35-40% of first-year international students failing

University works toward goal of 10% international students

Chelse McKee, staff

Earlier this month, during the university’s senate meeting, the topic of Navitas, a pre-university institution designated for incoming international students arose in the council’s chambers, the reason being the high failure rate of first-year international students.

Navitas would work as an introductory year for new international students to the University of Manitoba.

The population of international students has been on the rise since between 2003 and 2004, when the university saw a fairly significant jump in international attendance, according to Robert Kerr, vice-president (academic) and pro-vost.

The university set a goal only a few years ago, says Kerr, to have 10 per cent of the university’s population be made up of international students, and this year the university was successful with a population above nine per cent.

“We’re pretty much there,” Kerr says.

Kerr, a main facilitator behind the Navitas project, says that with 35-40 per cent of first-year international students failing, the university needs to seriously look at alternative methods to assist in acclimatizing new international students to the university’s culture.

Ibukun Akin-Agunbiade is an international student originally from Nigeria who had been residing and attending school in Canada for four years but only living in Winnipeg for three years. He spent his first year in Canada attending a college in British Columbia.

Akin-Agunbiade said he could see the benefits of an introductory first year for students.

“My going to college in B.C. was a great help before I came to university here because the college was smaller . . . and it helped me prepare for university.”

Kerr says that the main reasons international students are failing are due to trouble adjusting to Canadian universities.

“When you think of international students, although they may have the same academic skills as any other students, they’re dealing with differences in culture, differences in the educational system, [and] they’re away from home,” Kerr says.

“Certainly for most of the international students there can be fairly significant cultural changes that they’re having to adapt to, things they might do naturally in their own culture are not seen as positive here. There may be in some cultures where it is natural for students to be quite differential towards teachers and therefore it’s not part of their normal background to participate in class discussions and get involved because they’re there to listen and that’s just how it operates in their culture.”

The U of M’s Office of Institutional Analysis could not provide specific numbers on the failure rate of Canadian students in their first year.

Kerr says that the highest failure rate comes from the international students who found a way around the university’s language requirement. Those specific students were ones who came to Canada for their last year of high school.

“There’s a presumption that having done their Grade 12 in English, they are ready to move forward, or if they’ve done a similar thing at say an international school . . . so we found within those students that this is where [we’re] seeing some of the higher failure rates,” Kerr says.

Kerr continued on to say that around 50 per cent of those students who entered university in the aforementioned method received a GPA less than 2.0 at the end of their first year. Ultimately, he says, the largest cause of failure rates is the issue of communication.

“It’s really the nuances of the language is really the place where people can trip up.”

Akin-Agunbiade agreed that the main issue behind the failure rates is communication.

“For me, English was a first language . . . at the same time, coming here, we find the professors talk too fast, they use . . . slang sometimes and things we don’t understand and it’s hard to keep pace. The big [reason] is communication and the fast pace. The professor doesn’t really have time to explain every single thing, and so some students just get in class but they don’t have any idea what’s going on.”

Yaolu He is an international student from China who has been in Canada for three years. Although he believes that communication is an issue he thinks that sometimes the students just aren’t putting in the effort.

“I have failed one course but I’m pretty sure that’s because I didn’t pay a lot of time on studying. I don’t think [communication’s an issue] because [international] students have a failure rate but because they didn’t pay enough time [to] study.”

Kerr said that the disadvantage for international students, unlike students in a limited admission program, is that retaking a course is not as easy an option, which could greatly affect the future of their university career.

He explained that if a student has a GPA less than 2.0 at the end of their first year, they really can’t go on to their desired faculties. If the student ends up with a 1.9, they can always retake a course to boost their final mark, but for international students, it was usually an issue of understanding the professor.

“It’s quite possible [students can] come back and take some courses and fix the gap and move forward. So if it’s just an academic problem they may well be able to overcome that. But if one of the core problems is also a language problem then it’s very difficult for them to simply fill that gap by taking the course again because the course will not deal with the communication issue.”

The Navitas program at the University of Manitoba would be the second in the country and the first in the province.

The discussion for implementing Navitas continues at the next university senate meeting on Jan 30.