase of labor productivity and contributes to the solution of complex problems of cultural development. The improvement of planning and management in all branches of the national economy depends to a large extent on the level of the cultural and technical training of personnel. Under these conditions, higher education emerges as the principal source of training highly qualified personnel for all branches of the national economy. The further development of science and technology will depend to a considerable degree on how successfully higher education satisfies the needs of our industry and agriculture for specialists. Hence follows the necessity of studying the problem of preserving the student contingent, the reasons for dropout, and ways of eliminating these reasons—not only as one of the most important problems of higher education, but also as a problem of great socio-political, economic, and scientific importance. This also determines the posing of this question as a special problem.

The number of students who “drop out” in all three forms of study (full-time, evening, and correspondence), both in the humanities and in technical higher educational institutions, is rather considerable. Thus, in three higher educational institutions in the city of Tomsk—the Polytechnic Institute, the Institute of Automated Control Systems and Radioelectronics, and the Civil Engineering Institute—the average dropout rate in 1964 was 6.23 percent in full-time faculties, 7.71 percent in evening faculties, and 9.1 percent in correspondence faculties. The average graduation of students of the correspondence faculty of the Tomsk Polytechnic Institute in 1963 and 1964 amounted to 48.6 percent of the total number of correspondence students admitted in 1957 and 1958; in full-time faculties the share of graduates reached 65.75 percent of the total number admitted for study.⁵ Of four students at the Tomsk Polytechnic Institute, only three complete the higher educational institution.⁶ No smaller dropout is observed in other higher educational institutions of our country. According to data from the sociological laboratory of Ural University, it turns out that the higher educational institutions of Sverdlovsk annually lose from 4 to 7 and more percent of students. Over 7 years, from the 1958/59 to the 1964/65 academic years, the total number of students (only full-time departments are meant) who left higher educational institutions in Sverdlovsk amounted to 10,500 people.⁷ If, on average, higher educational institutions annually lose 5.7 percent of students, then, as N. A. Stepanova indicates, over five years the number of those expelled will amount to more than one quarter of the number of those admitted.⁸ A high dropout percentage leads to a shortage of specialists with higher education in production, which undoubtedly affects the development of our national economy.

The necessity of scientifically studying the causes of student dropout is felt no less acutely also because students leave higher educational institutions not

not only in the first year. A significant percentage of students drop out in the senior years as well. Here one may distinguish two points: the economic one, since annual expenditures per student average about one thousand rubles in technical and agricultural higher educational institutions, and in universities and teacher-training institutes respectively nine hundred and eight hundred rubles, which leads to enormous costs for the state; and the moral-psychological one, since the forced departure from higher educational institutions of a portion of young people means a painful breaking of their life plans. Recently, a disproportionate dropout of students from families of workers, collective farmers, and the intelligentsia has also been observed, which has a negative effect on accelerating the process of erasing social-class differences and on changing the social-class structure of our society.^9 Finally, without an analysis of the main factors determining student dropout, it is impossible to obtain a comprehensive idea of the effectiveness of the educational and upbringing process. It is therefore understandable that the study of the problem of student dropout is of not only great theoretical but also practical interest.

This problem can be solved at the sociological level of research. The sociological aspect of the problem consists in identifying the main factors influencing student dropout as a socially significant phenomenon, and in studying the multifaceted connections among these factors and their influence on students’ studies. Of course, this question can also be addressed in pedagogical, philosophical, social-psychological, economic, and other aspects. But if, say, the pedagogue may abstract from certain aspects of the phenomenon under consideration or from particular and concrete manifestations of individual factors, i.e., take narrow connections between individual aspects of the problem, then one of the characteristic features of any sociological study is a comprehensive approach to considering a given social problem, taking into account the numerous factors that influence that problem. This means that in solving the indicated problem it is necessary to proceed from the pedagogical, philosophical, social-psychological, economic, and other levels of research. It is necessary not only to name the factors influencing student dropout, but also to show the causes that generate these factors. This is the meaning of the sociological solution of the problem. Hence the importance of studying the problem of student dropout in the sociological literature. However, up to the present time not a single major work has appeared on the problem of student dropout from which it would be possible to draw optimal conclusions about the causes of student dropout.

