- You decide to divorce your partner based on circumstances you weren't expecting.
- Your partner decides to divorce you.
In the analogy, those would correspond to you leaving the school, or the school expelling you.
But the element of "circumstances you weren't expecting" has been completely lost. There's nothing more predictable than the university experience.
Are 30% of Dutch undergraduates leaving because they stumbled into better opportunities? Are they leaving because they're surprised that "school, but more of it" feels like more school? Are they leaving because their schools find that they perform below what their credentials suggested? (And if it's that last one... thirty percent?)
The 30% figure is not all that strange internationally.
That divorce question was a shorthand way of saying that not everything that you plan to do ends up running to completion. In general I think the answer is 'life happens' and not everything you start gets finished. People get disillusioned, they might see the future of the field they started to study in as imperiled or they might simply find that they do not see an advantage to completing the study. They might not have the self discipline to complete the run or they might have other needs or changing circumstances. They might simply get ill. They may find an opportunity that short-circuits the need for a degree.
Lots of people do graduate but to assume up front that over a period of four years of someone's life things are so stable that you will always be able to graduate is to ignore the reality of the circumstances of a large number of people.
- You decide to divorce your partner based on circumstances you weren't expecting.
- Your partner decides to divorce you.
In the analogy, those would correspond to you leaving the school, or the school expelling you.
But the element of "circumstances you weren't expecting" has been completely lost. There's nothing more predictable than the university experience.
Are 30% of Dutch undergraduates leaving because they stumbled into better opportunities? Are they leaving because they're surprised that "school, but more of it" feels like more school? Are they leaving because their schools find that they perform below what their credentials suggested? (And if it's that last one... thirty percent?)