The first-year experience of non-traditional students in Danish science and engineering university programmes

To understand student drop-out from university, research must explore students’ first-year experiences and the challenges they encounter. This article analyses the first-year experiences of non-traditional students in Danish science and engineering university programmes. Focusing on identity theory and the framework of integration processes provided by Tinto, the article presents the challenges experienced by students from non-academic backgrounds and by students with ethnic minority backgrounds. The analysis presents four themes that are experienced as particularly challenging for the students: (1) a strong career focus which is hard for the students to maintain in their transition into university; (2) how the students from some non-academic backgrounds encounter the challenges they meet with limited resources; (3) how they spend time and resources on their family and how this affects their integration in the programme; and (4) the process of academic and social integration are particularly challenging as they require students to submit themselves to the cultural expectations of their studies, which can be hard to understand for students from families with no prior experiences of academia. The article discusses how these experiences can be understood within an identity framework.