In the sociological literature, the causes of student dropout were studied already in the first decade of Soviet power. A fairly significant number of sociological studies were conducted in 1925–1930. During this period, concrete sociological studies were undertaken in higher educational institutions in Moscow, Leningrad, Sverdlovsk, and so on. The efforts of researchers were directed mainly toward analyzing the level of knowledge of applicants, and toward analyzing the party, social, age, and national composition of students. This was caused by the urgent need to rapidly create proletarian cadres for the national economy, to form a new Soviet intelligentsia, and by the need for the proletarianization of higher education.

Researchers also studied such problems as students’ time budgets, the determination of the academic workload, and public work

^9 Collected volume Sociology and Higher Education. Issue 100, Gorky, 1970.

students, housing conditions, students’ everyday life, financial situation, relations among student youth, the students’ working day, etc. Such topics were dictated by the need to create a new methodology for the education and upbringing of young people in higher educational institutions. These questions were studied in the works of A. Abinder⁹, K. Bukhman¹⁰, I. Vasiliev¹¹, I. Veksler¹², K. Kh. Kekcheev¹³, V. Kasatkin¹⁴, T. Larionova¹⁵, D. Lass¹⁶, and others. A significant number of researchers dealt with questions connected with student academic performance¹⁷. In the years indicated, studies were also conducted in the higher educational institutions of Tomsk¹⁸.

Studies of the causes of student dropout were not holistic in character. For the most part, individual factors influencing student dropout were studied. This made it possible to adopt partial measures to improve the organization of the educational process. Beginning in the 1930s, sociological research on problems of higher education was not conducted. Nor was the problem of student dropout studied. Only from the beginning of the 1960s did the problems of higher education again become an object of sociological research. The problem of dropout occupies a large place in these studies. Recently, sociological studies on the organization of the educational process, the level of academic performance, the social composition, and the causes of student dropout have been carried out in the higher educational institutions of Moscow, Leningrad, Novosibirsk, Sverdlovsk, Kharkov, Kaunas, Voronezh, and other cities of our country. At present, a considerable number of works on the problem of student dropout are being published in various journals¹⁹; individual articles on this problem are published in collections of papers²⁰; questions connected with this prob—

...problem, are discussed at various conferences²¹. The cause of student dropout is also examined in separate dissertations²².

All works on the problem of student dropout may be provisionally classified according to the research methodology and according to the breadth of coverage of the factors studied that influence student dropout. By these parameters we shall attempt to examine the existing literature. First of all, it must be said that there is a fairly considerable number of works in which the authors, while noting the importance of studying the problem of dropout, make various observations based on their own personal experience rather than on materials from sociological research, which often leads to incorrect conclusions. Thus, for example, D. A. Kuleshov, in the article “The Tradition Has Taken Hold”²³, writes that students who came to the institute from the ranks of the Soviet Army or from production study and work better than those who entered the institute immediately after finishing secondary school. The author goes on to write: “As we expected, the dropout of first-year students this year is significantly lower than the dropout of previous years.” The author provides neither numerical data nor any materials from sociological studies that would confirm this conclusion; meanwhile it is known that in those years the percentage of student dropout increased.

Such authors as A. G. Lebedev, M. A. Klement, Kh. A. Raig, A. I. Varnavsky, A. S. Zavyalov, B. P. Nadeinsky, A. M. Prudinsky, L. M. Kholmov, A. Shibaev²⁴, in their works attempt to reveal the causes of student dropout and to show ways of eliminating them. However, in these works only individual factors influencing student dropout are investigated, while no analysis is made of the reasons for the emergence of these factors. These works do not have the character of broad sociological research, which, of course, cannot give us a complete picture of the causes of dropout, still less show ways of overcoming them.

The Ural sociologists did considerable work in identifying the causes of student dropout²⁵. In the 1964/65 academic year, the sociological laboratory of Ural University conducted a study of the causes of student dropout in the higher educational institutions of Sverdlovsk. The researchers relied chiefly on the study of the personal files of students who had already been expelled, on survey materials from students leaving the higher educational institution, on the study of statistical reports of higher educational institutions, data from admissions committees, and other documentation. Dropout was calculated as follows: the total number of persons who had left the higher educational institution was established on the basis of the rector’s orders. The ratio of the number of those expelled during the academic year to the number of students enrolled at the beginning of the academic year gives the dropout percentage. Thus, the study covered students who dropped out from nine higher educational institutions of Sverdlovsk over a period of seven years.

