Supporting the Transition to Higher Education: Finnish Principals’ Views on Opportunities and Challenges of Institutional Cooperation

Abstract

The transition from upper secondary school to higher education is a major change in students’ lives. Supporting students to make informed decisions based on a realistic view of higher education is one of the key elements to ensuring their motivation in future studies. Cooperation between upper secondary and higher education is one model for providing students with realistic views. However, little research has been produced from this cooperation. Therefore, the aim of this paper, based on mixed-method research, is to produce new insights into the opportunities provided by institutional cooperation by analyzing the views of Finnish upper secondary school principals (N = 94). The data were gathered using an online survey and analyzed via qualitative content analysis and descriptive statistics. The results indicate that principals consider cooperation with higher education institutions to be beneficial but there are some challenges in its implementation, such as the different structures of upper secondary schools and universities and inadequate information about possible opportunities. There are also great differences in upper secondary schools’ levels of participation. Distance to the nearest higher education institution and the size of the upper secondary school affected the participation models. There is a need to support cooperation between institutions to ensure equal possibilities for students, such as common structures, better information, as well as a multitude of different opportunities.

Promoting Institutional Cooperation through a Joint Project-Based Learning Course: A Case Study of Upper-Secondary School and University Students’ Experienced Relevance

“…This increases dropout rates that is a major issue for HEIs (Hailikari and Nevgi 2010). Therefore, it is important to ensure an effective transition both for promoting the well-being of young people and remain productive in the educational sector to match the massive constantly growing need for education (Lin et al 2023;Ikävalko, Pernaa, and Aksela 2023).…”

“…For upper-secondary students one of the aims was to offer an overview of university life. Reflecting the introduced research background, we aimed to support young people in career planning through the course and facilitate the transition from upper secondary to further education or from higher education to work career (Jansen and Suhre 2010;Valto and Nuora 2019;Hailikari and Nevgi 2010;Ikävalko, Pernaa, and Aksela 2023;Lin et al 2023). A more detailed course description can be found in the Methods section.…”

“…The designed research context enabled addressing a known research gap. According to Ministry of Education and Culture (2017) and our previous research (Ikävalko, Pernaa, and Aksela 2023), there is need for more research exploring students' perceptions of institutional cooperation. Therefore, the aim of this qualitative research is to contribute to the topic by exploring USS and HEI students' perceptions of the cooperation.…”