Do they match? Prospective students’ experiences with choosing university programmes

Abstract

When transitioning from high school to university, young people must choose a programme that fits them. We argue that prospective students who can test this fit before starting the programme, will make a better choice. We propose an integrated framework where testing person-environment fit on ability beliefs, interests and sense of belonging possibly contributes to making the right choice. Dutch matching procedures are supposed to serve as a fit-test for prospective students choosing a university programme. 61 prospective students at four Dutch universities were interviewed on the role of matching in their programme choice. Different elements of matching appear to allow for testing fit but vary in which aspects of fit can be tested and the impact they have. It can be cautiously stated that the more aspects of fit that can be tested, the more a matching procedure impacts prospective students' final programme choice.

Will I be happy in this major? Predicting intrinsic motivation and subjective well-being with prospective students’ well-being forecast and interest-major fit forecast

“…While some higher education systems offer orientation phases for students to explore various majors and find out how much they like different majors, other education systems (e.g., the German system) do not have such a phase . Instead, they usually expect prospective students to choose a study major before entering university and stay with it as dropping out or changing the study major comes with costs for the individual and the organization and therefore is often seen as an event that should be avoided (Behr et al, 2020;Soppe et al, 2019). Thus, especially in education systems without an orientation phase it is important to predict how successful prospective students will be in a specific study major even before they enter university.…”