(1958/65 academic years). On the basis of an analysis of the data obtained, the researchers came to the conclusion that the main reason for dropout is that students were unable to cope with their studies: “poor academic performance,” “absences from classes,” and “failure to appear for the examination session” account for 46% of those dismissed and lead to the conclusion that dropout for this reason is increasing. About 12% of dropout is connected with a change in “family circumstances,” which entailed a “deterioration of material and living conditions” or their insufficiency in the newly formed family situation; 13% of dismissals are due to “transfer to another higher educational institution.”

The researchers link the increase in dropout over the period since 1958 with a larger percentage of the admission of production workers to higher educational institutions, while dropout to a greater extent occurred among production workers; with a change in the age composition of the student body; with an incorrect choice of higher educational institution and specialty; and with the difficulties of transition from the school system of instruction to that of the higher educational institution. However, despite this fairly substantial study, the authors, in our view, do little to reveal ways of overcoming the causes of student dropout, limiting themselves only to separate, particular recommendations. The study by A. S. Gromov, Yu. D. Ryzhkov, and I. V. Grebtsov deserves attention.^27 In order to determine the influence of social and everyday-life factors on students’ academic performance, a questionnaire survey was conducted among fifth- and sixth-year students. On the basis of the materials of this study, the authors come to the conclusion that students’ academic performance depends to a significant degree on whether, before entering the higher educational institution, the applicant had worked in the field of his future specialty or not, whether he received a stipend or not, and on how heavily the student was burdened with household duties. The work attempts to trace the dependence of students’ academic performance on age, sex, and family status. Despite the fact that the study covered a small number of students (only 175 persons), and that the analysis was conducted only on the basis of questionnaire data, the authors draw certain conclusions that are of considerable interest in the matter of eliminating the causes of poor academic performance and student dropout.

In 1968, the journal Soviet Pedagogy published an article by T. A. Kaverau and I. Sh. Koroleva,^28 in which the authors examine the reasons for student dropout from pedagogical higher educational institutions. They believe that in pedagogical higher educational institutions there is a process of increasing student dropout, but they name only one cause of dropout: poor academic performance, which they consider the principal one. This study seems to us not entirely complete. First, no analysis is given here of the causes of poor academic performance itself. Behind the factor of “academic failure” there may stand various causes, such as: inability to adapt to the higher-education system of instruction, family situation, material situation, lack of a place in a dormitory, the influence of comrades, failure to establish contact with the group, lack of supervision on the part of the dean’s office, lack of help from public organizations, and others. Second, the research methodology is also not given. In this respect, of great interest for the study of the problem of student dropout are the works of B. Rubin, Yu. Kolesnikov^29 and the Gorky socio-

^27 A. S. Gromov, Yu. D. Ryzhkov, I. V. Grebtsov. The influence of social and everyday-life factors on the academic performance of students of the Rostov-on-Don Medical Institute. — Soviet Health Care, 1967, No. 8.

^28 T. A. Kaverau, I. Sh. Koroleva. On the question of forming the contingent of pedagogical higher educational institutions. — Soviet Pedagogy, 1968, No. 10.

^29 B. Rubin, Yu. Kolesnikov. The Student Through the Eyes of a Sociologist. Publishing House of Rostov University, 1968.

...logs³⁰, in which the causes of students’ academic failure are investigated. It seems to us that in many cases the causes of academic failure are also causes of student dropout. Sociological studies show, for example, that those students who live in a dormitory study better than those who live in an apartment; that a rather significant percentage of students who have dropped out are those whom the dean’s office, the specialized departments, public organizations, etc., did not help in time. Therefore, in order to prevent the dropout of students because of academic failure, it is necessary to ascertain the causes leading to students’ academic failure. In the works mentioned, the research methodology is well presented.

Sociological studies on the problem of student dropout are also being conducted at Voronezh University³¹. The main shortcoming in the works of the Voronezh sociologists is that they do not provide a complete analysis of all the principal causes of student dropout.

A fairly substantial sociological study to determine the reasons for the dropout of first-year full-time students was conducted in Kaunas³². All students expelled from the first year were subjected to the study. The methodology of this study deserves attention. The data were collected by means of a questionnaire. Since at the time the study was conducted these students were no longer at the institute, one half of the questionnaire about them was completed by the secretaries of the faculty offices on the basis of documentary data. As a result, information was obtained on the following items of the questionnaire: the student’s surname, first name, and patronymic; social status; parents’ type of occupation; the family’s financial situation; all information about secondary school; grades in the certificate and on entrance examinations; and so on. The second half of the questionnaire was completed by the instructor—the head of the academic group in which the former student had studied. In this way, data were obtained on living conditions, class attendance, and the reasons for leaving the institute. Along with the answers to the questionnaire, the reasons for leaving the institute were clarified from character references that had been drawn up through the Komsomol channel for each departing student. It was found that dropout among different social groups of students is distributed unevenly. Among those who dropped out, workers accounted for 50%, collective farmers for 20%, and employees for 30%. Moreover, the main share of dropouts consists of graduates of urban schools, although, as is known, they are better prepared than graduates of rural schools. It was also found that the reasons for student dropout are poor housing conditions, poor attendance, insufficient preparation in secondary school, and insufficiently persistent work at the institute. The reasons for student dropout are also excessive enthusiasm for sports, amateur artistic activities, or other pursuits not connected with study; deterioration of health; difficult material conditions; family circumstances; and dislike of the specialty. However, this work too does not reveal ways of overcoming the indicated causes of student dropout.

In 1968 a dissertation was defended³³ in which substantial space was devoted to the study of the causes of student dropout. The author traced

³⁰ Sociological Studies of Educational and Upbringing Work in Higher Education. Gorky, 1969.
³¹ Collection: Pedagogy of Higher Education. Voronezh, 1969.
³² The Effectiveness of Specialist Training. Materials of the Inter-Republic Symposium. Kaunas, 1969.
³³ L. I. Sennikova. Higher Education as a Factor of Social Mobility. Author’s abstract. Sverdlovsk, 1968.

the dependence of student dropout on social status. In the author’s opinion, the age factor plays a significant role in student dropout. Unfortunately, the dissertation in question does not provide the research methodology.

In 1970, Gorky sociologists published a collection of works that also examines the causes of student dropout. As a result of analyzing the materials obtained, the sociologists came to the conclusion that the causes of first-year student dropout are an inability to adapt quickly to the higher-education system of instruction, as well as the fact that they did not receive timely necessary assistance from instructors, and poor housing conditions. Unlike the Kaunas sociologists, the Gorky researchers believe that dropout among first-year students who graduated from rural schools is twice as high as among students who graduated from urban schools. A. V. Cheremnov expresses the same idea.^34 He concludes that the causes of student dropout have a “social coloration.” This makes it necessary to combat student dropout with due regard for social composition.

Thus, despite the fact that in recent years a fairly significant number of works on the problem of student dropout have appeared, the state of study of the problem is such that we still do not have a holistic conception of the causes of student dropout. This necessitates further study of the problem of student dropout at the sociological level of research. Such an analysis will make it possible to identify, on a sufficiently well-founded basis, the factors influencing student dropout and to indicate ways of eliminating them.

^34 A. V. Cheremnov. The Development of Higher Technical Education in Soviet Society and the Problems of Eradicating Substantial Social Differences, Author’s Abstract. Novosibirsk, 1970.

1. “On the Centenary of the Birth of Vladimir Ilyich Lenin.” Theses of the CPSU Central Committee. Moscow, Politizdat, 1970, p. 31. ↩

2. Report of the CPSU Central Committee to the Twenty-Fourth Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. Materials of the Twenty-Fourth Congress of the CPSU. Moscow, Politizdat, 1971, p. 85. ↩

3. Directives of the Twenty-Fourth Congress of the CPSU on the five-year plan for the development of the national economy of the USSR for 1971–1975. Materials of the Twenty-Fourth Congress of the CPSU. Moscow, Politizdat, 1971, p. 180. ↩

4. V. I. Lenin, Collected Works, vol. 40, p. 215. ↩

5. A. P. Goryunov, I. F. Livshits, “On the Effectiveness of Training Engineering Personnel.” Proceedings of the Tomsk Polytechnic Institute, vol. 181, Tomsk, 1967, p. 13. ↩

6. I. F. Livshits, “The Profiling Department and the Adaptation of First-Year Students.” In: Cybernetics and the Higher Educational Institution. Tomsk, 1969, p. 58. ↩

7. Collection The Life Plans of Youth. Sverdlovsk, 1966, p. 207. ↩

8. See the cited work, p. 207. ↩

9. A. Abinder. Admission to the higher educational institutions of the RSFSR in 1926. — Krasnoe studenchestvo, 1926, No. 5. A. Abinder. The time budget and living conditions of students of the RSFSR. — Narodnoe prosveshchenie, 1927, No. 1. ↩

10. K. Bukhman. Higher education in the RSFSR in the current 1929–1930 academic year. — Statisticheskoe obozrenie, 1930, No. 2. ↩

11. I. Vasiliev. The student’s working day. — Vremya, 1923, No. 3. ↩

12. I. Veksler. On the question of the second-stage school and entrance examinations to higher educational institutions. — Narodnoe prosveshchenie, 1927, Nos. 11, 12. ↩

13. K. Kh. Kekcheev. The time budget of students. — Nauchnyi rabotnik, 1926, No. 10. ↩

14. V. Kasatkin. The sore spot of higher-education work. — Narodnoe prosveshchenie, 1926, No. 1. ↩

15. T. Larionova. The time budget of medical students of Irkutsk State University, 1930, vol. XVII. ↩

16. D. Lass. Contemporary studenthood. — Molodaya gvardiya, 1927, No. 9. ↩

17. See more about this in the works: A. I. Abinder. Students’ academic performance. — Nauchnyi rabotnik, 1927, No. 2; S. A. Kamenev. On the question of staffing educational institutions and student academic performance. — Nauchnyi rabotnik, 1928, No. 2; M. Krasnostavskii. Are you ready for the credit session? — Krasnoe studenchestvo, 1926, No. 5; B. Ivanov and V. Lenskii. Recording academic performance and attendance. — Tekhnika upravleniya, 1929. ↩

18. M. Malkov. The struggle for quality in Tomsk higher educational institutions and technical schools. — Krasnoe studenchestvo, 1926, No. 5. ↩

19. See: Vestnik vysshei shkoly, 1967, No. 1, pp. 15–30; 1969, No. 6, pp. 26–39, 65–66; 1969, No. 8, p. 4; Kommunist, 1969, No. 11, pp. 60–64; Molodoi kommunist, 1968, No. 5, pp. 53–59; Sovetskoe zdravookhranenie, 1967, No. 8, pp. 43–47. ↩

20. Collection: Zhiznennye plany molodezhi [Life Plans of Youth]. Sverdlovsk, 1966, pp. 205–214; collection: Sotsiologicheskie issledovaniya uchebno-vospitatel’noi raboty [Sociological Studies of Educational and Upbringing Work]. Gorky, 1967, pp. 5–6; collection: Effektivnost’ podgotovki spetsialistov [The Effectiveness of Specialist Training]. Kaunas, 1969, pp. 181–184; collection: Pedagogika vysshei shkoly [Pedagogy of Higher Education]. Voronezh, 1969, pp. 83–95; collection: Sotsiologiya i vysshaya shkola [Sociology and Higher Education]. Issue 100, Gorky, 1970, pp. 7–17, 20–26; collection: Sotsializm i ravenstvo [Socialism and Equality]. Sverdlovsk, 1970, pp. 134–141. ↩

21. Youth and Socialism. Theses of Reports. All-Union Scientific-Theoretical Conference. Publishing House of the Central Committee of the Komsomol, “Molodaya Gvardiya,” 1967; Questions of Teaching Methodology. (Reports of the republican scientific-methodological conference on questions of the scientific organization of instructional work in higher education, held in Tallinn on March 19–22, 1968), Tallinn, 1969. ↩

22. L. I. Sennikova. Higher Education as a Factor of Social Mobility. Author’s abstract. Sverdlovsk, 1968; A. V. Cheremnov. The Development of Higher Technical Education in Soviet Society and the Problems of Erasing Substantial Social Differences. Author’s abstract. Novosibirsk, 1970. ↩

23. D. A. Kuleshov. “The Tradition Has Taken Hold.” — Vestnik vysshei shkoly, 1960, No. 4, p. 25. ↩

24. See Vestnik vysshei shkoly, 1962, No. 1, pp. 38, 48, 49; 1963, No. 11, p. 53; 1963, No. 4, pp. 30, 32; 1969, No. 6, p. 66; Kommunist, 1969, No. 11. ↩

25. K. A. Stepanova. “Change in the Life Plans of Student Youth.” — In: Life Plans of Youth. Sverdlovsk, 1966, pp. 205–214. ↩